Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/100

 acquire, direct their efforts against his chastity. The first time the perfect nymph deputed on this errand, seen by him while bathing herself naked in the stream, caused him to forget his vow and dally with her for ten years. The second time the saint perceived the plot, but allowed himself to burst forth in words of unholy rage against the damsel who was trying to seduce him, and thus lost the merit of his former penance. After this he resolved never to speak a word, and persisted in his resolution, until the gods, in a body, addressed him in the long-desired form: "Hail, Brahman Saint" (Griffith, The Ramayan, vol. i. p. 274).

Visvamitra is of course a mythical character, and his penance imaginary; but the ascetic life he is described as leading was taken from models which the writers had before their eyes. All the marvels of the Thebaid in Christian times were, in fact, anticipated in India by at least one thousand years.

How deeply the ascetic tendency is implanted in human nature is strikingly shown in the case of the Essenes, the Nazarites, and the Therapeutæ, who sprang from a religion whose ostensible precepts are eminently opposed to all such courses, that of the Jews. Judaism powerfully encouraged all those inclinations to which monasticism is fatal: the propagation of the species, the acquisition of property, the maintenance of family ties, and the enjoyment of the good things which this world has to offer. Yet from the bosom of this sober faith sprang bodies of men who neither ate flesh, nor drank wine, nor cohabited with women. It may be that the Jewish ascetics were not very numerous; but it is clear, too, that they were not so few as to be deemed by contemporary observers altogether unimportant. And the fascination which John the Baptist, pre-*eminently an ascetic, exercised over his countrymen in the first century, is a sign that this mode of living was conducive among the Jews to that spiritual supremacy which is so constantly received at the hands of Christians.

That Christianity should encourage a disposition which even Judaism could not check was no more than might be expected from the language and conduct of its founder and his earliest disciples. Christ was never married, and probably lived in complete chastity. Paul goes so far as to compare marriage unfavorably