_Every Magian Church is itself an Order_ and it was only in respect of human weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered, but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manichæans (_electi, auditores_). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, _the order of all the orders_, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom nothing more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions--out of which, and between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like communities--the two cult-Churches of the West produced unnumbered monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer, celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in order to pray continuously to Cybele.[447] The schools of philosophy were nothing but ascetic orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes; the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monasteries. The Mandæan religion seems to have been a group of order-communities of varying rigour; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (320); he was merely the builder of the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of Matthew and almost all “Acts of the Apostles” testify to rigorously ascetic sentiment.[448] The Persian and Nestorian Churches developed the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the full. To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and Brotherhoods. And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the Karæi[449] (Qaraites) of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of the eighteenth.[450]