eration. When people
were praised for breaking the closest of family ties in their desire for
salvation, it would be absurd to suppose that social duties and
obligations would remain exempt. The Christian ascetic was ready enough
to risk his own life, or to take the life of others, on account of
minute points of doctrinal difference, but he was deaf to the call of
patriotism or the demands of civic life. Theology became the one
absorbing topic; and as monasticism assumed more menacing proportions,
the monk became the dominating figure, paralysing by his presence the
healthful activities of masses of the people. Speaking of the Eastern
Empire, although his words apply with almost equal truth wherever the
Church was supreme, Milman says:--

"That which is the characteristic sign of the times as a social and
political, as well as a religious, phenomenon, is the complete dominion
assumed by the monks in the East over the public mind.... The monks, in
fact, exercise the most complete tyranny, not merely over the laity, but
over bishops and patriarchs, whose rule, though nominally subject to it,
they throw off whenever it suits their purposes.... Monks in Alexandria,
monks in Antioch, monks in Constantinople, decide peremptorily on
orthodoxy and heterodoxy.... Persecution is universal; persecution by
every means of violence and cruelty; the only question is in whose hands
is the power to persecute.... Bloodshed, murder, treachery,
assassination, even during the public worship of God--these are the
frightful means by which each party strives to maintain its opinions and
to defeat its adversary. Ecclesiastical and civil authority are alike
paralysed by combinations of fanatics ready to suffer or to inflict
death, utterly unapproachable by reason."[175]

Against such combinations of ignorance, fanaticism, and ferocity, the
few remaining lovers of secular progress were powerless. Patriotism
became a mere name, and organised civic life an almost forgotten
aspiration. What the Pagan world had understood by a 'good man' was one
who spent himself in the service of his country. The Christian
understood by it one who succeeded in saving his own soul, even at the
sacrifice of family and friends. Vampire-like, monasticism fed upon the
life-blood of the Empire. The civic life and patriotism of old Rome
became a mere tradition, to inspire long after the men of the
Renaissance and of the French Revolution.

Finally, asceticism exerted a