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Updated: June 16, 2025
Sure those holy men who founded the orders of godly recluses little dreamed what those places might become in time, and with the ever-increasing love of ease and wealth which seems implanted in the heart of man. "Heaven pardon me if I speak or think amiss! but it is strange to hear and see what passes in the world.
It was imagined that the chiefs of sects ought to be recluses, having rules and institutions of their own, like the founders of religious orders. The teachers of the young were also at times species of anchorites, somewhat resembling the gourous of Brahminism. In fact, might there not in this be a remote influence of the mounis of India?
The meditations of Indian recluses are often described as self-hypnotism, and I shall say something on this point elsewhere, but it is clear that in giving the above account the Buddha did not contemplate any mental condition in which the mind ceases to be active or master of itself.
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.
As soon as I appeared at the grating the superioress was sent for, and we had an interview. The princess had given her fifty crowns, which she was going to lay out on linen for Armelline and Emilie. The recluses were stupefied when I told them that the fat priest was Cardinal Bernis, as they had an idea that a cardinal can never doff the purple.
Yet, on the whole, it is more frequently necessary to emphasize to prospective mothers what they should do than what they should avoid. This happens to be the case because, as a rule, they are inclined to become recluses.
When I went out and in as a missionary among the Chinese people for about thirty years, it sometimes occurred to me that only the inmates of their monasteries and the recluses of both systems should be enumerated as Buddhists and Taoists; but I was in the end constrained to widen that judgment, and to admit a considerable following of both among the people, who have neither received the tonsure nor assumed the yellow top.
The biographies of these recluses, for ages a source of consolation to the faithful in their temptations, are not to be regarded as mere works of fiction, though they abound in supernatural occurrences, and are the forerunners of the dæmonology of the Middle Ages. The whole world was a scene of dæmoniac adventures, of miracles and wonders.
A few bits of wood in a heap in a corner bore further witness to the poverty of the recluses. You had only to look at the coating of paint on the walls to discover the bad condition of the roof, and the ceiling was a perfect network of brown stains made by rain-water. A relic, saved no doubt from the wreck of the Abbaye de Chelles, stood like an ornament on the chimney-piece.
We travelled post, and in three days we got to Munich, where I went to lodge at the sign of the "Stag." There I found two young Venetians of the Cantarini family, who had been there some time in company with Count Pompei, a Veronese; but not knowing them, and having no longer any need of depending on recluses for my daily bread, I did not care to pay my respects to them.
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