that he spent many nights without sleep, and fasted without interruption seven days.' Symeon, a Christian Diogenes, spent six and thirty years praying, fast- ing, and preaching, on the top of a pillar thirty or Ibrty feet high, ate only once a week, and in fast times not at all. Such heroism of abstinence was possible, however, only in the torrid climate of the East, and is not to be met with in the West. Anchoretism almost always carries a certain cynic rough- ness and coarseness, which, indeed, in the light of that age, may be leniently judged, but certainly have no afiinity with the morality of the Bible, and offend not only good taste, but all sound moral feeling. The ascetic holiness, at least accord- ing to the Egyptian idea, is incompatible with cleanliness and decency, and delights in filth. It reverses the maxim of sound evangelical morality and modern Christian civilization, that cleanliness is next to godliness. Saints Anthony and Hilarion, ^ Comp. Matt. xi. 18, 19; 1 Tim. iv. 3-5. ' Hist. Eccles. lib. vi. cap. 34. ■■' Comp. Hist. Laii3. c. 33 and 95, § 32. LIGHTS AND SHADES OF MONASTIC LIFE. 167 .IS their admirers, Athanasius the Great and Jerome the Learned, tell us, scorned to comb or cut their hair (save once a year, at Easter), or to wash their hands or feet. Other lier- mits went ahnost naked in the wilderness, like the Indian gynmosophists.' The younger Macarius, according to the ac- count of his disciple Palladius, once lay six months naked in the morass of the Scetic desert, and thus exposed himself to the incessant attacks of the gnats of Africa, " whose sting can pierce even the hide of a wild boar." He wished to punish himself for his arbitrary revenge on a gnat, and was there so badly stung by gnats and wasps, that he was thought to be smitten with leprosy, and was recognized only by his voice.'' St. Symeon the Stylite, according to Theodoret, suffered him- self to be incessantly tormented for a long time by twenty enormous bugs, and concealed an abscess full of worms, to exercise himself in patience and meekness. In Mesopotamia there M'as a peculiar class of anchorets, who lived on grass, spending the greater part of the day in prayer and singing, and then turning out like beasts upon the mountain.^ Theodoret relates of the much lauded Akepsismas, in Cyprus, that he spent sixty years in the same cell, without seeing or speaking to any one, and looked so wild and shaggy, that he was once actually taken for a wolf by a shepherd, who assailed him with stones, till he discovered his error, and then worshipped the hermit as a saint." It was but a step from this kind of moral sublimity to beastly degradation. Many of these saints were no more than low sluggards or gloomy misanthropes, who would rather company with wild beasts, with lions, wolves, and hyenas, than with