The Hermits

And of the wonders which they saw in that isle it were too long to tell: how there met them an exceeding old man, with snow-white hair, who fell at St. Brendan’s feet three time...

At Alexandria, Antony met one Didymus, most learned in the Scriptures, witty, and wise: but he was blind. Antony asked him, “Art thou not grieved at thy blindness?” He was silen...

But how tolerant was his temper, and how humble his spirit; for though he was so great, he both honoured exceedingly the canon of the Church, and wished to put every ecclesiasti...

Ireland was then the “Isle of Saints.” Three orders of them were counted by later historians: the bishops (who seem not to have had necessarily territorial dioceses), with St. P...

When he had passed three years in that little house, he took possession of the peak which has since been so famous; and when he had commanded a wall to be made round him, and pr...

Thus ends this strange story. What we are to think of the miracles and wonders contained in it, will be discussed at a later point in this book. Meanwhile there is a stranger st...

Thus had Columba, if the tale be true, undertaken a noble penance; and he performed it like a noble man. If, according to the fashion of those times, he bewailed his sins with t...

For indeed in no northern country can such situations be found for the monastic cell as can be found in those great deserts which stretch from Syria to Arabia, from Arabia to Eg...

The ecclesiastical Boswell dared not mention the subject again to his hero for several years, though he came after from Durham to visit him, and celebrate mass for him in his li...

ON the south shore of the Black Sea, eastward of Sinope, there dwelt in those days, at the mouth of the River Iris, a hermit as gentle and as pure as Ephrem of Edessa. Beside a...

Abbot Macarius was going up to the mountain of Nitria, and sent his disciple on before. The disciple met an idol-priest hurrying on, and carrying a great beam: to whom he cried,...

HERMITS dwelling in the wilderness, as far as I am aware, were to be seen only in the northern and western parts of the island, where not only did the forest afford concealment,...

When, then, he retired, and had resolved neither to go forth himself, nor to receive any one, one Martinianus, a captain of soldiers, came and gave trouble to Antony. For he had...

But the movement, having once seized the Roman Empire, grew and spread irresistibly. It was accepted, supported, preached, practised, by every great man of the time. Athanasius,...

This picture is not poetry alone: it is history. Such men actually lived, and such work they actually did, from the southernmost point of Italy to the northernmost point of Scot...

And they had their reasons, and on the whole sound ones, for so regarding them. The educated classes had given up any honest and literal worship of the old gods. They were tryin...

Then he went back to Aphroditon, and with only two brothers, dwelt in the desert, in such abstinence and silence that (so he said) he then first began to serve Christ. Now it wa...

But after a few years (says Antony) it befell one day that he bowed himself in prayer, and remained so three days—that is, the Friday, the Sabbath, and the Lord’s day. Then I wa...

PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 SAINT ANTONY 21 THE LIFE OF SAINT PAUL, THE FIRST HERMIT 83 HILARION 104 ARSENIUS 149 THE HERMITS OF ASIA 155 BASIL 162 SIMEON STYLITES 167 THE HERMITS OF EU...

No sooner was he dead than Frederic seized on the garments kept in the monastery for the use of the poor, and even commanded his men to carry off the vessels of the altar. Then...

This was Antony’s first struggle against the devil: or rather this mighty deed in him was the Saviour’s, who condemned sin in the flesh that the righteousness of the Lord should...

How long the practice of the hermit life was common in these islands is more than my learning enables me to say. Hermits seem, from the old Chartularies, {331} to have been not...

Under the supposed patronage of those Saints, Trêves rose again out of its ruins. It gained its four great abbeys of St. Maximus (on the site of Constantine’s palace); St. Matth...