whom we sing in the Psalm, The saints shall go from virtue to virtue; the God of Gods shall be seen in Sion.’[442] The preference for this mode of life, as the highest form of a religious life that could be attained, seems to have arisen from an overstrained interpretation of some passages of Scripture. Thus Bede, in the beginning of his Life of Cudberct, tells us that he ‘would hallow its commencement by quoting the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who, in lauding the state of the perfection of the anchorite, says, “It is good for a man who hath borne the yoke from his youth; he shall sit alone and keep silent, because he shall raise himself above himself.”’[443] But the preference of the solitary life as the highest form of asceticism seems to have been mainly founded upon two passages in the New Testament. One is that passage in the Epistle of St. James in which he winds up his exhortation by saying, ‘Pure religion and undefiled, before God and the Father, is to visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world;’ or, as a literal rendering of the old Latin version would be, ‘Pure and immaculate religious service towards God and the Father is this, to visit the infants and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself immaculate from this world.’[444] By an overstrained interpretation of this passage it was assumed that a person could only keep himself immaculate from the world by withdrawing himself from it altogether, and from all association with his fellow-creatures, except in works of benevolence to those in distress; and that this was a form of religion peculiarly acceptable to God and the Father. The other passage is that in the First Epistle of St. Peter, where it is said, ‘But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light; which in times past were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.’[445] And this was interpreted to mean that those who passed their lives in mortifying the body and praising God by singing the psalter, in living in this world as strangers from all society and as pilgrims to a better world, were a peculiar people and entitled to call themselves the people of God. [Sidenote: Anchorites called _Deicolæ_ or God-worshippers.]