on as
betraying a tendency to luxury. The incentives to many of their rules of
life might excite a smile, if it were right to smile at the acts of
earnest men. Some, like the innocent Essenes, who would do nothing
whatever on the Sabbath, observed the day before as a fast, rigorously
abstaining from food and drink, that nature might not force them into
sin on the morrow. For some, it was not enough, by the passive means of
abstinence, to refrain from fault or reduce the body to subjection,
though starvation is the antidote for desire; the more active, and,
perhaps, more effectual operation of periodical flagellations and bodily
torture were added. Ingenuity was taxed to find new means of personal
infliction. A hermit who never permitted himself to sleep more than an
hour without being awakened endured torments not inferior to those of
the modern fakir, who crosses his arms on the top of his head and keeps
them there for years, until they are wasted to the bone, or suspends
himself to a pole by means of a hook inserted in the flesh of his back.

[Sidenote: Profound contemplation of God.]

[Sidenote: Aerial martyrs. Holy birds.]

Among the Oriental sects there are some who believe that the Supreme
Being is perpetually occupied in the contemplation of himself, and that
the nearer man can approach to a state of total inaction the more will
he resemble God. For many years the Indian sage never raises his eyes
from his navel; absorbed in the profound contemplation of it, his
perennial reverie is unbroken by any outward suggestions, the admiring
by-standers administering, as chance offers, the little food and water
that his wants require. Under the influence of such ideas, in the fifth
century, St. Simeon Stylites, who in his youth had often been saved from
suicide, by ascending a column he had built, sixty feet in height, and
only one foot square at the top, departed as far as he could from
earthly affairs, and approached more closely to heaven. On this elevated
retreat, to which he was fastened by a chain, he endured, if we may
believe the incredible story, for thirty years the summer's sun and the
winter's frost. Afar off the passer-by was edified by seeing the
motionless figure of the holy man with outstretched arms like a cross,
projected against the sky, in his favourite attitude of prayer, or
expressing his thankfulness for the many mercies of which he supposed
himself to be the recipient by rapidly striking his foreh