This account of the monks of St. Pachomius will give some notion of the monkish life in general, although one order differed from another in various ways. All that the monks had was considered to belong to them in common, after the pattern of the first Christians, as was supposed (_Acts_ ii. 34; iv. 32); and no one was allowed to have anything of his own. Thus we are told that when a monk was found at his death to have left a hundred pieces of silver, which he had earned by weaving flax, his brethren, who were about three thousand in number, met to consider what should be done with the money. Some were for giving it to the Church; some, to the poor. But the fathers of the society quoted St. Peter's words to Simon the sorcerer, "Thy money perish with thee" (_Acts_ viii. 20); and on the strength of this text (which in truth had not much to do with the matter), they ordered that it should be buried with its late owner. St. Jerome, who tells the story, says that this was not done out of any wish to condemn the dead monk, but in order that others might be deterred from hoarding. These different kinds of monks were first established in various parts of Egypt; but their way of life was soon taken up in other countries; and societies of women, who were called _nuns_ (that is to say _mothers_), were formed under the same kind of rules. One thing which had much to do with making monkish life so common was, that when persecution by the heathen was at an end, many Christians felt the want of something which might assure them that they were separate from the world, as Christ's true people ought to be. It was no longer enough that they should call themselves Christians; for the world had come to call itself Christian too. Perhaps we may think that it would have been better if those who wished to live religiously had tried to go on doing their duty in the world, and to improve it by the example and the influence of holy and charitable lives, instead of running away from it. And they were certainly much mistaken if they fancied that by hiding themselves in the desert they were likely to escape temptation. For temptations followed them into their retreats, and we have only too many proofs, in the accounts of famous monks, that the effect of this mistake was often very sad indeed. And we may be sure that if the good men who in those days were active in recommending the life of monks had been able to foresee how things would turn out, they would have been much more cautious in what they said of it.