Tertullian, writing in the second century, contrasts, in a well-known passage, the Christians of his day with the gymnosophists or hermits of India, declaring that, unlike these, the Christians did not fly from the world, but mixed with Pagans in the forum, in the market-places, in the public baths, in the ordinary business of life.(210) But although the life of the hermit or the monk was unknown in the Church for more than two hundred years after its foundation, we may detect, almost from the earliest time, a tone of feeling which produces it. The central conceptions of the monastic system are the meritoriousness of complete abstinence from all sexual intercourse, and of complete renunciation of the world. The first of these notions appeared in the very earliest period, in the respect attached to the condition of virginity, which was always regarded as sacred, and especially esteemed in the clergy, though for a long time it was not imposed as an obligation. The second was shown in the numerous efforts that were made to separate the Christian community as far as possible from the society in which it existed. Nothing could be more natural than that, when the increase and triumph of the Church had thrown the bulk of the Christians into active political or military labour, some should, as an exercise of piety, have endeavoured to imitate the separation from the world which was once the common condition of all. Besides this, a movement of asceticism had long been raging like a mental epidemic through the world. Among the Jews—whose law, from the great stress it laid upon marriage, the excellence of the rapid multiplication of population, and the hope of being the ancestor of the Messiah, was peculiarly repugnant to monastic conceptions—the Essenes had constituted a complete monastic society, abstaining from marriage and separating themselves wholly from the world. In Rome, whose practical genius was, if possible, even more opposed than that of the Jews to an inactive monasticism, and even among those philosophers who most represented its active and practical spirit, the same tendency was shown. The Cynics of the later Empire recommended a complete renunciation of domestic ties, and a life spent mainly in the contemplation of wisdom. The Egyptian philosophy, that soon after acquired an ascendancy in Europe, anticipated still more closely the monastic ideal. On the outskirts of the Church, the many sects of Gnostics and Manicheans all held under different forms the essential evil of matter. The Docetæ, following the same notion, denied the reality of the body of Christ. The Montanists and the Novatians surpassed and stimulated the private penances of the orthodox.(211) The soil was thus thoroughly prepared for a great outburst of asceticism, whenever the first seed was sown. This was done during the Decian persecution. Paul, the hermit, who fled to the desert during that persecution, is said to have been the first of the tribe.(212) Antony, who