Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the first four centuries.
Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the latter were infinitely greater.
The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their souls.
In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion and contemplation.
The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a natural development of the times.
This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of Oriental origin.
This need not surprise us.
In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious experiences in a different mood.