The breach involved a deeper evil. The ancient world of heathenism was near its dissolution. Vice and war, and latterly taxation, had dried up the springs of prosperity, and even of population, till Rome was perishing for lack of men. Cities had dwindled into villages, and of villages the very names had often disappeared. The stout Italian yeomen had been replaced by gangs of slaves, and these again by thinly scattered barbarian serfs. And if Rome grew weaker every day, her power for oppression seemed only to increase. Her fiscal system filled the provinces with ruined men. The Alps, the Taurus, and the Balkan swarmed with outlaws. But in the East men looked for refuge to the desert, where many a legend told of a people of brethren dwelling together in unity and serving God in peace beyond the reach of the officials. This was the time when the ascetic spirit, which had long been hovering round the outskirts of Christianity, began to assume the form of monasticism. There were monks in Egypt--monks of Serapis--before Christianity existed, and there may have been Christian monks by the end of the third century. In any case, they make little show in history before the reign of Valens. Paul of Thebes, Hilarion of Gaza, and even the great Antony are only characters in the novels of the day. Now, however, there was in the East a real movement towards monasticism. All parties favoured it. The Semiarians were busy inside Mount Taurus; and though Acacians and Anomoeans held more aloof, they could not escape an influence which even Julian felt. But the Nicene party was the home of the ascetics. In an age of indecision and frivolity like the Nicene, the most earnest striving after Christian purity will often degenerate into its ascetic caricature. Through the selfish cowardice of the monastic life we often see the loving sympathy of Christian self-denial. Thus there was an element of true Christian zeal in the enthusiasm of the Eastern Churches; and thus it was that the rising spirit of asceticism naturally attached itself to the Nicene faith as the strongest moral power in Christendom. It was a protest against the whole framework of society in that age, and therefore the alliance was cemented by a common enmity to the Arian Empire. It helped much to conquer Arianism, but it left a lasting evil in the lowering of the Christian standard. Henceforth the victory of faith was not to overcome the world, but to flee from it. Even heathen immorality was hardly more ruinous than the unclean ascetic spirit which defames God's holy ordinance as a form of sin which a too indulgent Lord will overlook. [Sidenote: New questions in controversy.]