treme and acknowledged term of frenzy, have
afforded ample materials of supernatural history. It was their firm
persuasion, that the air, which they breathed, was peopled with
invisible enemies; with innumerable demons, who watched every occasion,
and assumed every form, to terrify, and above all to tempt, their
unguarded virtue. The imagination, and even the senses, were deceived by
the illusions of distempered fanaticism; and the hermit, whose midnight
prayer was oppressed by involuntary slumber, might easily confound the
phantoms of horror or delight, which had occupied his sleeping and his
waking dreams. [64]

[Footnote 60: The diurnal and nocturnal prayers of the monks are
copiously discussed by Cassian, in the third and fourth books of his
Institutions; and he constantly prefers the liturgy, which an angel had
dictated to the monasteries of Tebennoe.]

[Footnote 61: Cassian, from his own experience, describes the acedia,
or listlessness of mind and body, to which a monk was exposed, when he
sighed to find himself alone. Saepiusque egreditur et ingreditur
cellam, et Solem velut ad occasum tardius properantem crebrius intuetur,
(Institut. x. l.)]

[Footnote 62: The temptations and sufferings of Stagirius were
communicated by that unfortunate youth to his friend St. Chrysostom. See
Middleton's Works, vol. i. p. 107-110. Something similar introduces the
life of every saint; and the famous Inigo, or Ignatius, the founder of
the Jesuits, (vide d'Inigo de Guiposcoa, tom. i. p. 29-38,) may serve as
a memorable example.]

[Footnote 63: Fleury, Hist. Ecclesiastique, tom. vii. p. 46. I have
read somewhere, in the Vitae Patrum, but I cannot recover the place
that several, I believe many, of the monks, who did not reveal their
temptations to the abbot, became guilty of suicide.]

[Footnote 64: See the seventh and eighth Collations of Cassian, who
gravely examines, why the demons were grown less active and numerous
since the time of St. Antony. Rosweyde's copious index to the Vitae
Patrum will point out a variety of infernal scenes. The devils were most
formidable in a female shape.]

The monks were divided into two classes: the Coenobites, who lived under
a common and regular discipline; and the Anachorets, who indulged their
unsocial, independent fanaticism. [65] The most devout, or the most
ambitious, of the spiritual brethren, renounced the convent, as they had
renounced the world. The fervent monasteries of Egypt, P