ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the
fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands,
and brothers; we must confess that in these women the spirit of the
old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been so long dead, flashed
up for one splendid moment, ere it sunk into the darkness of the
Middle Age; that in them woman asserted (however strangely and
fantastically) her moral equality with man; and that at the very
moment when monasticism was consigning her to contempt, almost to
abhorrence, as "the noxious animal," the "fragile vessel," the cause
of man's fall at first, and of his sin and misery ever since, woman
showed the monk (to his naively-confessed surprise), that she could
dare, and suffer, and adore as well as he.

But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and
spread irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached,
practised, by every great man of the time. Athanasius, Basil,
Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen in the East, Jerome, Augustine,
Ruffinus, Evagrius, Fulgentius, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of
Lerins, John Cassian, Martin of Tours, Salvian, Caesarius of Arles,
were all monks, or as much of monks as their duties would allow them
to be. Ambrose of Milan, though no monk himself, was the fervent
preacher of, the careful legislator for, monasticism male and
female. Throughout the whole Roman Empire, in the course of a
century, had spread hermits (or dwellers in the desert), anchorites
(retired from the world), or monks (dwellers alone). The three
names grew afterwards to designate three different orders of
ascetics. The hermits remained through the Middle Ages those who
dwelt in deserts; the anchorites, or "ankers" of the English Middle
Age, seem generally to have inhabited cells built in, or near, the
church walls; the name of "monks" was transferred from those who