a tropical climate.' The first attempt of this kind brought him to the verge of death ; but his constitution conformed itself, and when Theodoret visited him, he had solemnized six and twenty Lent seasons by total abstinence, and thus surpassed Moses, Elias, and even Christ, who never fasted so but once. x\nother of his extraordinary inflictions was to lace his body so tiglitly that the cord pressed through to the bones, and could be cut off only with the most terrible pains. This occasioned his dismissal from the cloister. He afterward spent some time as a hermit upon a mountain, with an iron chain upon his feet, and was visited there by admiring and curious thi'ongs. When this failed to satisfy him, he invented, in 423, a new sort of holiness, and lived, some two days' journey (forty miles) east of Antioch, for six and thirty years, until his death, upon a pillar, which at the last was nearly forty cubits high;" for the pillar was ' Butler, 1. c, however, relates something similar of a contemporary Benedictine monk, Dom Claude Leante : "In 1731, when he was about fifty-one years of age, he had fasted eleven years without taking any food the whole forty days, except what he daily took at mass ; and what added to the wonder is, that during Lent he did not properly sleep, but only dozed. He could not bear the open air ; and toward the end of Lent he was excessively pale and wasted. This fact is attested by his breth- ren and superiors, in a relation printed at Sens, in 1731." - The first pillar, which he himself erected, and on which he lived four yeai-s, was six cubits (tt^x^"") ^o\ *h^ second twelve, the third twenty-two, and the fourth, which the people erected for him, and on which he spent twenty years, was thirty-six, according to Theodoret ; others say forty. The top was only three feet in diameter. It probably had a railing, however, on which he could lean in sleep or exhaustion. So at least these pillars are drawn in pictures. Food was carried up to the pillar saints by their disciples on a ladder. § 37. ST. SYHIEON AND THE PILLAR SAINTS. 193 raised in proportion as lie approached heaven and perfection. Herejie could never lie nor sit, but only stand, or lean upon a post (probably a banister), or devoutly bow ; in which last posture he almost touched his feet with his head — so flexible had his back been made by fasting. A spectator once counted in one day no less than twelve hundred and forty-four such genuflexions of the saint before the Almighty, and then gave up counting. He wore a covering of the skins of beasts, and a chain about his neck. Even the holy sacrament he took upoii his pillar. There St, Symeon stood many long and weary days, and weeks, and months, and years, exposed to the scorching- sun,