leads a _lonely_ life; and the
name was given to persons who professed to withdraw from the world and
its business that they might give themselves up to serve God in
religious thoughts and exercises. Among the Jews there had been whole
classes of people who practised this sort of retirement: some, called
_Essenes_, lived near the Dead Sea; and others, called _Therapeutae_, in
Egypt, where a great number of Jews had settled. Among the heathens of
the East, too, a like manner of living had been common for ages, as it
still continues to be; and many of them carry it to an excessive
strictness, as we are told by travellers who have visited India, Thibet,
and other countries of Asia.

Nothing of the kind, however, is commanded for Christians in the New
Testament; and when Scripture warrant for the monkish life was sought
for, the great patterns who were produced were Elijah and St. John the
Baptist--the one of them an Old Testament prophet; the other, a holy man
who lived, indeed, in the days when our Lord Himself was on the earth,
but who was not allowed to enter into His Church, or to see it fully
established by the coming of the Holy Ghost at the day of Pentecost. But
still it was very natural that the notion of a life of strict poverty,
retirement from the world, and employment in spiritual things, should
find favour with Christians, as a means of fulfilling the duties of
their holy calling; and so it seems that some of them took to this way
of life very early. But the first who is named as a _hermit_ (that is to
say, a _dweller in the wilderness_) was Paul, a young man of Alexandria,
who, in the year 251, fled from the persecution of Decius into the
Egyptian desert, where he is said to have lived ninety years. Paul,
although he afterwards became very famous, spent his days without being
known, until, just before his death, he was visited by another great
hermit, St. Antony. But Antony himself was a person of great note and
importance in his own lifetime.

He was born in the district of Thebes, in Egypt, in the very same year
that Paul withdrew from the world. While a boy, he was thoughtful and
serious. His parents died before he had reached the age of twenty, and
left him considerable wealth. One day, when in church, he was struck by
hearing the story of the rich young man who was charged to sell all that
he had, give to the poor, and follow our Lord (_St. Luke_ xviii. 18-22).
At another time he was moved by hearing th