were said to have been placed there by Alexander the Great. These tribes
spoke the language called Ethiopie, a dialect of Arabic which was not
used in the country which we have hitherto called Ethiopia.

[Illustration: 213.jpg TEMPLE OF ABU SIMBEL IN NUBIA]

The Ethiopie version of the Bible was about this time made for their
use. It was translated out of the Greek from the Alexandrian copies,
as the Greek version was held in such value that it was not thought
necessary to look to the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. But these
well-meant efforts did little at the time towards making the Hexumitae
Christians. Distance and the Blemmyes checked their intercourse with
Alexandria. It was not till two hundred years later that they could be
said in the slightest sense to be converted to Christianity.

Though the origin of monastic life has sometimes been claimed for the
Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea, yet it was in Egypt that it was
framed into a system, and became the model for the Christian world. It
took its rise in the serious and gloomy views of religion which always
formed part of the Egyptian polytheism, and which the Greeks remarked as
very unlike their own gay and tasteful modes of worship, and which were
readily engrafted by the Egyptian converts into their own Christian
belief. In the reigns of Constantine and his sons, hundreds of
Christians, both men and women, quitting the pleasures and trials of
the busy world, withdrew one by one into the Egyptian desert, where the
sands are as boundless as the ocean, where the sunshine is less cheerful
than darkness, to spend their lonely days and watchful nights in
religious meditation and in prayer. They were led by a gloomy view
of their duty towards God, and by a want of fellow-feeling for their
neighbour; and they seemed to think that pain and misery in this world
would save them from punishment hereafter. The lives of many of these
Fathers of the Desert were written by the Christians who lived at the
same time; but a full account of the miracles which were said to have
been worked in their favour, or by their means, would now only call
forth a smile of pity, or perhaps even of ridicule.

"Prosperity and peace," says Gibbon, "introduced the distinction of the
vulgar and the ascetic Christians. The loose and imperfect practice
of religion satisfied the conscience of the multitude. The prince or
magistrate, soldier or merchant, reconciled their fervent zeal, a