In an enumeration of the natural causes of the anchoretic life, the influence of scenery should by no means be overlooked. As the gay and multiform beauties of a broken surface, teeming with vegetation (when seconded by favoring circumstances) generate the soul of poetry; so (with similar aids) the habit of musing in pensive vacuity of thought is cherished by the aspect of boundless wastes, and arid plains, or of enormous piles of naked mountain: and to the spirit that has turned with sickening or melancholy aversion from the haunts of man, such scenes are not less grateful or less fascinating than are the most delicious landscapes to the frolic eye of joyous youth. The wilderness of the Jordan, the stony tracts of Arabia, the precincts of Sinai, and the dead solitudes of sand traversed, but not enlivened by the Nile, offered themselves, therefore, as the natural birth-places of monachism; and skirting as they did the focus of religion, long continued (indeed they have never wholly ceased) to invite numerous desertions from the ranks of common life. A general and extreme corruption of manners, the wantonness, and folly, and enormity of licentious opulence, and the foul depravity which never fails to characterise the misery that follows the steps of luxury, operate powerfully in the way of reaction to exacerbate the motives and to swell the excesses of the ascetic life, when once that mode of religion has been called into being. If the "powers of the world to come" are vividly felt by those who renounce sensual pleasure, the vigor of their self-denial, and the firmness of their resolution in adhering to their rule, will commonly bear proportion to the depth of the surrounding profligacy. Nothing could more effectually starve this species of enthusiasm in any country in which it appeared to be growing, than to elevate public morals. The exaggerated virtue of the monastery can hardly subsist in the near neighborhood of the genuine virtue of domestic life; nor will religious celibacy be in high esteem among a people who regard adultery, not less than murder and theft, as a crime, and with whom fornication is the cloaked vice only of a few. But in Syria and the neighboring countries, at the time when the monastic life took its rise, the most shameless dissoluteness of manners prevailed, and prevailed to a degree that has rarely been exceeded; and there is reason to believe that the early establishments of the Essenes were, in a great measure, peopled by those who, having imbibed the love of virtue from Moses and the prophets, fled, almost by necessity, from a world in which the practice of temperance and purity had become scarcely possible. In after times, the corruption of the great cities, in a similar manner, contributed to fill the monastic houses. The evidence of Josephus (often cited) though there may sometimes be traced in it a little oratorical exaggeration, is sufficient to prove the existence of