That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the name of sanctity, and should have done so too in front of Christianity, is indeed amazing; and could never have happened if Christianity had not first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space. The tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences to petrify the heart has been already adverted to; and it receives a signal illustration in the monkish life; especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there imbedded below the touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of enthusiastic piety; and it may be met with even in our own times among those who have no inclination to run away from the comforts of common life. * * * * * III. Spiritual pride, the most repulsive of the religious vices, was both a main cause, and a principal effect of the ancient monachism. The particular manner in which this odious pride sprung up in the monastery deserves attention. That sort of plain and practical religion which adapts itself to the circumstances of common life—the religion taught by the apostles, a religion of love, sobriety, temperance, justice, fit for the use of master and servant, of husband and wife, of parent and child, by no means satisfied the wishes of those who sought in Christianity a delicious dream of unearthly excitements. It was therefore indispensable to imagine a new style of religion; and hence arose the doctrine so warmly and incessantly advanced by the early favorers of monkery, that our Lord and his apostles taught a two-fold piety, and recognized an upper and an under class in the church, and sanctioned the division of the Christian body into what might be termed a plebeian, and a patrician order. This doctrine appears more or less distinctly in every one of the fathers who at all favors the monastic life. It may seem to bear analogy to the principle of the Grecian philosophers who had their common maxims for the vulgar, and their hidden instructions for the few. But the resemblance is more apparent than real: the distinction arose among the Christians from altogether another source. The church, that is to say the collective body of true believers, is called in the New Testament the spouse of Christ; but the monks perverted the figure by using it distinctively, by calling individual Christians "the brides of Christ," and by appropriating the honor to those who had taken the vow of celibacy. The most absurd and impious abuses of language presently followed from this error, and such as it were even blasphemous to repeat. Yet some of the greatest writers of the times are charmed with these irreligious conceits.