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And at a sign from Cyril, Peter the Reader stepped forward, and led away, gently enough, the two weepers, who were welcomed as they passed by the blessings, and prayers, and tears even of those fierce fanatics of Nitria. Nay, Peter himself, as he turned to leave them together in the sacristy, held out his hand to Philammon.
In the meanwhile, there had passed up the steps of the Temple a gorgeous line of priests, among whom glittered, more gorgeous than all, the stately figure of the pontiff. They were followed close by thousands of monks, not only from Alexandria and Nitria, but from all the adjoining towns and monasteries.
There were five thousand on the mountain of Nitria; near Arsinoe the Abbot Serapion governed ten thousand. It has even been asserted that there were as many monks in the deserts of Egypt as inhabitants in the towns. The immense majority of these religious were cenobites; that is to say, they lived in the same enclosure, and were united under an elected head, the abbot.
In time, too, many of these conscripts became monks, and the great monasteries of Scetis and Nitria were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers from the neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who had entered the "spiritual warfare" to escape the earthly one.
A large party of monks fresh from Nitria, with ragged hair and beards, and the peculiar expression of countenance which fanatics of all creeds acquire, fierce and yet abject, self-conscious and yet ungoverned, silly and yet sly, with features coarsened and degraded by continual fasting and self-torture, prudishly shrouded from head to heel in their long ragged gowns, were gesticulating wildly and loudly, and calling on their more peaceable companions, in no measured terms, to revenge some insult offered to the Church.
Cyril was silent a while. 'What answer am I to have the honour of taking back? A month's relegation to Nitria on bread and water? You, I am sure, will not allow such things to go unpunished; indeed, if they do, there is an end to all authority and discipline. Cyril was still silent; whilst Peter's brow clouded fast. At last he answered 'The cause wants martyrs. Send the boy to me.
In Egypt, the sandy deserts on each side of the rich valley of the river offered great facilities for such a mode of life: that of Nitria was full of monks, the climate being mild and the wants of man easily satisfied. It is said that there were at one time in that country of these religious recluses not fewer than seventy-six thousand males and twenty-seven thousand females.
Although the order still shows "some quivering in fingers and toes," as Carlyle expresses it, the principles of the Reformation are too widely believed, and its benefits too deeply appreciated, to justify any hope or fear of the ultimate triumph of Jesuitism. Retrospect So the Christian monk has greatly changed since he first appeared in the deserts of Nitria, in Egypt.
'Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured in the theatre! thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair streaming about his chest and shoulders. 'Nitria! Nitria! For God and the mother of God, monks of Nitria! Down with the Jewish slanderers!
The apparitors were frightened and hung back; and without their help it was impossible to force the horses through the mass of tossing arms and beards in front. The matter was evidently growing serious. 'The bitterest ruffians in all Nitria, your Excellency, whispered one of the guards, with a pale face; 'and two hundred of them at the least.
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