tanism which seems to have existed in every faith in every stage
of its history. When men are looking about them for means to mortify the
flesh and to stifle the heart, a prohibition of marriage is the first
expedient that suggests itself. Until this is done away with, further
severities are impossible. Marriage, however, was not condemned at a
single blow. The first step was to forbid second marriages. A bachelor
in holy orders might marry with impunity; a widower did so at his peril.
Having effected this concession, the ascetic spirit found means to
increase its influence. It received a strong impulse at the close of the
second century, as Mr. Lea affirms, by the rise of the Neoplatonic
philosophy, with all its mystical and stoical tendencies, and by the
introduction into Europe and the rapid spread of the great Manichaean
heresy. In the view of this doctrine, man's body was the work of the
Devil, and condemned as such to ceaseless abuse and mortification by his
soul. Among the ascetic excesses which were the logical consequences of
such a dogma, inveterate chastity was, of course, not the last to be
enjoined. Manichaeism was an object of violent detestation to the Church;
but as the latter could not afford to let itself be outdone in austerity
by a vulgar heresy, it began to adopt a similar uncompromising attitude
towards marriage. The Council of Nicaea was held in 325. This body,
however, was chiefly occupied with debates upon Arianism, and is
responsible but for a single enactment bearing on the subject in hand.
The bearing of this enactment is, moreover, indirect, inasmuch as Mr.
Lea conclusively proves that it refers not to lawful wives, (as in later
ages of the Church it became needful to assume that it _did_ refer,) but
to female companions of the unlicensed sort. For more than half a
century after the Nicaean Council, the movement of the celibatarian
spirit is lost sight of in the all-absorbing disputes on the Arian
heresy. A strong reaction, however, is signalized by the issue, under
Pope Damasus, in the year 385, of the first definite command imposing
perpetual celibacy as an absolute rule of discipline on the ministers of
the altar. This was very well as an injunction, but it was nothing
without enforcement. More than half a century again elapsed before the
new discipline was substantially acknowledged. By the mass of the
servants of the Church--among which several names stand apart as those
of its more emine