ESSAY ON THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE FIRST SIX CENTURIES

4

The worship the Mother of Christ

 

There is another characteristic of the mystical life of which little appears in the following pages. I mean the devotion to the Blessed Virgin. We can hardly conceive an identity between ourselves and the monks of old, unless we find in them some traces of what is now considered to be essential to the very notion of the spiritual life. Let me say something upon this subject before I conclude.

We hear a great deal about the practical system of devotion to our Lady, which is supposed to be perfectly modern, and which is over and above the dogmatic decrees of the council of Trent. That there is such a system we readily admit; it is not explicitly contained in formal documents, but it is preached by parish priests in their sermons, taught by nuns to girls who are about to make their first communion, pervades the whole life of the Church, is sucked in by Catholics with their mother's milk, surrounds us all like an atmosphere and is breathed in with every breath we draw. To this we must submit or we are bad catholics, and keep ourselves aloof from the mystical life of the Church. In point of fact a practical system of some kind over and above authorized formulas there always must be, because our faith is too vast and magnificent to be expressed in words. Now it is precisely to this fact, that I wish to draw attention; if there must have been such a system in the Church from the first, what was it? how far especially did it appear in the mystical life of the Saints of the wilderness? has it utterly perished? did it contain anything about Mary? If it can be made out that in the early Church there existed a system, in its leading features like that which shocks the sensibilities of men who eliminate Mary from the Christian life, it renders their position more untenable and illogical than ever. I am willing to allow at once that the practical system of the Church has developed; but by development I mean nothing vague or indefinite. Some writers speak of development as though they believed in a theological transmutation of species; as if one doctrine could come out of another utterly different in kind. Others write as though the process of development was a contest, the result of which has been that, by a sort of natural selection, the strong doctrines outlived the weak, as though the truths thus developed were only connected together by historical sequence, without any internal cohesion. On the contrary, doctrines were delivered whole, and their growth is a process of evolution by which the hidden harmony of the parts is renderer: visible, though all those parts were previously taught or implicitly held. The development consists in bringing to light by reflection, what was spontaneously believed before. It is the unfolding of an idea, which was given whole.

Christian truths were thus planted whole like the trees in Paradise; they grew, they unfolded blossoms and they developed into fruit, but they never sprang from seed. If the principle is to be of any scientific use, we must not be content with indistinct germs, any more than we could hope to satisfy a man who asked for an oak, by showing him an acorn. Can we then by any fair use of recorded facts show the existence of any practical system of devotion to our Lady, floating about the ancient Church, and especially about the cells of the desert? It would not be surprising if we could not discover a vestige of it. There is no difficulty whatsoever in showing that on state occasions, four hundred years before the division of the East from the Catholic Church, sermons were preached by St. Proclus or by St. Cyril of Alexandria, which prove that the doctrine of Christendom was then what it is now. The practical system however of an age gone by is precisely what is most perishable, because it is not contained in documents. Fifteen hundred years hence, it is very unlikely, that one Garden of the Soul will remain, while the canons of the council of Oscott have a chance of being preserved in some future Hardouin. Grand dogmatic treatises remain to reveal the great truths, which occupied the then religious world, but history is silent about the prayers, and the aspirations, and the special devotions, and the spiritual reading of the layman, and about the sermons of the obscure priest, at the time when the Nicene council met. Is there however anything which will render it perfectly conceivable that a Hail Mary or something like it might have been said in the desert? Let us begin with what is certain.

At the end of the sixth century, there is no doubt whatever that the devotion of a monk of Palestine to the Blessed Virgin was precisely what it would be now. John Moschus, accompanied by Sophronius, afterwards patriarch of Jerusalem, set out on a voyage in which he visited the principal monasteries of the East, about the year 578. He tells us stories which read like pages from the Glories of Mary, and which prove that the cells of hermits had images of the Blessed Virgin with the Infant in her arms, that they prayed to her, and burned can­dles before them. In one case Abbot John the Anchorite, who lived in a cavern, twenty miles from Jerusalem, when about to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Cross, or the relics of the Saints, used to pray thus to the Blessed Virgin: “Holy Lady, Mother of God, since I am about to travel a long way, take care of thy lamp and do not let it be extinguished, for I am going away trusting to have thy help for a companion of my way”. The story goes on to say that the lamp continued to burn miraculously in his absence. Another story is told of a hermit on the Mount of Olives, whom the devil tempted to put out of his cell an image of our Lady with the Holy Child, and to whom Abbot Theodore said that he had better commit any sin than cease to adore Jesus Christ, God and Lord, with His holy Mother.

In another place, our Lady appears in a vision to a monk who had a volume of Nestorius in his cell. I am not defending the truth of these miracles, though I see no reason to doubt them; I bring them forward to prove that in the sixth century the devotion of the monks needs no application of the principle of development to prove its identity with that of the nineteenth. We have not advanced much since then. And these facts throw light on others of the same period. In the year 555, on the 4th of June, St. Simeon Stylites the younger, solemnly erected his pillar in the presence of the monks of his monastery and called on our Lord, His mother, and the holy angels to witness the truth of the words which he then spoke. The swine saint wrote to the Emperor to complain of the destruction of an image of our Blessed Lady. The thought and the name of Mary must evidently have been in his mind, and have cheered him throughout his marvelous mystical life.

I, however, go much further than this. It is quite plain that so great a devotion could not be of recent growth. It springs up before us all at once as a grand river. Even if its course was unknown to us, so wide and so full a stream must have passed through many lands, and its fountains must be sought for in a distant country. Let us trace it upwards as far as we can. About the year 480, some monk in Palestine wrote a narrative of an event, which took place on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, probably in the year 383, the conversion of Mary of Egypt. In the time of her sinfulness she endeavored to enter the church of the Holy Sepulchre and found herself repelled by an invisible force. She lifts up her eyes and sees an image of our Lady over the porch, and she bursts out into the following prayer: “0 Lady and Virgin, who didst bear the Word of God according to the flesh, I know that it is neither reasonable nor decorous that I, so foul with sin, should look on thine image, who wert ever a stainless virgin; nevertheless, since thy Son became man to save sinners, help me in my desolation, order the door to be opened even to me that I may adore the holy Cross”.

It is no wild conjecture, then, that the cry, “Lady, lady, forsake me not”, which she afterwards used, must have been ever on Mary's lips during her long wanderings, in the desert. Again, in October, of the year 367, St. Gregory of Nazianzen narrated in one of his first sermons in his new church at Constantinople, that St. Justina invoked our Lady and was heard. Evidently, St. Gregory, himself a monk, was no stranger to devotion to Mary, though his great works may contain no further invocation of her. The next example carries us back to the first ages of monachism. About the year 355 a young Egyptian of fifteen, conversed with St. Antony, and afterwards became well known as Abbot Poemen. One day, we cannot now tell at what period of his long life, he fell into a state of ecstasy; and when he was coming to himself, Abbot Isaac bent over him and said to him: “where were you?” He answered: “my mind was where the Holy Mary, the Mother of God, stood weeping at the cross of the Savior, and I was all the while wishing evermore to weep like that”. These words are the first chords of the Stabat Mater stealing over the Church in the desert, like the music from the fabled statue at the dawn of day. It was a nearer approach to modern devotion than the words of St. Ambrose: I have heard of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, but not of her weeping.

Now let me connect the monastic devotion to Mary with the common spiritual life of the Church before I have done. We have seen in the passages quoted from St. Irenneus and Origen the two ideas on which the modern devotion to Mary rests; in the former we have found what may be called its hypothetical necessity, that is, its necessity on the supposition that God willed to make the redemption of mankind correspond to its fall. In Origen we have seen how that devotion is personal, that is to Mary as to a person, who stands to our individual soul in the place of a mother. Did these ideas develop, that is bear fruit, become living parts of the spiritual life of Christians, and spread into the practical system of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, at the time when St. Athanasius, St. Gregory, St. Basil, and St. Chrysostom were alive? I believe that, necessarily few and scanty as are the relics of such a system, the deeper we dig into the buried remains of antiquity, the more we shall be convinced of its existence. There are several instances of what I mean, which have been too lately discovered to be generally known. Let me begin with two, about which I can only speak second-hand, because I am ignorant of the language in which they are written.

Nothing can be a better index of the mind of Christians than their popular hymns. The vernacular hymns sung, for instance, all over England may be considered as a very practical test of the trains of devotional thought, and the imagery peculiar to our people. Now it so happens that a Protestant missionary has lately brought to Europe the hymnal of Jared, a hymn-book of the Abyssinian Church. Some of the hymns are very ancient, and are anterior to the time of the Eutychian heresy. Here we have the words which burst from the lips and hearts of the children of the Abyssinian Church before the work of St. Frumentius was corrupted by the Monophysite heresy.

In one of the hymns we find the Archangel Gabriel clothed in the purple garments of which Severus the Monophysite had stripped the angels; while the hymn to our Lady, to which we refer, could never have sprung from a heart which disbelieved in the two natures of her Son. Men and women in Axoum in the sixth century did not essentially differ from what they are in London, and as our English hymns are sung by many a laborer and workwoman in courts and garrets, so we may be sure that the Abyssinian poor carried home from church the hymns of Jared to cheer them in their labors in the fields or at the loom. No hymn, however, sung at the Oratory could surpass in glowing expressions that sung in Abyssinia. It reads like a portion of the Litany of Loretto, of which it anticipates many invocations. “Our Mother”, it says, “and the Mother of our Lord, Angels with pen of gold shall write thy praises; thou art the bush, which was truly called Holy of Holies; thou art the light, the treasure-house of the Word; Mary, pray for us”. She is called the mother of martyrs, the ark which contained the law, the gate of salvation. There is evidently a personal devotion to Mary at work in the hearts of the faithful. I now go back to an earlier time and to a different country.

It is strange that, as if to reward the faith of the Church in the declaration of the Immaculate Conception, testimonies previously unknown are springing up which prove the fact asserted in the Bull that it formed part of the original revelation of Christianity. Voices are reaching us from various parts of the ancient Church, which bear witness to the identity of the spiritual life of their people with our own. A schism, of which all record had perished, desolates the church of Edessa, and St. Ephrem could appeal in a popular hymn or rhythmical discourse to the Immaculate Conception, as a doctrine to which all hearts would respond. He pleads for indul­gence to our Lord on behalf of the afflicted Church in these words: “Truly Thou and Thy Mother are the only beings who are beautiful altogether and in every respect; for there is no spot in Thee, Lord, nor in Thy Mother any stain”.

When we remember St. Ephrem's clear views of original sin, and his reverence for the souls of baptized infants who died without actual sin, these words are perhaps the clearest testimony, which has reached us from antiquity, of its belief in the perfect immaculateness of Mary's conception. Unless she were in the grace of God from the first instant of her existence, her stainlessness could not be paralleled with our Lord's, nor could she stand alone with Him in solitary purity, unshared by a single human being.

The nineteenth century has not improved upon the fourth. Who dictated the words, which had lain hid for more than a thousand years in an Eastern monastery, and which have just come to light from the British Museum? He was a monk, at once of the desert and the city. We have in one breath the witness of the wilderness and of the schools. Strange combination of the hermit and the modern Benedictine, St. Ephrem issued from the wilds, and became the master of a widespread theological school. Like everything else supposed to be of late growth in the Church, scientific theology began fat earlier than is thought. Even Rome, which the shallow imagination of historians had supposed to be, from the earliest times, the very home of mental stagnation, has been lately discovered to have possessed a school in the second century.

Alexandria and Antioch each formed a separate scientific centre, more or less Greek in its origin; but the university of the far east was Edessa. There was the chief seat of the genuine oriental Church, with the least admixture of the Greek. There was the point where Christianity came in contact with all the philosophies and religions of the East, Buddhism, the worship of fire, the doctrine of the good and evil principle, and the tradition of the Brahmins. It was one of the earliest centers of Christianity, and its fame for science was almost equal with its faith. In the second century the Bible was translated there, and its version was used by all Christians who spoke the Syrian tongue. The capital of the ancient kingdom of Osroene, it was a light to countries where Christianity is now unknown or disguised under the tenets of miserable sects. It was over its school that St. Ephrem presided, and his influence extended to Armenia, Parthia, and even through Syro-Persian merchants to the coast of Malabar.

Though the Persian school at Edessa was probably distinct from his own, yet Persia also knew his name and felt his power. He represented the doctrine of St. James of Nisibis, whose favorite disciple he was, who was one of the fathers of the Council of Nicaea, and whom he is said to have accompanied thither. On his deathbed he could appeal to Jesus by all the moving details of His Passion to bear him witness that he had only taught the doctrines of the apostles. But he was far more than a monk and a doctor. He was a popular preacher, and his hymns were sung all over the east. He was within the walls of Nisibis when it was besieged by Sapor, and his songs cheered the hearts of its defenders and celebrated their victory, when the broken troops of the heathen turned away baffled from its walls.

Never was hermit more popular. Gentle, courteous, loving, he entered into conversation with all, even the most degraded women. A man of the people, he shared their danger in war, wept over all their sorrows, and suffered with their sufferings. He fearlessly attacked the selfishness of the Roman government in devastating the country for fear of the Persians. By his hymns, however, above all, he leavened the minds of the people. He wrote them and set them to popular tunes, in order to counteract the heretical songs of Bardesanes and Harmodius. He formed a choir of young girls to sing them, and thus they penetrated into the homes and domestic life of his countrymen. He exhausts all the imagery of an oriental imagination to express his own tender feelings towards the Mother of God, and make the love of her sink deep into the minds of the people. He taught them the power of her prayers with God: “But most of all”, he prays to God, “again and again I entreat and adjure Thee, that Thou wouldst put down the monstrous enemy of the human race by the prayers and merits of Thy Mother”. “To Thee, Lord”, he says, “together with the sweet smell of sacrifice, we offer the merits of the most blessed Virgin Mary”. “O Jerusalem the blessed, may thy gates be open to all and shut out none; may our prayers and supplications be admitted before the throne of the Lamb by the intercession of the Virgin Mother of God and of all the blessed, and may they obtain mercy and pity”. His teaching was not lost upon the Syrian Church. In the beginning of the fifth century, St. James of Sarugtaught the Immaculate Conception. Even the Nestorian heresy, which overwhelmed the East like a deluge, could not obliterate it. In the 13th century, a Nestorian hymn declares Mary to have been sanctified in the first moment of her conception. It is perfectly plain from all this, that in the early Church the doctrine of Mary's greatness was not a sterile idea, but was reduced to practice.

Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, were taught the value of her prayers. If we invoke the principle of development, it is not on account of any deficiency of proof. That development is not a progress from doctrine to practice, but from a less to a more extensive practice. Devotion to Mary is now more widely spread and more universal: it is not more intense or more practical. That St. Athanasius says comparatively so little about the subject, proves that our Lady was not so prominently put forward at Alexandria in his time; but it does not prove that in his day the Immaculate Conception was unknown, nor that in other parts of the Church devotion to her was not as great and as practical as in the nineteenth century, since his contemporary, St. Ephrem, is as clear as St. Alphonso Liguori. The only legitimate conclusion to be drawn from the facts is, that the practice of Alexandria was, as far as our present knowledge extends, less like our own than that of Edessa. At the same time I see nothing incredible in the notion that the faithful who crowded around the pulpit of S. Athanasius invoked our Lady, when they heard their great pastor call her the All-holy and the Godlike Mary.

Again, there is a class of literature of which sufficient use has not as yet been made; I mean spurious and apocryphal writings. It is considered enough to banish a work from controversy, if the Benedictines have declared that it does not proceed from the pen of the author, whose name it bears. If however its age can be ascertained, a book may be an unexceptionable witness, without being an authority. We have been too apt to look upon individual fathers as authorities in doctrine, which they are only to a limited extent: even St. Athanasius is more valuable as bearing testimony to what was taught by the Church in his day, than as a teacher.

It is no paradox to say that a nameless writer may be a better witness of the popular system of the Church. It would be absurd to suppose that works like those of that great saint in general, his treatise De Synodis, for instance, represent the common spiritual read­ing of the faithful at Alexandria. Just as the Golden Legend in the middle ages was certainly in the hands of the faithful to an incalculable extent more frequently than the Summa of St. Thomas, so we may be sure that an apocryphal Gospel was popular in the early Church, in a sense in which St. Augustine was not. Many of these writings were perfectly orthodox, and represent legends which were current among Christiana. Though the Church always protested against their being Scripture, yet they were often tolerated till the decree of Gelasius; and the number of manuscripts which are preserved, and the traces of their contents which remain even in medieval legends, are proofs that they were widely spread. We may therefore safely assume, that in some of them we possess books, which represent a popular system in the early Church. One of them has just come to light, which is pronounced by Tischendorf to have been written not later than the fourth century, though it may have been composed even earlier.

It is an account of the death of the Blessed Virgin, written in the form of a narrative put into the mouth of St. John. Its doctrine is perfectly orthodox, and it contains throughout a singularly straightforward assertion of the absolute Godhead of Christ, yet without any of the theological terms which were peculiar to a later period. In this book we find the whole doctrine of the intercession of our Lady. She prays on her deathbed that Jesus should grant help to all who invoke her name. The answer of our Lord is: “Rejoice, and let thine heart be glad, for every grace and gift has been given to thee by My Father who is in heaven, by Me, and by the Holy Ghost. Every soul calling upon thy name shall not be ashamed, but shall find mercy and consolation, help and confidence both in this world and the world to come, before My Father who is in heaven”. Accordingly, after her death, a sick man, by the command of St. Peter, cries out, “Holy Mary, Mother of Christ our God, have mercy on me”, and is cured. In a document belonging to the same cycle, the very manuscript of which is of the 6th century, it is said that “the blessed one was holy and chosen by God from the moment that she was conceived in her mother's womb”. I do not think that there is any extravagance in the assertion that Mary entered into the spiritual life of the men who wrote and read these books; nor should I be at all surprised to hear the Ave Maria coming from their lips, nor even to find in their souls a devotion to her name and her heart.

One more instance before I have done. There is no stranger collection in all literature than the motley one, called the Sibylline Oracles. No one, of course, imagines that they are what their name indicates that they claim to be. They are the productions of men of the most various creeds at very different times, sheltering under the Sibyl's name descriptions of contemporary events. Jew, heretic, and Christian, have contributed to the motley assemblage of heterogeneous poetry. It looks like a vast tesselated pavement made up of fragments of various mosaics, all thrown together, where arabesque patterns, the most grotesque, are cemented together with tragic masks and fragments of graceful forms. It reminds us of a discordant concert, where the organ's solemn tones mingle with the wild roll of the barbaric gong and the crash of oriental cymbals. The strangest heretics stand side by side with faithful Catholics. But whoever is the writer, or whatever his creed, we have at least the passionate outburst of genuine feelings, which agitated human breasts in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our faith. We have the savage exultation of the Jew that the day of vengeance is at hand; and we have the hopes and the fears, the joy and the despondency of Christians. The wounds of Jesus, and the crown of thorns, with the de tails of the Passion, appear sometimes to console Christians under persecution. Much more frequently, however, the poems dwell on the approaching judgment and the consequent triumph of the Church. As we have heard the prelude of the Stabat Mater in the desert, so we find the germs of the Dies Iris in the famous Sibylline acrostich of the name of Christ. But, amidst all the terrible images of the day of doom, and the scarcely disguised triumphant expectation of God's vengeance on the heathen, there is one image of peace and compassion which breathes a pitying charm over the awful picture. It is that of the pure Virgin, who, at the Archangel's bidding, received her God in her bosom, and to whose outstretched hands, pleading for mercy, Christ granted a space for repentance, even to the Pagan. Evidently, in the age of martyrdom, Christians would have found nothing strange in the intercession of Mary.

I trust that I have said enough to show the bearing of such books as that here presented to the public on the history of the Church, and the use which we can draw from them for our own spiritual good. The more we study that ancient Church, the more we shall be convinced of what our faith has already told us, that we are absolutely one with it. This is true, not only in great dogmas, but also in our life and practice. I hope that I have already elsewhere shown that, if we take into consideration the actual practice of the ancient Church, its conduct in the confessional was by no means so different from ours, as the mere study of the canons might lead us to suppose. Something has been done in these few pages to point out the same fact as to our interior life, though volumes might be written upon the subject. The lives of the desert saints may thus be useful in regulating our own life.

 The insight, which is here given into these peaceful solitudes, may help us to correct the tendency to overactivity, which penetrates even into our very religion. The railroad pace of the world hurries even good Christians along with it, and they fling themselves into schemes of active benevolence, in a way which is often injurious to their interior life. It produces a combined restlessness and languor, a physical exhaustion of nerve and brain, which is very perilous. Never did Christians want more prayer than now, for the world is all in confusion, and the time is out of joint, and before we attempt to set it right, we had better begin with ourselves. All is floating and uncertain. Landmarks, intellectual and political, are torn up. and men are drifting they know not whither Nothing will save us from danger but an intellect, a heart, and a mode of life, entirely one exteriorly and interiorly with the everliving Church of Christ. There is no possible Christian life but in the old path of mortification and prayer. Along this path the saints, in every age, have borne their cross. Throughout all its various forms, sanctity is still identical, nor do I see very much difference between St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, and the Cure d'Ars in his cramped confessional. May they obtain grace for us to follow them, if not in their heroic penance, yet at least in their interior life, in boundless charity for our sinful and suffering brethren, and their burning love for Jesus and Mary.

Nor can I finish my task, without turning to you, who are attempting to renew outside the Church the monastic system, which except within her pale can only be stagnant or awfully perilous. Not in a spirit of ridicule, but of the profoundest pity do I think of you. While my whole soul revolts with indignation at the presumption of those who without mission, without jurisdiction, without the requisite gifts, presume to take upon themselves the guidance of souls, I feel the deepest compassion for those, who are their victims and who are on their way with them to the inevitable ditch. To us who are looking on, it seems nothing less than a judicial fatuity to put oneself under the guidance of men, who never speak of a sacrament, without betraying a confusion of thought, which shows them to be incapable of seeing clear into any theological question whatsoever. How dare they touch the keys without a semblance of jurisdiction? With what face can they urge anyone to make a confession when they inform the penitent that after all the misery and the agony of the avowal of guilt, forgiveness might have been cheaply purchased without it? How can they pronounce an absolution which they themselves loudly assert to be unnecessary? But, above all things, I am struck with wonder at their presumption in pronouncing on vocations. It is just such tricks as these played before high heaven, which make the angels weep, when they see rash men rushing in where they would fear to tread. A Catholic priest, with the tradition of eighteen centuries at his back, with the living Church to guide and to check him, trembles when he has to pronounce on a vocation, and when he meddles with the spiritual life of a soul, redeemed by the blood of Christ. He knows well that nature can take the semblance of grace, and that not all who desire the most perfect life are called by God's Holy Spirit. Alas, poor souls! when at the bidding of some Anglican clergyman you have given up all the dearest ties of life, and entered into a mock convent, or taken unauthorized obligations, what guarantee have you that one day you will not discover, when it is too late, that you have made an irremediable blunder? When, under the monotony and the labor of wearing work, a Catholic, nun at times feels fainting and overpowered, what will become of you, poor sheep without a shepherd, or, what is worse, with sham sacraments and false guides? May God, in reward for your goodwill, bring you into the true fold, before you fall into the hardened sobriety of hopeless pride, or the terrible delusion of false mysticism.

FAREWEL

It only remains for me to say a few words on the work now translated. Its author is the Countess Hahn-Hahn, long a well-known German writer. She was not originally a Catholic, and was only converted at an advanced age. Married very young, it is commonly known that her marriage was not a happy one, and she spent a great portion of her life in travelling about Europe, as well as in countries which at that time were but little visited, especially by ladies. She first became famous by her “Letters from the East”, a book which attracted great attention by the boldness and originality of her views, the vividness of her descriptions of scenery, and the beauty of the style. She has also written many novels, said to be distinguished by striking sketches of character, life-like dialogues, and a total absence of plot. She was converted to the Catholic Church by the excellent Bishop of Mayence, Monsignor von Ketteler. Since her conversion she has lived a devout and solitary life in a convent at Mayence. Notwithstanding her advanced age, her mind is active as ever, and she has been employed in writing works which are very deservedly popular. Her novels, one of which has been translated in the Month, are beautifully written and well conceived, though the dialogue is at times rather garrulous, and the artistic faults as well as the excellencies of her old writings are not absent. Besides works of fiction she has written a series of books on the History of the Church, one of which is now presented to the reader in an English dress. She has embodied in it many of the beautiful descriptions of scenes visited. by herself and published in her earlier works, as well as a great deal of information on heathen as well as ecclesiastical subjects. Though it is not free at times from the fault of prolixity, and though her expressions are not of course always as accurate as if she were a theologian, yet it is by far the fullest and best picture of the primitive monks which has appeared in English. To take but one instance, the life of St. Simeon Stylites contains circumstances which, as far as I know, will hardly be found elsewhere in the language.

We are indebted for the excellent and careful translation to a lady whose accurate knowledge of languages is a guarantee for its fidelity.