2.

ELIAS and St. John the Baptist sanctified the deserts, and Jesus Christ
himself was a model of the eremitical state during his forty days' fast
in the wilderness; neither is it to be questioned but the Holy Ghost
conducted the saint of this day, though young, into the desert, and was
to him an instructor there; but it is no less certain, that an entire
solitude and total sequestration of one's self from human society, is
one of those extraordinary ways by which God leads souls to himself, and
is more worthy of our admiration, than calculated for imitation and
practice: it is a state which ought only to be embraced by such as are
already well experienced in the practices of virtue and contemplation,
and who can resist sloth and other temptations, lest, instead of being a
help, it prove a snare and stumbling-block in their way to heaven.

This saint was a native of the Lower Thebais, in Egypt, and had lost
both his parents when he was but fifteen years of age: nevertheless, he
was a great proficient in the Greek and Egyptian learning, was mild and
modest, and feared God from his earliest youth. The bloody persecution
of Decius disturbed the peace of the church in 250; and what was most
dreadful, Satan, by his ministers, sought not so much to kill the
bodies, as by subtle artifices and tedious tortures to destroy the souls
of men. Two instances are sufficient to show his malice in this respect:
A soldier of Christ, who had already triumphed over the racks and
tortures, had his whole body rubbed over with honey, and was then laid
on his back in the sun, with his hands tied behind him, that the flies
and wasps, which are quite intolerable in hot countries, might torment
and gall him with their stings. Another was bound with silk cords on a
bed of down, in a delightful garden, where a lascivious woman was
employed to entice him to sin; the martyr, sensible of his danger, bit
off part of his tongue and spit it in her face, that the horror of such
an action might put her to flight, and the smart occasioned by it be a
means to prevent, in his own heart, any manner of consent to carnal
pleasure. During these times of danger, Paul kept himself concealed in
the house of another; but finding that a brother-in-law was inclined to
betray him, that he might enjoy his estate, he fled into the deserts.
There he found many spacious caverns in a rock, which were said to have
been the retreat of money-coiners in the days of Cleopatra, q