ABSTRACT
The earliest home of Christian monasticism was almost certainly Egypt, which by the very forbidding nature of its scenery appears at all times to have turned the minds of its inhabitants to thought of the other world. For in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, intensely religious though they were, no severe mortifications, nor even celibacy, appear to have been required from the powerful priesthoods, while in China and Japan there was virtually no hierarchy at all till the yellow-robed Buddhists from India arrived. Beyond the mountains that wall India still exists by far the largest of all monastic political states where the wide highlands of Tibet are governed by Lama monks—the most powerful hierarchy that Buddhism ever knew. All the faiths that were cradled on Indian soil have very strongly, though in varying degrees, emphasized ascetic ideals, a thing not true of lands to the east or the west. Organized asceticism cannot be claimed as a distinctively Christian institution.
