That dwells in the land of mystery.
The ship is masked; its colour is the colour of the waves at night. The ship is pleased. A shadowy blue-grey ship going forward calmly, equably, yet triumphantly, ever gently forward, towards the unknown, the mysterious....
II
THE HERMITS
The first effort of the Apostles towards the establishment of Christianity was along the way of Martha—the sharing out of the money and the starting of a sort of Christian-socialist state. But life taught them that this was impracticable, and they and all the early Christians soon found themselves working and living and praying in an altogether different way—driven into the wilderness, stoned out of cities, hounded into gaol, faced with the horrors of torture or barbarous execution. There were soon more Christians in the desert places of the earth, living in caves and in forests, than there were in the towns and villages. Some fled from persecution, others were driven by the Spirit; and no doubt all, when they found themselves cut off from the world, began to share in the meditative idea of Christianity. They obtained the consolation of wanderers, and found a new significance in the promise of the Comforter. They had visions; they met the resurrected spirits of those who had died in the Lord. The strange life they had to live brought a romantic mystery into the possibilities of the road and the outside world, so that when one met a stranger there was the doubt that he might be an angel, that he might even be the risen Lord Himself. The heavens opened, and sweet music accompanied the vision of the Grail. The stigmata appeared on the hands and bodies of those who had attained to unity with Christ.
Yet those who went out into the wilderness, alike those who fled persecution and those who went out voluntarily to seek and be alone with God, were tempted “of the devil” as they phrased it. The town and the world which they wished to overcome tempted them back. They had left behind in “the world” fathers, mothers, brides, children, friends, money, position, pleasure. They lived on locusts and wild honey and grains and roots—and they longed for the good meat of the city. They were ragged, unwashed, bruised, unkempt—they longed for the freshness of the bath, white linen, and clean clothes. Their bones ached and they were tired—they longed for soft beds. They were solitary and longed for company, longed especially for the company of women. And the devil who tempted them was a dragon that could never be killed, which, slain, but changed to a different shape. The temptation was put forward in new guise, and the lure of sin more subtly baited. They entered into the temptation of Jesus as they entered also into his sufferings.
They drew men unto them. All those whose minds were troubled by the monstrous woman—Babylon—thought of the Christian solitude in the desert. It became a not infrequent phenomenon—the going into the desert “to save one’s soul.” The wild places of the earth began to have names and fame. Hermits lived in places where no one had ever lived before, and the curious came out to see them. By their spiritual virtues they made the desert, which was barren in the material sense, blossom as the rose.
The caves in the mountains by the Dead Sea filled with anchorites, and the holy men looked upon the dead salt lake that had once been the gay world of Sodom and Gomorrah. The mountain supposed to be the mountain of Christ’s temptations became honeycombed with the abodes of world-forsakers. “If a man does not say to himself in his innermost heart, God and I, we are alone in the world; he will never find rest,” said one, and betook himself to Mount Sinai. The Virgin Mary sailing in a boat with St. Thomas and St. John was wrecked off the coast of Macedonia and miraculously washed ashore on the mountain of Athos; and in due course there appeared on the strange uninhabited mountain an antique Greek, lean, long-haired, unutterably devout, and he lived in a cave and meditated on the Mother of God. Another followed and another, till a laura was founded.
The hermits gave Christianity a new bias. One has only to compare an ascetic’s dream, the majesty and the mystery of the Revelation of St. John, with the sweet reasonableness of the Gospels ... “A sower went forth to sow,” and the like ... to see how great is the change in the spirit of the Church under the influence of the anchorites. Such a sentence as—“To him that overcometh I will give of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it,” comes straight from the desert and is part and parcel of the spiritual fervour of the early Church.
The hermit based his life on Christ’s wanderings in the wilderness and His denial of the world, on the idea of bearing the Cross, and on the promised second coming of Christ. As Christ renounced the power of changing stones into bread, so they renounced the power of bread, the feeding of the hungry, i.e. service in the world, the way of Martha. As Christ refused the throne of Caesar when the devil was ready to show him the way to obtain it, so they refused to try to establish Christ’s kingdom in a material form. They denied all material power—denied that the power of Caesar was real power, that physical force had power, that money had power. St. Arsenius, the anchorite, was offered all the revenues of Egypt by the Emperor Arcadius and asked to use them for the help of the poor, the hermits, and the monks; but Arsenius refused, saying that such work would be worldly and was not for him. The same Arsenius inherited a great fortune, his cousin’s estate, but refused it.
“When did my cousin die?”