for sins committed in a pre-existent state. Every pleasure enjoyed, he says, is as a nail fastening the soul more securely in its dungeon; every pleasure given up is a nail withdrawn, and hastens on the period of its release. The religions of the Hindus and the Buddhists aim at the gradual suppression of the body and the entire eradication of desire. Hinduism endeavours to attain this result chiefly by means of penance; Buddhism by means of reflection. Hinduism advocates the surrender of the good things of this life, because they are in themselves bad. Buddhism advocates the same sacrifice, because, though in themselves indifferent, they are likely to prolong our love of life, which it regards as the root of all evil.

Like many other views which find no warrant in the Christianity of Christ, it has had a considerable influence upon the Christianity of Christendom. The pillar saints, for example, stood for years on the top of lofty columns, till they became a mass of corruption too loathsome to be described. They were firmly convinced that if heaven were to be attained by them, it could only be won through agony. The words which the poet-laureate puts into the mouth of Stylites express the feelings of an ascetic with

much force and pathos, and are, it seems to me, a reductio ad absurdum of asceticism.

Let

us listen for a moment to the poor saint's

prayer :—

"I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold

Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn, and sob,
Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and colds,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,
A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow.

Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then.

Now am I feeble grown; my end draws nigh;
I hope my end draws nigh; half deaf I am,
So that I scarce can hear the people hum
About the column's base, and almost blind,
And scarce can recognise the fields I know.

Yet cease I not to clamour and to cry,

Have mercy, mercy: take away my sin.

O Jesus! if thou wilt not save my soul,
Who may be saved? who is it may be saved?
Who may be made a saint, if I fail here ?
Show me the man hath suffer'd more than I,
For did not all thy martyrs die one death?

But I die here

To-day, and whole years long, a life of death.

I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the Saints;
Or in the night, after a little sleep,

I wake the chill stars sparkle; I am wet
With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.
I wear an undress'd goatskin on my back,

A grazing iron collar grinds my neck;
And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross,
And strive and wrestle with thee till I die:
O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin."

Now if pleasure were essentially sinful, then Stylites was the wisest of men. If heaven be worth winning, and if it can only be won by agony, then the more agony we cause ourselves to bear, the surer we shall be of an eternal reward. But the majority of ascetics are far less consistent. They believe that they can best please God by painful penances and wearisome pilgrimages, by bodily flagellations and mortifications, by fasting till they are almost starved, and keeping vigils till they are nearly mad, by depriving themselves of what is agreeable, by choosing what is disgusting, by refraining from worldly pursuits and amusements, by attempting to eradicate every natural instinct—by acting, in short, as if pain were the chief end of life. That is

their creed. But, unlike Stylites, they do not act up to it. They try to make a compromise between their inclinations and beliefs. They endeavour to intersperse enjoyment with their sufferings, in the hope that the former may be sufficiently atoned for by the latter. This halfhearted policy seems to me most irrational. The man who deliberately and systematically chooses what is unpleasant may be acting a wise and prudent part; but the ordinary semi-ascetic, though he makes himself very miserable, will possibly have too much pleasure after all to pass muster with his god of pain. He loses this world to a very considerable extent, and by no means makes sure of the next.

Asceticism in its extreme form, in which it is synonymous with the worship of pain, will scarcely bear a moment's examination. The supposition that God takes delight in agony is the foulest of all conceivable blasphemies. The Being who could make his creatures exquisitely sensitive, place them in a world teeming with sources of enjoyment, and then require them to act continuously in violation of their nature by making pain the chief end of their existence the Being who was capable of such a refinement of cruelty, instead of deserving to

be worshipped as a god, ought to be execrated as the very prince of fiends.

Pain, so far from being that in which the Author of the universe takes delight, is very frequently a clear sign that His laws have been disobeyed. It is the great criterion of evil. One of the most convincing arguments against crime is, that it causes misery and must therefore be out of harmony with man's nature and with God's. If we take a comprehensive view of a bad man's life, the proof that he has done wrong will frequently be found in the fact, not that he has had too much pleasure, but that he has had (upon the whole) too little,-his pleasure having been purchased by too prodigal an expenditure of suffering.

Asceticism, however, often takes (especially in Christendom) a somewhat different form. Pleasure and pain are regarded as neither good nor bad in themselves; but it is said that the choice of pain and the rejection of pleasure are the means we should employ to disgust ourselves with the present world, and to get our affections fixed entirely on another. Many persons seem to think that they ought by rights to care for nothing but heaven. They seem to think, as they lavish their affections upon those who are

I