Other animals live that they may eat; man eats that he may live; for neither is eating his business nor pleasure his good. Therefore those are strongly to be condemned who seek after Sicilian lampreys, Mæandrian eels, Pelorian mussels, oysters from Abydos, sprats from Lipara, Attic flounders, Mantinean turnips, Ascræan beetroot, thrushes from Daphne, and Chalcedonian raisins.”[245.1] Of course the sensible old Father meant this partly as a protest against the monstrous gastronomic luxury of the Romans, of which we read in Suetonius and other Latin writers of that age; but it seems no less true that he was carried away in these matters by an ideal of extravagant anti-sensualism, which had then strongly taken possession of the Christian Church, and was indeed a rank native growth of the East, specially of Syria and Egypt, as Church history largely testifies. Nay, even in modern times, and in Western Europe, where the cold climate partly excuses, partly necessitates, high feeding, we find young persons, in the first start of a religious life, not unfrequently led into a course of ascetic practice, as prejudicial to their bodies as the excessive bookwork of the colleges is to the mind. Young Whitefield, we are told, suffered not a little from exercises of this kind; and the prolonged formal fastings prescribed as God-pleasing by recent Ritualistic clergymen in this country, have on more than one occasion enfeebled for a whole lifetime the bodily functions of their virgin devotees. This is sad enough; but it is not the worst. Such absurdities make Christianity ridiculous, and force revolted nature into the {246} school of a benign Bentham or an easy Hume, where one may at all events be moral and reasonable. When we read in the biography of some modern Anglo-Catholic saint that he feared nothing so much as the soft seduction of a slice of buttered toast, and the golden deliciousness of a glass of Madeira, we begin to sigh for Aristotle; it were better to have no religion at all as an inspiring soul of morality, than a religion which lends importance to such puerilities. But if these things have been done by certain pseudo-Christians, and are paraded even now, there was one belief, very common in the early ages of the Church, which tended not a little to intensify the tendencies which lead to them. At all times it is possible for the expectation of a future life to encroach on the enjoyment of the present; and the growth of the asceticism of the first centuries was beyond doubt powerfully aided by the overwhelming influence of a newly promulgated and greedily accepted immortality, and yet more perhaps, by the belief in the speedy second coming of Christ. The renunciation of the world, and the more characteristic worldly enjoyments, becomes of course much more easy when the machinery of the world is shortly expected to stop. And thus the weakness of human nature concurred with a number of accidental causes