gent in their
exhortations than to a life of purity. To no greater temptation were the
converts to Christianity subjected than the looseness of prevailing
sentiments in reference to this vice. It stared everybody in the face.
Basil took especial care to guard the monks from this prevailing
iniquity, and made chastity a transcendent and fundamental virtue. He
aimed to remove the temptation to sin. The monks were enjoined to shun
the very presence of women. If they carried the system of
non-intercourse too far, and became hard and unsympathetic, it was to
avoid the great scandal of the age,--a still greater evil. To the monk
was denied even the blessing of the marriage ties. Celibacy became a
fundamental law of monachism. It was not to cement a spiritual despotism
that Basil forbade marriage, but to attain a greater sanctity,--for a
monk was consecrated to what was supposed to be the higher life. This
law of celibacy was abused, and gradually was extended to all the
clergy, secular as well as regular, but not till the clergy were all
subordinated to the rule of an absolute Pope. It is the fate of all
human institutions to become corrupt; but no institution of the Church
has been so fatally perverted as that pertaining to the marriage of the
clergy. Founded to promote purity of personal life, it was used to
uphold the arms of spiritual despotism. It was the policy of Hildebrand.

The vow of Obedience, again, was made in special reference to the
disintegration of society, when laws were feebly enforced and a central
power was passing away. The discipline even of armies was relaxed. Mobs
were the order of the day, even in imperial cities. Moreover, monks had
long been insubordinate; they obeyed no head, except nominally; they
were with difficulty ruled in their communities. Therefore obedience was
made a cardinal virtue, as essential to the very existence of monastic
institutions. I need not here allude to the perversion of this
rule,--how it degenerated into a fearful despotism, and was made use of
by ambitious popes, and finally by the generals of the Mendicant Friars
and the Jesuits. All the rules of Basil were perverted from their
original intention; but in his day they were called for.

About a century later the monastic system went through another change or
development, when Benedict, a remarkable organizer, instituted on Monte
Cassino, near Naples, his celebrated monastery (529, A.D.), which became
the model of all t