ere--embers of phoenix
fire over all the earth,--the hope of Resurrection.

26. What would have been the course, or issue, of Christianity, had it
been orally preached only, and unsupported by its poetical literature,
might be the subject of deeply instructive speculation--if a
historian's duty were to reflect instead of record. The power of the
Christian faith was however, in the fact of it, always founded on the
written prophecies and histories of the Bible; and on the
interpretations of their meaning, given by the example, far more than
by the precept, of the great monastic orders. The poetry and history
of the Syrian Testaments were put within their reach by St. Jerome,
while the virtue and efficiency of monastic life are all expressed,
and for the most part summed, in the rule of St. Benedict. To
understand the relation of the work of these two men to the general
order of the Church, is quite the first requirement for its farther
intelligible history.

Gibbon's thirty-seventh chapter professes to give an account of the
'Institution of the Monastic Life' in the third century. But the
monastic life had been instituted somewhat earlier, and by many
prophets and kings. By Jacob, when he laid the stone for his pillow;
by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before
he had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet
who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its
primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal
Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and
derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God,
and practical wisdom dependent on His guidance.[31]

[Footnote 31: I should myself mark as the fatallest instant in the
decline of the Roman Empire, Julian's rejection of the counsel of the
Augurs. "For the last time, the Etruscan Haruspices accompanied a
Roman Emperor, but by a singular fatality their adverse interpretation
by the signs of heaven was disdained, and Julian followed the advice
of the philosophers, who coloured their predictions with the bright
hues of the Emperor's ambition." (Milman, Hist. of Christianity, chap.
vi.)]

The form which the monastic spirit took in later times depended far more
on the corruption of the common world, from which it was forced to
recoil either in indignation or terror, than on any change brought
about by Christianity in the ideal of human virtue