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44 trained in science and in the practice of virtue to gain admission into the heavenly regions. Hence arises the propriety and the absolute necessity of asceticism: in other words, of war against the flesh, which is the destructive prison-house of the soul. Apollonius and his followers, like Pythagoras and his disciples, constitute a regular order of Pagan monks, and when we bear in mind that apart from all contact with Christian churches, the Paganism of the far East has furnished a very similar instance for centuries, we cannot but wonder at the strange obstinacy of certain modern writers who assert that the monastic life is one of the chief and most characteristic institutions of Christianity. The determined efforts of Paganism to become a moral religion without any great modification of forms or of creeds are traceable both in the religious teaching and in the theurgy of Apollonius. It is no longer Nature viewed through her severer or gentler phenomena; it is no longer the hero who subdues monsters, or the formidable champion of right against wrong, who will concentrate in himself the reli-