That the Egyptian hermits, flying from association with the world, should betake themselves to caves, is hardly to be wondered at. In that land the rocks are pitted with artificial grottoes, which were the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, and were commodious and to be had without asking leave of any one. Twice was Athanasius obliged to fly from the fury of the Arians, and to take refuge among the solitaries in their caves. Once he was constrained to remain in concealment in his father's tomb, also a cavern. When he was banished to Trèves, tradition says that he would not occupy a house, but sought out a grotto in a hill beyond the Moselle, and made his abode therein. The filiation between the Syrian and Egyptian solitaries with the hermits of Buddhism may be made out with some plausibility. In the East sanctity and asceticism are inseperable. The smug missionary who cannot preach the Gospel apart from a wife, mosquito curtains and a cottage piano, and who travels from one station to another in a palanquin borne by sweating natives, does not impress the imagination of an Oriental, and has small chance of making converts. It was possibly much the same with the barbarians who overwhelmed the Roman Empire. To strike their imagination and win them to the Cross, it may be that asceticism was a necessary phase of mission work. "The Spirit breatheth where He wills, and thou canst not tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth," is the Vulgate rendering of S. John iii. 8. But if it was at one time a necessary phase, it ceased to be so when the effect required was produced; and from the close of mediaeval times the hermit was an anachronism. The life of S. Antony by Athanasius, and the _Historia Lausiaca_ or "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," by Palladius (died c. 430), were published in the West, and inflamed minds with the desire to emulate the ascetics of Syria and Egypt; and speedily there were zealots who sought out retreats in the dens of the earth, in which to serve God in simplicity.