and forbidding
all women to cross the thresholds of their humble dwellings; and
yet, in spite of all the severities they have exercised on
themselves, it was with difficulty they could repress the fury of
their passions." Hilarion, says Jerome, saw visions of naked
women when he lay down on his solitary couch and delicious meats
when he sat down to his frugal table. Such experiences rendered
the early saints very scrupulous. "They used to say," we are told
in an interesting history of the Egyptian anchorites, Palladius's
_Paradise of the Holy Fathers_, belonging to the fourth century
(A.W. Budge, _The Paradise_, vol. ii, p. 129), "that Abba Isaac
went out and found the footprint of a woman on the road, and he
thought about it in his mind and destroyed it saying, 'If a
brother seeth it he may fall.'" Similarly, according to the rules
of St. Caesarius of Aries for nuns, no male clothing was to be
taken into the convent for the purpose of washing or mending.
Even in old age, a certain anxiety about chastity still remained.
One of the brothers, we are told in _The Paradise_ (p. 132) said
to Abba Zeno, "Behold thou hast grown old, how is the matter of
fornication?" The venerable saint replied, "It knocketh, but it
passeth on."

As the centuries went by the same strenuous anxiety to guard
chastity still remained, and the old struggle constantly
reappeared (see, e.g., Migne's _Dictionnaire d'Ascetisme_, art.
"Demon, Tentation du"). Some saints, it is true, like Luigi di
Gonzaga, were so angelically natured that they never felt the
sting of sexual desire. These seem to have been the exception.
St. Benedict and St. Francis experienced the difficulty of
subduing the flesh. St. Magdalena de Pozzi, in order to dispel
sexual desires, would roll on thorny bushes till the blood came.
Some saints kept a special cask of cold water in their cells to
stand in (Lea, _Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i, p. 124). On the
other hand, the Blessed Angela de Fulginio tells us in her
_Visiones_ (cap. XIX) that, until forbidden by her confessor, she
would place hot coals in her secret parts, hoping by material
fire to extinguish the fire of concupiscence. St. Aldhelm, the
holy Bishop of Sherborne, in the eighth century, also adopted a
homeopathic method of treatment, though of a more literal kind,
for W