chap, xxxvii] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 63 They seriously renounced the business, and the pleasures, of the age ; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage ; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness. In the reign of Con- stantine, the Ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world, to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the first Chris- tians of Jerusalem, 3 they resigned the use, or the property, of their temporal possessions ; established regular communities of the same sex, and a similar disposition ; and assumed the names of Hermits, Monks, and Anachorets, expressive of their lonely retreat in a natural or artificial desert. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised ; and the loudest applause was bestowed on this Divine Philosophy, 4 which sur- passed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend with the Stoics in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death ; the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile discipline ; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves, all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this Divine Philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the desert ; 5 and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which had been instituted by the Es- senians, in Palestine and Egypt. The philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary people, who dwelt among the palm-trees near the Dead Sea ; who subsisted with- out money, who were propagated without women ; and who 3 Cassian (Collat. xviii. 5 [Migne, vol. xlix. p. 1095]) claims this origin for the institution of the Ccenobites which gradually decayed till it was restored by Antony and his disciples. 4 n<peifjLU>Ta.TOi' yap ti XPV/J- 11 € ' y avOpdoirovs tXQovcra &eov ?; TOiavri) <pio(ro<pia. These are the expressive words of Sozomen, who copiously and agreeably describes (1. i. c. 12, 13, 14) the origin and progress of this monkish philosophy (see Suicer. Thesaur. Eccles. torn. ii. p. 1441). Some modern writers, Lipsius (torn. iv. p. 448, Manuduct. ad Philosoph. Stoic, iii. 13) and la Mothe le Vayer (torn. ix. de la Vertu des Payens, p. 228-262), have compared the Carmelites to the Pythagoreans, and the Cynics to the Capucins. 5 The Carmelites derive their pedigree, in regular succession, from the prophet Elijah (see the Theses of Beziers, a. p. 1682, in Bayle's Nouvelles de la B^publique des Lettres, Oeuvres, torn. i. p. 82, &c. and the prolix irony of the Ordres Monas- tiques, an anonymous work, torn. i. p. 1-433. Berlin, 1751). Borne and the in- quisition of Spain silenced the profane criticism of the Jesuits of Flanders (Helyot, Hist, des Ordres Monastiques, torn. i. p. 282-300), and the statue of Elijah, the Carmelite, has been erected in the church of St. Peter (Voyages du P. Labat, torn, iii. p. 87).
