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Monachism, II, pp. 6-7, who takes it from Sir H. Chauncey’s Hist. and Antiqs. of Hertfordshire, p.

Suggested in the first instance by that desert life which was at once the earliest phase of monachism and one of the earliest sources of Christian mythology, strengthened by the symbolism which represented different virtues and vices under the forms of animals, and by the reminiscences of the rites and the superstitions of Paganism, the connection between men and animals became the keynote of an infinite variety of fantastic tales.

But in the West, monachism assumed very different forms, and exercised far higher functions.

The Eastern St. Athanasius had been the founder of Italian monachism.

The influence the first form of monachism has exercised upon the world, so far as it has been beneficial, has been chiefly through the imagination, which has been fascinated by its legends.