eral and religious knowledge, are the top ics on which we purpose throwing together a few scattered observations. We beg to premise, that of the ancient solitaries here noticed, none comes further down the stream of history than the eighth or ninth century; with what goes under the denomination of ascetics of later date, we purpose not to meddle.

The current notions among ecclesiastical writers as to the kind of persons who betook themselves to an ascetic mode of life have been, that they were a very low and fanatic class, that they were ignorant and selfish, and were led astray by erroneous ideas of the general scope of the Gospel, with whose precepts and doctrines they mixed up a goodly portion of speculative dross from Eastern systems of philosophy relative to the virtue of bodily mortifications. These, or something like these, have been the common opinions on the subject, especially since the days of Luther and Calvin. We are not disposed to question the validity of these assertions, taken in their general import; but we think, at the same time, they will not bear an absolute interpretation. We have no doubt but there were many able and intelligent men who adopted this solitary mode of life, not exclusively from relig. ious motives, but from the then position of the world at large. It is often assert ed in the early records of the asceticsand the same thing is frequently affirmed in graver histories-that many of them fled to the deserts from persecution, as well as to be in some degree removed from the vile contamination which manifested itself in every phase and grade of society. Salvian, who wrote his Government of God at the beginning of the fifth century, gives us a frightful picture of society in his own day, and affirms that it had been much the same from apostolic times, and that this general corruption had compelled many of the most pious Christians to seek shelter in the caves and rocks of the wilderness from its horrid pollution. In fact, there has been in modern times a good deal of loose thinking and talking on this subject. We have confounded things which ought not to have been mixed up together, and shown in our judgments no small lack of discrimination. The solitary have been classed with the monkish orders, and have come in for a considerable share of the opprobrium which has justly enough been attached

to conventual establishments of all kinds. But a hermit's life is comparatively innocent; a monk's can hardly be so. Wherever men are congregated into masses, no matter under what pretence, and especially if they enjoy any corporate privileges, there corruption springs up with tropical rankness. The mere withdrawing from the world, and leading a life of contemplative solitude, partakes more of eccentricity than moral defilement. Besides, it must be borne in mind that retiring to a cave or hut in Egypt, Nubia, or Mesopotamia, is a very different sort of thing from dwelling in a cave or hut on the hills of Westmoreland, or in the gorges of the Highlands. A cave in hot countries is a most delicious retreat-a place coveted and sought after

"From storms a shelter, and from heat a shade."

And when we hear of the anchorites living on the simple herbs of the wilderness, we must remember that these consist of the delicious grape, the orange, the pomegranate, the fig, and other equally pleasant and nourishing productions, not the wild haws and blackberries which, even in nature's most prodigal humor, would be all that would fall to the lot of any poor fellow who should take a fancy in European regions for a life of seclusion from society. Then, again, the physical man does not need in these warm regions the diet of a London alderman; nay, it becomes revolting to the stomach, and destructive of life itself. It is often men tioned in the lives of the Eastern hermits that they had little gardens about their habitations; and we have no doubt but if we could lift up the vail of past times, and could arrive at the real facts of the case, we should find that the majority of these devotees to asceticism really lived very comfortable and cozy lives in these dry and delicious climates. The bodily mortification we associate with their names is little more than ideal, being founded on things having little or no positive relation to each other.

As to the question, how far a solitary life, for the avowed purpose of religious contemplation, is allowable, according to the spirit and letter of Christian doctrine, much might be said; and the question naturally gives rise to many nice points, which can not be satisfactorily disposed of in a short paper like this. We shall there

moirs of the solitaries of the desert. He went from Rome to visit those who dwelt in Egypt. He then proceeded to the city of Jerusalem, where he spent twenty years, chiefly in visiting and in obtaining accounts of these pious men. These memoirs were originally published without his name, and the religious world would have remained entirely ignorant of their real authorship, had it not been preserved by means of the Christian father of the Church, Jerome. The number of biographical sketches by Ruffinus amounts to thirty-three. They have always maintained a high repute among theological writers, and are alluded to by Saints Benoit, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, Fulbert Bishop of Chartres, and others. Palladius of Galatia was another writer on the ascetics. He was himself one of the hermits who lived on Mount Nitre, and flour ished in the year 388, and was subsequently made bishop of a diocese in Bythinia. He visited all the solitaries of the desert of whom he could learn any account; and heard from their own lips matters concerning their mode of life, the country they respectively belonged to, and the progress they had made in Christian knowledge, humility, and self-denial. In the eightieth year of his age, he was requested by the Governor of Cappadocia to write the lives of the most distinguished of the anchorites of Egypt, Lybia, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, and Italy. This compilation was made and dedicated to his patron, the governor. Socrates, the ecclesiastical historian, and St. John of Damascus, speak highly of it.

Sulpicius Severus gives an account of a journey that his patron, St. Martin, had made three years before his death, to see and converse with the solitaries of Egypt; and Theodoret, Bishop of Cyr, furnishes a statement of the recluses of the desert in Syria and the neighboring countries. Theodoret lived in the middle of the fifth century: he declares that his information is correct, and that he describes nothing but what he saw himself or obtained from eye-witnesses of undoubted credit and purity of character.

Pelagius, a deacon of the Roman Church, translated into Latin, in conjunction with John, a sub-deacon, a work on the Life and Doctrines of the Fathers of the Desert. The original treatise was in Greek. Paschal, who is supposed to have been a monk in the Abbey of Dume, in Gallacia,

translated from the Greek a work containing questions put to many anchorets in the East, and the answers they made to them. And John Mose, an abbot, gives an account of the most remarkable actions and sayings of these ancient solitaries, in a work entitled The Spiritual Flower Garden.*

Now a word or two upon the manner in which the Catholic Church has treated the writings and characters of a portion of these ascetic devotees. It has uniformly, within the last three centuries espe cially, been anxious to throw a moiety of them into the background; to pass a slight on those whose writings either in letter or spirit seemed to oppose the childish and puerile superstitions with which it feeds the credulity of its followers in every portion of the globe. Books on the Ancient Fathers of the Desert, the Church has in abundance; they swarm in every direction, of all sizes, from that huge monument of folly, the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, in fifty-four double-columned folios, to the penny tract. But we never meet a solitary sentence of common sense, nor rational inquiry in any one of them. All is one uniform mass of such groveling and fanatical twaddle, that we really wonder how any human being who has barely sense sufficient to count his own fingers should ever pay the slightest attention to it. But so it is. The Catholic priesthood find in these ancient hermits of the East a capital field for propagating their delusions, and cultivate it most assiduously; carefully from time to time weeding out of their stock of biographies the most remote allusion to men who have spoken of the Christian system in "the

*We beg to mention the following works and Mss. as containing considerable information on the Fathers of the Desert: Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, in 54 volumes, folio; Traité de la Lecture des Pires des Déserts, par Bonaventure d'Argoune, Paris, 1697; La Solitude Chrétienne, C. Sarreux, Paris, 1667, 3 vols.; Les Pensées de la Solitude Chrétienne et le Mépris du Monde, par P. Toussaint de Saint Luc, Paris, 1682. In addition to these several works, which constitute but a small portion of what really exists on the subject of the ancient Christian ascetics, we beg to mention the numbers of some Mss. in the Bibliothèque du Roi, at Paris: Nos 7023, 7024, 382, and 6845. In the public library of St. Omer there are several mss. of the same kind; those we have looked at are Nos. 715, 716, 724, and 762. A distinguished librarian in one of the chief libraries of Paris, told us that there were in Italy, Spain, and France more than three thousand Mss. on this subject.

there are instances where two or three persons There are seven live in one cell or dwelling. mills on the mountain, which grind the corn for the whole community."

inserted several accounts he had furbished

up out of the Vatican library, of several solitaries whose religious sentiments and opinions the Church did not then approve of. A controversy was the consequence, but Papal power ultimately gained the day, and the work was entirely suppressed, or denuded of its obnoxious passages. And this has been the uniform practice of the Catholic body for the last five or six hundred years. It has kept a most vigilant eye over this department of its regular and popular literature for the laity, and hashed and dished it up to suit the palates of the poor deluded people destined to feed upon it. But we must now proceed forward.

One of the earliest of the Christian hermits we shall notice is St. Ephraim. He fixed his abode in a singularly retired and picturesque spot on the banks of a small river in Asia Minor. He flourished about the year 350. Several works are ascribed to his pen, among which there is a small manual of botany. The accounts of him state that, though deeply imbued with a religious spirit, he cultivated an acquaintance with many of the branches of secular knowledge known in his day. He gives a list of the plants in the country he inhabited, which contains upward of one hundred and fifty distinct varieties. He traveled over a considerable district of the East, and gives the following account of the solitaries who inhabited Mount Nitre.

"After having remained (says he) three years in the monasteries about Alexandria, where I had enjoyed religious instruction and edifying conversation on learning generally from the lips of men of high virtue, I went to the mountain of Nitre. We here saw a lake which is at least seventy miles in circumference. I traversed its shores in three days, and arrived at that part of the mountain which faces the south. Here a vast and desolate desert presented itself, which extends to the remotest parts of Ethiopia. In the neighborhood of the hill there were nearly five thousand persons who had withdrawn themselves from the world, and who served God day and night. They generally live single, but

There is a romantic and interesting account of a brother and sister, called Martha and Christien, connected with the his

for insertion, but we shall endeavor to

give the chief outlines of the case. They in Aleppo. The father was smitten with were the only children of a rich merchant an ardent desire to become the founder of a noble family; and full of this idea, he took the harsh and unjustifiable means of placing his only daughter Martha under the care of some female solitaries, where she was to pass the remainder of her life. He urged his son Christien to enter the army under Constantine the Great, with a view of obtaining honor and renown. By this domestic arrangement all his vast treasures, both in money and landed possessions, were to devolve upon Christien, to sustain with becoming splendor the anticipated glory of the family.

without a murmur; but Christien reasonMartha obeyed her father's commands ed the case with him, and among many other things said: "My sister is as one dead, and if I fall in battle, as I am willing to do, your name is extinct forever." The father, however, would not yield his interview before he had to set out to point. The sister and brother had a long join the army. They swore fidelity to each other. Ten long years rolled but no intelligence had ever been received from Christien. His father became inconsolable and died, leaving his immense treasures to his daughter, in trust, for Christien, should he ever make his appear

ance.

away,

to which Martha belonged was now exThe cupidity of the religious order cited to a high pitch; and to induce her to relinquish her command over it, her religious sisters instituted all kinds of petty, persecuting regulations to annoy her, in order that they might gain their selfish ends. The bishop of the diocese likewise joined in this crusade against_poor Martha; but she flinched not. She always declared she would again see her beloved brother, and place him in possession of his rightful inheritance. Another long ten years passed away, and yet no news of Christien. A report was industriously circulated that he had been slain in battle,