For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people, have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century) hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so many fortresses of the Lord. Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness and its too insistent creditors. The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness. “What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”