and an opinion gradually
gained ground that these abstinent disciples cultivated a higher form of
piety. The adherents of the new discipline silently increased, and by
the middle of the third century, a class of females who led a single
life, and who, by way of distinction, were called virgins, were in some
places regarded by the other Church members with special veneration.
[314:3] Among the clergy also celibacy was now considered a mark of
superior holiness. [314:4] But, in various places, pietism about this
time assumed a form which disgusted all persons of sober judgment and
ordinary discretion. The unmarried clergy and the virgins deemed it
right to cultivate the communion of saints after a new fashion, alleging
that, in each other's society, they enjoyed peculiar advantages for
spiritual improvement. It was not, therefore, uncommon to find a single
ecclesiastic and one of the sisterhood of virgins dwelling in the same
house and sharing the same bed! [315:1] All the while the parties
repudiated the imputation of any improper intercourse, but in some cases
the proofs of profligacy were too plain to be concealed, and common
sense refused to credit the pretensions of such an absurd and suspicious
spiritualism. The ecclesiastical authorities felt it necessary to
interfere, and compel the professed virgins and the single clergy to
abstain from a degree of intimacy which was unquestionably not free from
the appearance of evil.

About the time that the advocates of "whatsoever things are of good
report" were protesting against the improprieties of these spiritual
brethren and sisters, Paul and Antony, the fathers and founders of
Monachism, commenced to live as hermits. Paul was a native of Egypt, and
the heir of a considerable fortune; but, driven at first by persecution
from the abodes of men, he ultimately adopted the desert as the place of
his chosen residence. Antony, in another part of the same country,
guided by a mistaken spirit of self-renunciation, divested himself of
all his property; and also retired into a wilderness. The biographies of
these two well-meaning but weak-minded visionaries, which have been
written by two of the most eminent divines of the fourth century,
[316:1] are very humiliating memorials of folly and fanaticism. These
solitaries spent each a long life in a cave, macerating the body with
fasting, and occupying the mind with the reveries of a morbid
imagination. In an age of growing superstit