BY CHARLES KINGSLEY ILLUSTRATED London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1891 The Right of Translation is Reserved Richard Clay and Sons , Limited , LONDON AND BUNGAY. First printed in parts 1868. Reprinted in 1 Volume , Crown 8 vo. 1871, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1890, 1891....

St. Paphnutius used to tell a story which may serve as a fit introduction to this book.  It contains a miniature sketch, not only of the social state of Egypt, but of the whole Roman Empire, and of the causes which led to the famous monastic movement in the beginning of the fifth century after Christ. Now Paphnutius was a wise and holy hermit, the Father, Abba, or Abbot of many monks; and after he had trained himself in the desert with all severity for many years, he besought God to show him whi

The life of Antony, by Athanasius, is perhaps the most important of all these biographies; because first, Antony was generally held to be the first great example and preacher of the hermit life; because next, Athanasius, his biographer, having by his controversial writings established the orthodox faith as it is now held alike by Romanists, Greeks, and Protestants, did, by his publication of the life of Antony, establish the hermit life as the ideal (in his opinion) of Christian excellence; and

Many have often doubted by which of the monks the desert was first inhabited.  For some, looking for the beginnings of Monachism in earlier ages, have deduced it from the blessed Elias and John; of whom Elias seems to us to have been rather a prophet than a monk; and John to have begun to prophesy before he was born.  But others (an opinion in which all the common people are agreed) assert that Antony was the head of this rule of life, which is partly true.  For he was not so much himself the fi

Under Decius and Valerius, the persecutors, at the time when Cornelius at Rome, and Cyprian at Carthage, were condemned in blessed blood, a cruel tempest swept over many Churches in Egypt and the Thebaid. Christian subjects in those days longed to be smitten with the sword for the name of Christ.  But the crafty enemy, seeking out punishments which delayed death, longed to slay souls, not bodies.  And as Cyprian himself (who suffered by him) says: “When they longed to die, they were not allowed

A monk gave away his wealth to the poor, but kept back some for himself.  Antony said to him, “Go to the village and buy meat, and bring it to me on thy bare back.”  He did so: and the dogs and birds attacked him, and tore him as well as the meat.  Quoth Antony, “So are those who renounce the world, and yet must needs have money, torn by dæmons.” Antony heard high praise of a certain brother; but, when he tested him, he found that he was impatient under injury.  Quoth Antony, “Thou art like a ho

Remember me in thy holy prayers, glory and honour of virgins, nun Asella.  Before beginning to write the life of the blessed Hilarion, I invoke the Holy Spirit which dwelt in him, that, as he largely bestowed virtues on Hilarion, he may give to me speech wherewith to relate them; so that his deeds may be equalled by my language.  For those who (as Crispus says) “have wrought virtues” are held to have been worthily praised in proportion to the words in which famous intellects have been able to ex

Hilarion was born in the village of Thabatha, which lies about five miles to the south of Gaza, in Palestine.  He had parents given to the worship of idols, and blossomed (as the saying is) a rose among the thorns.  Sent by them to Alexandria, he was entrusted to a grammarian, and there, as far as his years allowed, gave proof of great intellect and good morals.  He was soon dear to all, and skilled in the art of speaking.  And, what is more than all, he believed in the Lord Jesus, and delighted

I shall give one more figure, and that a truly tragical one, from these “Lives of the Egyptian Fathers,” namely, that of the once great and famous Arsenius, the Father (as he was at one time called) of the Emperors.  Theodosius, the great statesman and warrior, who for some twenty years kept up by his single hand the falling empire of Rome, heard how Arsenius was at once the most pious and the most learned of his subjects; and wishing—half barbarian as he was himself—that his sons should be brou

The impulse which, given by Antony, had been propagated in Asia by his great pupil, Hilarion, spread rapidly far and wide.  Hermits took possession of the highest peaks of Sinai; and driven from thence, so tradition tells, by fear of those mysterious noises which still haunt its cliffs, settled at that sheltered spot where now stands the convent of St. Catharine.  Massacred again and again by the wild Arab tribes, their places were filled up by fresh hermits, and their spiritual descendants hold

On the south shore of the Black Sea, eastward of Sinope, there dwelt in those days, at the mouth of the River Iris, a hermit as gentle and as pure as Ephrem of Edessa.  Beside a roaring waterfall, amid deep glens and dark forests, with distant glimpses of the stormy sea beyond, there lived on bread and water a graceful gentleman, young and handsome; a scholar too, who had drunk deeply at the fountains of Pagan philosophy and poetry, and had been educated with care at Constantinople and at Athens

Of all such anchorites of the far East, the most remarkable, perhaps, was the once famous Simeon Stylites—a name almost forgotten, save by antiquaries and ecclesiastics, till Mr. Tennyson made it once more notorious in a poem as admirable for its savage grandness, as for its deep knowledge of human nature.  He has comprehended thoroughly, as it seems to me, that struggle between self-abasement and self-conceit, between the exaggerated sense of sinfulness and the exaggerated ambition of saintly h

Most readers will recollect what an important part in the old ballads and romances is played by the hermit. He stands in strongest contrast to the knight.  He fills up, as it were, by his gentleness and self-sacrifice, what is wanting in the manhood of the knight, the slave too often of his own fierceness and self-assertion.  The hermit rebukes him when he sins, heals him when he is wounded, stays his hand in some mad murderous duel, such as was too common in days when any two armed horsemen mee

Of all these saintly civilizers, St. Severinus of Vienna is perhaps the most interesting, and his story the most historically instructive. [224] A common time, the middle of the fifth century, the province of Noricum (Austria, as we should now call it) was the very highway of invading barbarians, the centre of the human Maelstrom in which Huns, Alemanni, Rugi, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down and round the starving and beleaguered towns of what had once been a happy and fertile

It is not necessary to enter into the vexed question whether any Christianity ever existed in these islands of an earlier and purer type than that which was professed and practised by the saintly disciples of St. Antony.  It is at least certain that the earliest historic figures which emerge from the haze of barbarous antiquity in both the Britains and in Ireland, are those of hermits, who, in celibacy and poverty, gather round them disciples, found a convent, convert and baptize the heathen, an

Intermingled , fantastically and inconsistently, with the story of St. Brendan, is that of St. Maclovius or Machutus, who has given his name to the seaport of St. Malo, in Brittany.  His life, written by Sigebert, a monk of Gembloux, about the year 1100, tells us how he was a Breton, who sailed with St. Brendan in search of the fairest of all islands, in which the citizens of heaven were said to dwell.  With St. Brendan St. Malo celebrated Easter on the whale’s back, and with St. Brendan he retu

The famous St. Columba cannot perhaps be numbered among the hermits: but as the spiritual father of many hermits, as well as many monks, and as one whose influence upon the Christianity of these islands is notorious and extensive, he must needs have some notice in these pages.  Those who wish to study his life and works at length will of course read Dr. Reeves’s invaluable edition of Adamnan.  The more general reader will find all that he need know in Mr. Hill Burton’s excellent “History of Scot

Hermits dwelling in the wilderness, as far as I am aware, were to be seen only in the northern and western parts of the island, where not only did the forest afford concealment, but the crags and caves shelter.  The southern and eastern English seldom possess the vivid imagination of the Briton, the Northumbrian, and the Scot; while the rich lowlands of central, southern, and eastern England, well peopled and well tilled, offered few spots lonely enough for the hermit’s cell. One district only w

A personage quite as interesting, though not as famous, as Cuthbert or Guthlac, is St. Godric; the hermit around whose cell rose the Priory of Finchale.  In a loop of the river Wear, near Durham, there settled in the days of Bishop Flambard, between 1099 and 1128, a man whose parentage and history was for many years unknown to the good folks of the neighbourhood.  He had come, it seems, from a hermitage in Eskdale, in the parish of Whitby, whence he had been driven by the Percys, lords of the so

The fertile and peaceable lowlands of England, as I have just said, offered few spots sufficiently wild and lonely for the habitation of a hermit; those, therefore, who wished to retire from the world into a more strict and solitary life than that which the monastery afforded were in the habit of immuring themselves, as anchorites, or in old English “Ankers,” in little cells of stone, built usually against the wall of a church.  There is nothing new under the sun; and similar anchorites might ha