The Hermits eBook

prided themselves upon needing fewer luxuries than the meanest slaves; who took rank among each other and among men not on the ground of race, nor of official position, nor of wealth, nor even of intellect, but simply on the ground of virtue, was a perpetual protest against slavery and tyranny of every kind; a perpetual witness to the world that, whether all men were equal or not in the sight of God, the only rank among them of which God would take note, would be their rank in goodness.

BASIL

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 roaring waterfall, amid deep glens and dark forests, with distant glimpses of the stormy sea beyond, there lived on bread and water a graceful gentleman, young and handsome; a scholar too, who had drunk deeply at the fountains of Pagan philosophy and poetry, and had been educated with care at Constantinople and at Athens, as well as at his native city of Caesaraea, in the heart of Asia Minor, now dwindled under Turkish misrule into a wretched village.  He was heir to great estates; the glens and forests round him were his own:  and that was the use which he made of them.  On the other side of the torrent, his mother and his sister, a maiden of wonderful beauty, lived the hermit life, on a footing of perfect equality with their female slaves, and the pious women who had joined them.

Basil’s austerities—­or rather the severe climate of the Black Sea forests—­brought him to an early grave.  But his short life was spent well enough.  He was a poet, with an eye for the beauty of Nature—­especially for the beauty of the sea—­most rare in those times; and his works are full of descriptions of scenery as healthy-minded as they are vivid and graceful.

In his travels through Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, he had seen the hermits, and longed to emulate them; but (to do him justice) his ideal of the so-called “religious life” was more practical than those of the solitaries of Egypt, who had been his teachers.  “It was the life” (says Dean Milman {163}) “of the industrious religious community, not of the indolent and solitary anchorite, which to Basil was the perfection of Christianity. . . .  The indiscriminate charity of these institutions was to receive orphans” (of which there were but too many in those evil days) “of all classes, for education and maintenance:  but other children only with the consent or at the request of parents, certified before witnesses; and vows were by no means to be enforced upon these youthful pupils.  Slaves who fled to the monasteries were to be admonished and sent back to their owners.  There is one reservation” (and that one only too necessary then), “that slaves were not bound to obey their master, if he should order what is contrary to the law of God.  Industry was to be the animating principle of these settlements.  Prayer and psalmody were to have their stated hours, but by no means to intrude on those devoted to useful labour.  These labours were strictly defined; such as were of real use to the community, not those which might contribute to vice or luxury.  Agriculture was especially recommended.  The life was in no respect to be absorbed in a perpetual mystic communion with the Deity.”