How much of penetration, or judgment, this sentence exhibits, I hope will become manifest to the reader as I unfold before him the actual history of his faith; but being, I suppose, myself one of the last surviving witnesses of the character of recluse life as it still existed in the beginning of this century, I can point to the portraiture of it given by Scott in the introduction to 'The Monastery' as one perfect and trustworthy, to the letter and to the spirit; and for myself can say, that the most gentle, refined, and in the deepest sense amiable, phases of character I have ever known, have been either those of monks, or of servants trained in the Catholic Faith.] 30. Setting all questions of this nature aside for the moment, my younger readers need only hold the broad fact that during the whole of the fourth century, multitudes of self-devoted men led lives of extreme misery and poverty in the effort to obtain some closer knowledge of the Being and Will of God. We know, in any available clearness, neither what they suffered, nor what they learned. We cannot estimate the solemnizing or reproving power of their examples on the less zealous Christian world; and only God knows how far their prayers for it were heard, or their persons accepted. This only we may observe with reverence, that among all their numbers, none seemed to have repented their chosen manner of existence; none perish by melancholy or suicide; their self-adjudged sufferings are never inflicted in the hope of shortening the lives they embitter or purify; and the hours of dream or meditation, on mountain or in cave, appear seldom to have dragged so heavily as those which, without either vision or reflection, we pass ourselves, on the embankment and in the tunnel. 31. But whatever may be alleged, after ultimate and honest scrutiny, of the follies or virtues of anchorite life, we are unjust to Jerome if we think of him as its introducer into the West of Europe. He passed through it himself as a phase of spiritual discipline; but he represents, in his total nature and final work, not the vexed inactivity of the Eremite, but the eager industry of a benevolent tutor and pastor. His heart is in continual fervour of admiration or of hope--remaining to the last as impetuous as a child's, but as affectionate; and the discrepancies of Protestant objection by which his character has been confused, or concealed, may be gathered into some dim picture of his real self when once we comprehend the simplicity of his faith, and sympathise a little with the eager charity which can so easily be wounded into indignation, and is never repressed by policy.