a more than ordinary profligacy and ferocity among the Jews of his time. This people, destitute of the restraining and refining influence of philosophy and of elegant literature, which ameliorated the manners of the surrounding nations, had been deprived, almost entirely, of all salutary restraints from the divine law by the corrupt evasions of rabbinical exposition. At the same time, the keen disappointment of the national hope of universal dominion under the Messiah, exasperated their native pride to madness. A large indulgence, to say no more, is therefore due to those ardent, but feeble-minded persons, who, untaught by an experiment of the danger they incurred, fell into the specious error of supposing that a just solicitude for the preservation of personal virtue might excuse their withdrawment from the duties of common life; and the more so as they were willing to purchase a discharge from its claims by resigning their share of its lawful delights. The Christian recluses fled from scenes in which, as they believed, purity could not breathe, to solitudes where (though no doubt they found themselves mistaken) they supposed it would flourish spontaneously. And in truth, though it must be much more difficult to live virtuously under the provoking restraints of monastic vows, than amid the allowed enjoyments of domestic life, refined by Christianity, there may be room to question whether the balance might not really be in favor of the monastery, when the only alternative was an abode with the most extreme profligacy. So natural to young and ardent minds, under the first fervors of religious feeling, is the wish to run far from the sight and hearing of seductive pleasure, and so plausibly may such a design recommend itself to the simple and sincere, that, even in our own times, if by any means the general opinion of the Christian church could be brought round to favor, or to allow, the practice of monastic seclusion, and if, instead of being on all sides reprobated and ridiculed, it were permitted, encouraged, and admired, the conjecture may be hazarded, that an instantaneous rush from all our religious communities would take place, and a host of the ardent, the imaginative, the melancholic; not to mention the disappointed, the splenetic, and the fanatical, would abandon the domestic circle, and the scenes of business, to people sanctuaries of celibacy and prayer in every sequestered valley of our island.[4] * * * * *