with immorality, especially avarice and extravagance. After much persecution, which he bore patiently, he forsook the church, with his friends, among whom were some bishops and priests, and, about 330, founded a rigid monastic sect in Scytliia, which subsisted perhaps a hundred years. They were Quartodecimans in the practice of Easter, observing it on the 14th of Nisan, according to Jewish fashion^ Epiphanius speaks favorably of their exemplary but severely ascetic life. 3. The EucHiTES or Messalians,' also called Enthusiasts, were roaming mendicant monks in Mesopotamia and Syria (dating from 360), who conceived the Christian life as an un- intermitted prayer, despised all physical labor, the moral law, and the sacraments, and boasted themselves perfect. They ' From ",i^i^ = Eux''""', from eux'Ti prayer. 200 THIED PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590. taught, that every man brings an evil demon with him into the world, which can only be driven away by prayer ; then the Holy Ghost comes into the soul, liberates it from all the bonds of sense, and raises it above the need of instruction and the means of grace. The gospel history they declared a mere allegory. But they concealed tlieir pantheistic mysticism and antinomianism under external conformity to the Catholic church. When their principles, toward the end of the fourth century, became known, the persecution of both the ecclesias- tical and the civil authority fell upon them. Yet they per- petuated themselves to tlie seventh century, and reappeared in the Euchites and Bogomiles of the middle age. § 40, Mo7iasticism in the West. Athanasius, Anibrose^ Augustine, Martin of Tours. e Ambeosius : De Virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem suam libri tres, written about 377 (in the Benedictine edition of Ambr. Opera, torn. ii. p. 145-183). AuGusTijTDS (a. d. 400) : De Opere Monacborum liber unus (in tbe Bened. ed., torn. vi. p. 476-504). SuLPi'^trs Seveetjs (about A. D. 403) : Dialog! tres (de virtutibus monacborum orientalium et de virtutibus B. Martini) ; and De Vita Beati Martini (both in ih» £iiyiifl^iea»--^Ziu:2J22^ ,vet. J?atpam,- toin. vi. p. 349 8<|ii.,-aftd bettor- in i Oii^Ji *^ ^f ' GallancWs Bibliotheca vet. Patrum, luiu. \in. p. S'J2 MiqJ. JCoJti^^ ^^- ^' M-^BiLLON : Observat. de monachis in occidente ante Benedictuin JTjL^ e( ^ (Prfef. in Acta Sanct. Ord. Bened.). H. II. Milmajj : Hist, of Latin j,v^i^«r ^'^A ' Christianity, Lond. 1854, vol. i. cb. vi. p. 409-426 : " Western Monasti- ^C/V€A*v<) *2/i;^iU|^.cism." Count de Montalembekt : The Monks of the West, Engl. I o ^g translation, vol. i. p. 379 sqq. In the Latin church, in virtue partly of the climate, partly of the national character,' the monastic life took a much milder form, but assumed greater variety, and found a larger field of usefulness than in the Greek. It produced no pillar saints, nor other such excesses of ascetic heroism, but was more practi- ' Sulpitius Severus, in the first of his three dialogues, gives several amusing in- stances of the difference between the Gallic and Egyptian stomach, and was