=3. Monks and Saints.=――In the practical occupation of their lives, Jews and Christians were distinctly divided by legislation, and through religious sentiment they were drifting further and further apart. About this period, the end of the fifth century, the Church hero of the day was a certain Simon Stylites, afterwards canonised as saint, and added to that long roll of deified beings, to be prayed to and protected by, which was making the Christian heaven something of a heathen Olympus. Saint Simon Stylites’s claim to saintship and to hero-worship lay in the fact that he was living on the top of a pillar, and that ‘living’ meant to him not the common round of daily duties and daily cares, but a miserable and useless existence, persevered in from the purest motives. Saint Simon Stylites may serve as an extreme example of what was then, and for centuries after, the highest Christian ideal. There came to be a whole class of men called monks, and of women who were called nuns, who of their own free will gave up all the innocent pleasures and happinesses of life. They prayed, and fasted, and scourged themselves at regular intervals, and chose to live in bareness and discomfort, and often in actual dirt. They put peas in their shoes, and hair shirts on their backs; and the kindnesses they did――and they did many――were done from duty to God rather than from love of man. In the intervals of their set prayings and fastings they doctored the sick, but they seldom remembered that ‘a cheerful heart doeth good like a medicine.’ There was once a small sect among the Jews[7] who thought they could best serve God by selfishly withdrawing from the world in which He had placed them, who chose to suffer rather than to do, and who made an especial study and an especial care of their own souls. This sect, the Essenes, which was scanty and short-lived, was never in sympathy with the body of the Jewish nation. It was a system altogether repugnant to Jewish notions of what is pleasing to God. Cleanliness, in the Jewish code, is not even next to godliness, but is a detailed and indispensable part of it. Wilful dirt, and discomfort, and dismalness, are, all alike, considered immoral, and the whole teaching of the Bible is on the lines that ‘the servants of the Lord shall rejoice before Him,’ and ‘serve Him with gladness.’ The monks of Christianity were an exaggerated outcome of that outlived error, the Essenes of Judaism; and we can understand how the silent, cowled, and barefooted monks, and the multitude of the readily worshipped ‘saints,’ made the principles of Christianity distasteful to the Jew, in like manner as the persecuting, blundering populace rendered the practice of it disgraceful. More and more the Jews lived a distinct and separate life from the peoples among whom they dwelt, separated by religious thought as well as by so-called religious legislation.