This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ...of being recognized, by the Church. This is a perfect reflex of what took place in the Early Church. Time would fail me--and I should weary you, as you are not interested in Church history--were I to describe these processes: how the 'ecclesiastical virgins' took to living in communities when Constantine gave ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ...of being recognized, by the Church. This is a perfect reflex of what took place in the Early Church. Time would fail me--and I should weary you, as you are not interested in Church history--were I to describe these processes: how the 'ecclesiastical virgins' took to living in communities when Constantine gave peace to the Church; and how before this men of ascetic dispositions had retired for solitude and contemplation into the desert, where they became banded together under superiors elected from among them, whom they styled, in the dialect of the country, abbots--that is, father; how, as towns became more and more Christianized, monasteries of men and convents of women sprung up in their midst, and devoted themselves to works of mercy; how all the great writers of early times--St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and others--were their enthusiastic defenders; and how successive councils drew up canons for their government; till at length, as of old here in England, scarcely a town but what possessed its monastery or its nunnery. I have said enough to show that when they claim in its glorious fulness the heritage of the 'faith once delivered to the saints, ' we can confidently point to the virgin martyrs and confessors, to the Egyptian solitaries and ascetics--nay, to the apostles themselves--forsaking not only houses and lands, but Wives, for Christ, whether actually, as leading continent lives after their call to the apostolate, or figuratively, as continuing unmarried; to the great Apostle of the Gentiles, wishing, in his zeal for Christ, that all men were even as he himself, and forgetting not, in his loving instructions to his son Timothy, as to the government of his diocese, to lay down rules for 'the widows, ' lest by...
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