ed ten
thousand females and twenty thousand males, of the monastic profession.
The Egyptians, who gloried in this marvellous revolution, were disposed
to hope, and to believe, that the number of the monks was equal to the
remainder of the people; and posterity might repeat the saying, which
had formerly been applied to the sacred animals of the same country,
That in Egypt it was less difficult to find a god than a man.

Athanasius introduced into Rome the knowledge and practice of the
monastic life; and a school of this new philosophy was opened by the
disciples of Antony, who accompanied their primate to the holy threshold
of the Vatican. The strange and savage appearance of these Egyptians
excited, at first, horror and contempt, and, at length, applause and
zealous imitation. The senators, and more especially the matrons,
transformed their palaces and villas into religious houses; and the
narrow institution of _six_ Vestals was eclipsed by the frequent
monasteries, which were seated on the ruins of ancient temples, and
in the midst of the Roman forum. Inflamed by the example of Antony, a
Syrian youth, whose name was Hilarion, fixed his dreary abode on a sandy
beach, between the sea and a morass, about seven miles from Gaza. The
austere penance, in which he persisted forty-eight years, diffused a
similar enthusiasm; and the holy man was followed by a train of two
or three thousand anachorets, whenever he visited the innumerable
monasteries of Palestine. The fame of Basil is immortal in the monastic
history of the East. With a mind that had tasted the learning and
eloquence of Athens; with an ambition scarcely to be satisfied with the
archbishopric of Caesarea, Basil retired to a savage solitude in Pontus;
and deigned, for a while, to give laws to the spiritual colonies which
he profusely scattered along the coast of the Black Sea. In the West,
Martin of Tours, a soldier, a hermit, a bishop, and a saint, established
the monasteries of Gaul; two thousand of his disciples followed him to
the grave; and his eloquent historian challenges the deserts of Thebais
to produce, in a more favorable climate, a champion of equal virtue.
The progress of the monks was not less rapid, or universal, than that
of Christianity itself. Every province, and, at last, every city, of the
empire, was filled with their increasing multitudes; and the bleak and
barren isles, from Lerins to Lipari, that arose out of the Tuscan Sea,
were chosen by t