“The nearer,” said Abbot Muthues, “a
man approaches God, the more he will see himself to
be a sinner.”
Abbot Sisois, when he lay dying, begged to live a
little longer, that he might repent; and when they
wondered, he told them that he had not yet even begun
repentance. Whereby they saw that he was perfect
in the fear of the Lord.
But the most startling confession of all must have
been that wrung from the famous Macarius the elder.
He had been asked once by a brother, to tell him
a rule by which he might be saved; and his answer
had been this:—to fly from men, to sit in
his cell, and to lament for his sins continually;
and, what was above all virtues, to keep his tongue
in order as well as his appetite.
But (whether before or after that answer is not said)
he gained a deeper insight into true virtue, on the
day when (like Antony when he was reproved by the
example of the tanner in Alexandria) he heard a voice
telling him that he was inferior to two women who dwelt
in the nearest town. Catching up his staff,
like Antony, he went off to see the wonder.
The women, when questioned by him as to their works,
were astonished. They had been simply good wives
for years past, married to two brothers, and living
in the same house. But when pressed by him,
they confessed that they had never said a foul word
to each other, and never quarrelled. At one time
they had agreed together to retire into a nunnery,
but could not, for all their prayers, obtain the consent
of their husbands. On which they had both made
an oath, that they would never, to their deaths, speak
one worldly word.
Which when the blessed Macarius had heard, he said,
“In truth there is neither virgin, nor married
woman, nor monk, nor secular; but God only requires
the intention, and ministers the spirit of life to
all.”
I shall give one more figure, and that a truly tragical
one, from these “Lives of the Egyptian Fathers,”
namely, that of the once great and famous Arsenius,
the Father (as he was at one time called) of the Emperors.
Theodosius, the great statesman and warrior, who
for some twenty years kept up by his single hand the
falling empire of Rome, heard how Arsenius was at
once the most pious and the most learned of his subjects;
and wishing—half barbarian as he was himself—that
his sons should be brought up, not only as scholars,
but as Christians, he sent for Arsenius to his court,
and made him tutor to his two young sons Honorius
and Arcadius. But the two lads had neither their
father’s strength nor their father’s nobleness.
Weak and profligate, they fretted Arsenius’s
soul day by day; and, at last, so goes the story,
provoked him so far that, according to the fashion
of a Roman pedagogue, he took the ferula and administered
to one of the princes a caning, which he no doubt
deserved. The young prince, in revenge, plotted
against his life. Among the parasites of the
