Jewish prophets; always independent of, sometimes opposed to, the
regular clergy; and dependent altogether on public opinion and the
suffrage of the multitude. When Christianity, after three centuries
of repression and persecution, emerged triumphant as the creed of
the whole civilized world, it had become what their lives describe.
The model of religious life for the fifth century, it remained a
model for succeeding centuries; on the lives of St. Antony and his
compeers were founded the whole literature of saintly biographies;
the whole popular conception of the universe, and of man's relation
to it; the whole science of daemonology, with its peculiar
literature, its peculiar system of criminal jurisprudence. And
their influence did not cease at the Reformation among Protestant
divines. The influence of these Lives of the Hermit Fathers is as
much traceable, even to style and language, in "The Pilgrim's
Progress" as in the last Papal Allocution. The great hermits of
Egypt were not merely the founders of that vast monastic system
which influenced the whole politics, and wars, and social life, as
well as the whole religion, of the Middle Age; they were a school of
philosophers (as they rightly called themselves) who altered the
whole current of human thought.

Those who wish for a general notion of the men, and of their time,
will find all that they require (set forth from different points of
view, though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de
Montalembert's "Moines d'Occident," in Dean Milman's "History of
Christianity" and "Latin Christianity," and in Ozanam's "Etudes
Germaniques." {17a} But the truest notion of the men is to be got,
after all, from the original documents; and especially from that
curious collection of them by the Jesuit Rosweyde, commonly known as
the "Lives of the Hermit Fathers." {17b}