these but as a corruption of the monastic state rather than a distinct order. He adds to these a fourth sort of monks, made of those who, not being able to endure the monastic life in a convent, retreated alone into certain cells to live more at liberty, but praises the second as the most perfect. In his nineteenth conference, an abbot called John, who had been an anchorite and had entered a monastery, is asked which of the two orders was to be preferred, and replies that he thought the life of the cœnobites best for those who were not absolutely perfect, and shows that none but those who have attained to a degree of eminent perfection are capable of living the life of a hermit.[439] Another of these ancient fathers, Nilus, who had betaken himself to a solitary life in the desert of Sinai, and died about the year 451, writes a treatise upon the question whether the life of the Anchorites, or Hermits, whom he also calls Hesycasts, or Quietists, who dwell in solitude, is to be preferred before the life of those religious who dwell in cities, and states that this is a question about which the judgment of spiritual men is much divided. Those who prefer the religious who live in communities in cities before the anchorites, say that they have more worth because they meet with more opposition; whereas those who live in solitude being quiet and not subject to temptations, have not so much virtue; to which Nilus replies that there are as many temptations in solitude as in cities, and that the reason why some persons argue so is because they regard outward sins only, not considering that there are infinite temptations and spiritual sins which encounter us as well in privacy as in cities; and he therefore supports the opinion that the solitary life is the higher form of the religious life.[440] Isidore of Seville, too, in the seventh century, distinguishes between the different kinds of monks, and says that the Cœnobites are they that live in common, like those in the days of the apostles, who sold their goods and had all things in common; the Hermits, they that withdraw into desert places and vast solitudes in imitation of Elias and John the Baptist, delighting, with a wonderful contempt of the world, in total solitude; and the Anchorites, they who, having perfected themselves in cœnobitical life, shut themselves up in cells apart from the aspect of men, inaccessible to all, and living in the sole contemplation of God.[441] But Bede, who was a Benedictine monk, seems also to regard the life of an anchorite as a higher form of religious life, when in his History he says of Cudberct on his retiring to the island of Farne, that, ‘advancing in the merits of his devout intention, he proceeded even to the adoption of a hermit life of solitary contemplation and secret silence;’ and, in his Life, that ‘he was now permitted to ascend to the leisure of divine speculation, and rejoiced that he had now reached the lot of those of