that has effected all this, but the virgins themselves.” St Basil’s works show even more plainly the evils resulting from the system. St Jerome also intimates the same facts. There is indeed nothing wonderful in all this. Men and women were fighting against human nature, common sense, yea, even against Christianity itself, possessed by an evil spirit; which was of Stoic birth, but assumed the garb of preeminent sanctity. Other vices, besides those hinted at above, were the necessary offspring of the system. St Jerome tells us that men who wore the garb of poverty and wished to excite admiration as avowedly poor, were gathering wealth within their ragged sleeves. But I need go no further in this disagreeable direction, and shall content myself with having said what the subject seemed to demand. Another phase of the same ascetic bias in the human mind is what we understand by Puritanism. This turn of religious sentiment led men, and leads men still, to forego pleasures and to look with suspicion on enjoyments, however innocent in themselves. It is a persuasion of the same kind as that which led the Stoic to exclaim[66], “Thou wilt despise the pleasant song, the dance, the ‘pancratium,’ if thou dividest the harmonious strain into each of its notes, and askest thyself am I overcome by that? For thou wouldst blush to confess as much. Having done the like with regard to dancing, and considered each separate motion and action, thou wouldst come to the same conclusion, with respect to it: and the same also about the ‘pancratium.’ In short, except virtue and the things relating to virtue, remember in all things to consider the parts of which they consist, one by one, that by their dissection thou mayest learn to despise them.” The closely cut hair, which Persius gives us[67] as a characteristic of the Stoic youth, has had its counterpart among those whom the Cavaliers for this cause called Roundheads. And we find that these men were animated by a zeal for what they considered the cause of GOD, which led them to defy danger, and apparently to court difficulties. Yet there was often an exaggeration of feeling and sentiment in many, similar to that which led to the asceticism of the first ages of the Church; and which leads men still to seek the monastic life. Among the Puritans, though distinguished from them in history, in name, and in many peculiarities, we see the Quakers standing prominently forth. In fact, they were more puritanic than the Puritans, and seem the personification of Stoicism among Christian people.