grade of their ascetic piety, into four and twenty classes, named by the letters of the Greek alphabet. They lived three in a cell. They ate in common, but in strict silence, and with the face covered. They made known their wants by signs. The sick were treated with special care. On Saturday and Sunday they partook of the communion. Pachomius, as abbot, or archi- mandrite, took the oversight of the whole ; each cloister having a separate superior and a steward. Pachomius also established a cloister of nuns for his sister, whom he never admitted to his presence when she would visit him, sending her word that she should be content to know that he was still alive. In like manner, the sister of Anthony and the wife of Ammon became centres of female cloister life, which spread with great rapidity. Pachomius, after his conversion, never ate a full meal, and for fifteen years slept sitting on a stone. Tradition ascribes to him all sorts of miracles, even the gift of tongues and perfect do- minion over nature, so that he trod without harm on serpents and scorpions, and crossed the I*^ile on the backs of crocodiles ! ' Soon after Pachomius, fifty monasteries arose on the Nitriau mountain, in no respect inferior to those in the Thebaid. They maintained seven bakeries for the benefit of the anchorets in the neighboring Libyan desert, and gave attention also, at least in later days, to theological studies ; as the valuable manuscripts recently discovered there evince. * Mohler remarks on this (Vermischte Schriftcu, ii. p. 183): "Thus antiquity expresses its faith, that for man perfectly reconciled with God there is no enemy in nature. There is more than poetry here ; there is expressed at least the high opin- ion his own and future generations had of Pachomius." The last qualifying remark suggests a doubt even in the mind of this famous modem champion of Romanism aa to the real historical character of the wonderful tales of this monastic saint. 198 THIKD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590. From Egypt the cloister life spread witli the rapidity of the irresistible spirit of the age, over the entire Christian East. The most eminent fathers of the Greek church were either themselves monks for a time, or at all events friends and pa- trons of monasticism, Ephraim propagated it in Mesoj)otamia ; Eustathins of Sebaste in Armenia and Paphlagonia ; Basil the Great in Pontns and Cappadocia. The latter provided his monasteries and nnnneries with clergy, and gave them an im- proved rule, which, before his death (379), was accepted by some eighty thousand monks, and translated by Rufinus into Latin, He sought to unite the virtues of the anchorite and coenobite life, and to make the institution useful to the church by promoting the education of youth, and also (as Athanasius designed before him) by combating Arianism among the people.^ He and his friend Gregory Nazianzen were the first to unite scientific theological studies with