and happiness.

27. "Egypt" (Mr. Gibbon thus begins to account for the new
Institution!), "the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the
first example of monastic life." Egypt had her superstitions, like
other countries; but was so little the _parent_ of superstition that
perhaps no faith among the imaginative races of the world has been so
feebly missionary as hers. She never prevailed on even the nearest of
her neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to
my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement
of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that
influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that
in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition:
while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the
parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in
its material and technic elements, the mistress of Literature, showing
authors who before could only scratch on wax and wood, how to weave
paper and engrave porphyry. She was the first exponent of the law of
Judgment after Death for Sin. She was the Tutress of Moses; and the
Hostess of Christ.

28. It is both probable and natural that, in such a country, the
disciples of any new spiritual doctrine should bring it to closer
trial than was possible among the illiterate warriors, or in the
storm-vexed solitudes of the North; yet it is a thoughtless error to
deduce the subsequent power of cloistered fraternity from the lonely
passions of Egyptian monachism. The anchorites of the first three
centuries vanish like feverish spectres, when the rational, merciful,
and laborious laws of Christian societies are established; and the
clearly recognizable rewards of heavenly solitude are granted to those
only who seek the Desert for its redemption.

29. 'The clearly _recognizable_ rewards,' I repeat, and with cautious
emphasis. No man has any data for estimating, far less right of judging,
the results of a life of resolute self-denial, until he has had the
courage to try it himself, at least for a time: but I believe no
reasonable person will wish, and no honest person dare, to deny the
benefits he has occasionally felt both in mind and body, during periods
of accidental privation from luxury, or exposure to danger. The extreme
vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of
himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occas