1. The idea of moral reformation had from the first seized different men with a varying tenacity of grasp.[301] There were some men who had a higher moral ideal than others: there were some whose natures were stronger: there were some to whom moral life was not the perfection of human citizenship, but the struggle of the spirit to disentangle itself from its material environment, and to rise by contemplation to fellowship with God. There are proofs of the existence in the very earliest Christian communities of those who endeavoured to live on a higher plane than their fellows. Abstinence from marriage and from animal food were urged and practised as “counsels of perfection.” In some communities there was an attempt to make such counsels of perfection obligatory. In the majority of communities, though they were part of “the whole yoke of the Lord,”[302] and were specially enjoined at certain times upon all church members, they were not of universal or constant obligation. Those who habitually practised them were recognized as a church within the Church. The practice of them was known by a name which we have seen to be common in the Greek philosophical schools. It was relative to the conception of life as an athletic contest. It was that of bodily training or gymnastic exercise (ἄσκησις).[303] The secession of the Puritan party left much of this element still within the great body of confederated communities. At the end of the third century it became important both within them and without. It was increased, partly by the growing influence of the ideas which found their highest expression outside Christianity in Neo-Platonism; partly by the growing complexity of society itself, the strain and the despair of an age of decadence; partly also by the necessity of finding a new outlet, when Christianity became a legal religion, for the passionate love of God which had led men to a sometimes ecstatic martyrdom. It was joined by the parallel tendency among professors of philosophy. It soon took a new form. Hitherto those who followed counsels of perfection lived in ordinary society, undistinguished except by their conduct from their fellow-men. The ideal “Gnostic” of Clement of Alexandria takes his part in ordinary human affairs, “acting the drama of life which God has given him to play, knowing both what is to be done and what is to be endured.”[304] But early in the fourth century the practice of the ascetic life in Christianity came to be shown in the same outward way, but with a more marked emphasis, as the similar practice in philosophy. It was indeed known as philosophy.[305] It was most akin to Cynicism, with which it had sometimes already been confused, and its badges were the badges of Cynicism, the rough blanket and the unshorn hair. To wear the blanket and to let the hair grow was to profess divine philosophy, the higher life of self-discipline and sanctity. It was to claim to stand on a higher level and to be working out a nobler ideal than