the earliest ages, derived from the teaching of its founder. It seems clear that Christ did (no doubt under earlier Essenian influence) lay great emphasis on the merit of self-denial; though it seems equally clear that He did not contemplate the selfish and cowardly system of eremitical and cenobitic life which commenced in the Thebaid a few centuries after His death, and which is still fully exemplified in the modern Trappists and Carthusians. However that may be, St. Bernard, St. Bruno, St. Francis, St. Dominic, &c., translated literally into their own lives, under the influence of an unusually fervid religious imagination, the principles of Christian ethics, as expounded universally up to the fifteenth century.
In those ages of vicarious virtue and expiation they became centres of a great public interest, and attracted many disciples. Then, in an evil hour, they drew up certain rules of life, which were slightly modified versions of their own extraordinary lives, and bade their followers bind themselves by the most solemn and indissoluble obligation to their observance. Such rules could only be observed by men who possessed their own temperament and imagination, and one needs very little experience of human life to understand their scarcity, and the great error of supposing that any large body of men would observe them with fidelity. In the middle ages the average faith of men was much keener than it is in the nineteenth: the disturbing influence of science, of scientific history,
