Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/66

xl intercourse. Towards the conclusion of the third century, when monachism was so vehemently propagated, and the East inundated with a restless class of men, who strolled about in pursuit of proselytes (not much unlike the errant-knights of a subsequent age) the position I have laid down is more clearly evinced. It would be doing injustice to my subject, if, in speaking of this singular fact, I used other language than that of the historian of the Roman empire. "The progress of the monks," says this philosophic writer, "was not less rapid, or universal, than that of Christianity itself. Every province, and at last, every city of the empire, was filled with their increasing multitudes; and the bleak and barren isles, from Lerins to Lipari, that arise out of the Tuscan sea, were chosen by the Anachorets, for the place of their voluntary exile. An easy and perpetual intercourse by sea and