Fuller, the Worthy, has a beautiful passage in his Church History concerning “Primitive Monks with their Piety and Painfulness.”—“When the furnace of persecution in the infancy of christianity was grown so hot, that most cities, towns, and populous places were visited with that epidemical disease, many pious men fled into deserts, there to live with more safety, and serve God with less disturbance. No wild humour to make themselves miserable, and to choose and court their own calamity, put them on this project, much less any superstitious opinion of transcendant sanctity in a solitary life, made them willingly to leave their former habitations. For whereas all men by their birth are indebted to their country, there to stay and discharge all civil relations, it had been dishonesty in them like bankrupts to run away into the wilderness to defraud their country, their creditor, except some violent occasion (such as persecution was) forced them thereunto; and this was the first original of monks in the world, so called from μόνος, because living alone by themselves. “Here they in the deserts hoped to find rocks and stocks, yea beasts themselves, more kind than men had been to them. What would hide and heat, cover and keep warm, served them for clothes, not placing (as their successors in after ages) any holiness in their habit, folded up in the affected fashion thereof. As for their food, the grass was their cloth, the ground their table, herbs and roots their diet, wild fruits and berries their dainties, hunger their sauce, their nails their knives, their hands their cups, the next well their wine-cellar; but what their bill of fare wanted in cheer it had in grace, their life being constantly spent in prayer, reading, musing, and such like pious employments. They turned solitariness itself into society; and cleaving themselves asunder by the divine art of meditation, did make of one, two or more, opposing, answering, moderating in their own bosoms, and busy in themselves with variety of heavenly recreations. It would do one good even but to think of their goodness, and at the rebound and second hand to meditate upon their meditations. For if ever poverty was to be envied it was here. And I appeal to the moderate men of these times, whether in the height of these woeful wars, they have not sometimes wisht (not out of passionate distemper, but serious recollection of themselves) some such private place to retire unto, where, out of the noise of this clamorous world, they might have reposed themselves, and served God with more quiet.” * * * * * _None but that heavenly Father, who alone Beholds the struggles of the heart, alone Sees and rewards the secret sacrifice._—XVIII. p. 163. _Meu amor faça em Deos seu fundamento Em Deos, que so conhece e so estima A nobreza e o valor de hum pensamento._ Fernam Alvares do Oriente.