Stoics and Saints - College of Stoic Philosophers

108 THE MONASTIC SYSTEM.
the most constant and courageous champions of the truth of
the Incarnation ;
and it was mainly by their help
that he
won the greatest and most pregnant of doctrinal victories.
Still, on the whole, it is a dark, sad history.
The asceticism of the Eastern Church is distinctly in
human; the taint of manichreism runs through
it and poisons
its springs; a latter hatred to the body, as the organ of the
flesh, was its ruling principle, and it tended to gross and
foolish excesses, helpful neither to earth nor to heaven.
Before, however, we leave it to study the far nobler monachism
of the West, which mingled itself in very vital contact
with the development of the secular society by which it
was surrounded, we must in fairness pause to weigh one
consideration, which may tell in favour of even this com
paratively low form of the religious life.
Look, for example, more narrowly for a moment at this
very Simeon Stylites. As matter of fact his age did rever
ence him profoundly, and he wielded a very powerful in
fluence over men. Very foolish of the age
to be influenced
by such extravagant absurdities, we may say. Most surely,
very foolish, it might have kept
its reverence for nobler
things. Perhaps the republican enthusiasm for the rant of
the demagogue, and the evangelical worship of the popular
preacher are parallel absurdities in ours. If, however, we
are to understand history we must take each age as we find
it, and study with respect and sympathy those elements in
it which were found at the time to be of power. We may
be sure that if
any great movement seems to us to be
absurd or extravagant, those who come after us will find
much that may be called by the same names in the doings
of our own days.
Here, in this Oriental asceticism, we see rising in the
world a new kind of power, at which it is worth one s
while to look a little closely. This Simeon, by his austerities