Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe

The early Syrian and Egyptian hermits would have become a sect of manichean heretics but for the popularity of the profession and the Arian persecution. In quitting the world they cut themselves off from the churches. They no more took part in its assemblies, participated in the sacraments, nor observed the sacred seasons. Paul, the first hermit, deserted the society of men when aged fifteen, and lived till the age of a hundred and ten in solitude without ever having partaken of the Bread of Life. S. Mary of Egypt spent forty-seven years in the Wilderness, stark naked, covered with hair like a wild beast, and only received the Viaticum when dying, by the chance of a priest passing that way. A fifteenth century statue of her, nearly life-size, is in the National Museum at Munich, removed from the Cathedral of Augsburg as indelicate. S. Antony spent twenty years in a sort of cistern, and only twice a year received loaves, let down from above through the roof. Certainly all that time he was voluntarily excommunicate. If S. Hilarius ever made sacramental communion we are not told, but we do know that he was for ever hiding himself from where were his fellow- men, in wilds and oases, and where there were no Christian churches.

In the desert, times and seasons slipped away, and became confounded, so that by the first hermits neither Easter nor the Lord's Day were observed. In the Gospel, the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and prisoners, are appointed as the means of deserving a reward in heaven, but the anchorites neglected every one, cut themselves adrift from the chance of performing them, and sought to merit heaven in their own way. Christ declared, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you," but they wilfully lived apart from the sacramental life as surely as any modern Quaker.