Many of the austerities they practised sound to us absurd, for it is hard to feel in sympathy with a Simon Stylites who spent the best days of his manhood crouched on a high pillar at the mercy of sun, wind, and rain, until his limbs stiffened and withered away. Yet the hermits and monks were an arresting witness to Christianity in an age that had not fully realized what Christ’s teaching meant. ‘He that will serve me let him take up his cross and follow me.’ This ideal of sacrifice was brought home for the first time to hundreds of thoughtless men and women when they saw some one whom they knew give up his worldly prospects and the joy of a home and children in order to lead a life of perpetual discomfort until death should come to him as a blessing not a curse. The majority of the leading clergy in the early Church, the ‘Fathers of the Church’, as they are usually called, were monks. [Sidenote: The Fathers of the Church] Two of them, St. Gregory and St. Basil, studied together at the University of Athens in the fourth century. St. Basil founded a community of monks in Asia Minor, where his reputation for holiness soon drew together a large number of disciples. He did not try to win them by fair words or the promise of ease and comfort, for his monks were allowed little to eat and spent their days in prayer and manual labour of the hardest kind. The Arians, who hated St. Basil as an orthodox Catholic, once threatened that they would confiscate his belongings, torture him, and put him to death. ‘My sole wealth is a ragged cloak and some books,’ replied the hermit calmly. ‘My days on earth are but a pilgrimage, and my body is so feeble that it will expire at the first torment. Death will be a relief.’ It came when he was only fifty, but not at the hands of his enemies, for he died exhausted by the penances and privations of his customary life. He left many letters and theological works that throw light on the religious questions of his day. St. Gregory had lived for a time with St. Basil and his monks in Asia Minor but was not strong enough to submit to the same harsh discipline. Indeed he declared that but for the kindness of St. Basil’s mother he would have died of starvation. Afterwards he returned home and was ordained a priest. He was a gentler type of man than St. Basil, a poet of no little merit and an eloquent preacher. Yet another of the Catholic ‘Fathers of the Church’ was St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He was elected to this see against his own will by the people of the town, who respected him because he was strong and fearless. St. Ambrose did not hesitate to use the wealth of the Church, even melting down some of the altar-vessels, to ransom Christians who had been carried away captive during one of the barbarian invasions. ‘The Church,’ he declared, ‘possesses gold and silver not to hoard, but to spend on the welfare and happiness of men.’