worships, pilgrimages, miraculous relics, rosaries, and much more,
which strangely anticipates the monastic religion; and his
followers, to this day, are more numerous than those of any other
creed.

Brahmins, too, had given themselves up to penance and mortification
till they believed themselves able, like Kehama, to have gained by
self-torture the right to command, not nature merely, but the gods
themselves. Among the Jews the Essenes by the Dead Sea, and the
Therapeutae in Egypt, had formed ascetic communities, the former
more "practical," the latter more "contemplative:" but both alike
agreed in the purpose of escaping from the world into a life of
poverty and simplicity, piety and virtue; and among the countless
philosophic sects of Asia, known to ecclesiastical writers as
"heretics," more than one had professed, and doubtless often
practised, the same abstraction from the world, the same contempt of
the flesh. The very Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, while they
derided the Christian asceticism, found themselves forced to affect,
like the hapless Hypatia, a sentimental and pharisaic asceticism of
their own. This phase of sight and feeling, so strange to us now,
was common, nay, primaeval, among the Easterns. The day was come
when it should pass from the East into the West. And Egypt, "the
mother of wonders;" the parent of so much civilization and
philosophy both Greek and Roman; the half-way resting-place through
which not merely the merchandise, but the wisdom of the East had for
centuries passed into the Roman Empire; a land more ill-governed,
too, and more miserable, in spite of its fertility, because more
defenceless and effeminate, than most other Roman possessions--was
the country in which naturally, and as it were of hereditary right,
such a movement would first appear.