dwelt alone to those who dwelt in regular communities, under a fixed
government. But the three names at first were interchangeable; the
three modes of life alternated, often in the same man. The life of
all three was the same,--celibacy, poverty, good deeds towards their
fellow-men; self-restraint, and sometimes self-torture of every
kind, to atone (as far as might be) for the sins committed after
baptism: and the mental food of all three was the same likewise;
continued meditation upon the vanity of the world, the sinfulness of
the flesh, the glories of heaven, and the horrors of hell: but with
these the old hermits combined--to do them justice--a personal faith
in God, and a personal love for Christ, which those who sneer at
them would do well to copy.

Over all Europe, even to Ireland, {15} the same pattern of Christian
excellence repeated itself with strange regularity, till it became
the only received pattern; and to "enter religion," or "be
converted," meant simply to become a monk.

Of the authentic biographies of certain of these men, a few
specimens are given in this volume. If they shall seem to any
reader uncouth, or even absurd, he must remember that they are the
only existing and the generally contemporaneous histories of men who
exercised for 1,300 years an enormous influence over the whole of
Christendom; who exercise a vast influence over the greater part of
it to this day. They are the biographies of men who were regarded,
during their lives and after their deaths, as divine and inspired
prophets; and who were worshipped with boundless trust and
admiration by millions of human beings. Their fame and power were
not created by the priesthood. The priesthood rather leant on them,
than they on it. They occupied a post analogous to that of the old