Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ...When a considerable number had associated themselves with some eminent anchoret, as many did with St. Antony a generation later, the beginning of monasticism was at hand; this was definitely established when Pachomius brought such a gathering of individuals into a community and gave them rules for admission and for conduct. Within a hundred years monasticism had spread to Western Europe. The intellectual basis, however, of Christian asceticism had been already given by the great theologians of the Alexandrian schools, Clement and Origen, who established as a Christian ideal that life which, free from earthly passion and desire, withdrawn from the world, finds its rest in God. But it was pagan teaching which had given the theologians this ideal of the ascetic saint. The warrant of Christian asceticism, therefore, came primarily neither from Judaism nor from the teachings of Christ and the apostles, but from Hellenistic philosophy, from the tenets of the later Pythagoreans and Platonists, even as the Christian practice of asceticism had arisen out of the religious practice of Greco-Roman paganism. SOME ASPECTS OF AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY By MORRIS HICKY MORGAN SOME ASPECTS OF AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY It is related that Sir Walter Scott, during his visit to Pompei, was frequently heard to exclaim, "The City of the Dead," with no other remark. So difficult was it even for his marvellous imagination to conjure up the activities of living men and all the bustle of a city in that abandoned spot. Many another traveller and many professed antiquarians have found themselves unable to escape from the shadow of death which, in spite of all that the skilful methods of modern excavation and restoration have accomplished, still hangs over these...