The meditative man desires to withdraw from the world. He seeks a place of quiet where he may escape the manifold distractions of common life; he subordinates the body to the spirit; he dreams of an ideal state for which this present life is a preparation or probation. He believes in a "world-renouncing ethic," whose formula is "We live to die."

The active man desires to use and control the world. His happiness is to immerse himself in affairs. He is forever busy with investigation, and with the problem of applying the results of investigation to the conditions of life. He takes the planet as it stands, and is glad that he is a citizen of it; he would make the most of all his opportunities. He believes in a "world-affirming ethic," whose formula is "We live to live."

It is easy to exaggerate the contrast between the mind of the East and the mind of the West. Human nature laughs at generalizations. Two great religions of the East have contradicted the doctrine that we live to die. Confucius said nothing about the gods, Moses said nothing about the life to come. These religions, in the heart of the East, concerned themselves with the present life. The teachings of Confucius were as practical as the teachings of Franklin. The historians, the poets and the prophets of Judaism agreed that the rewards and punishments of God are to be looked for in this world, and appear in health and in sickness, in prosperity and in adversity.

Indeed, the East and the West have twice met already. They met in Greek philosophy, where the Stoics regarded the world from the point of view which we consider characteristically Eastern, and their neighbors the Epicureans regarded life from the point of view which seems to us distinctively Western. They met also in the religion, whose essential adjectives are the words "spiritual" and "social." Jesus taught a love of God which includes all that is Oriental in its renunciation of the world, and a love of man which in its affirmation of the world includes all that is Occidental.

The contrast, however, between the East and the West is real and abiding. It is true that the difference between the monastic ideal of Basil and the monastic ideal of Benedict is surprisingly slight. Basil is as practical as Benedict, and makes quite as much of the life of action: he sets his monks to till the ground and to apply themselves to reading and writing. The fact remains, however, that Eastern monasticism and Western monasticism took different roads, and have had a very different history: largely because the Eastern monks were Orientals and the Western monks were Occidentals. The racial differences appeared.

Eastern monasticism renounced the world: at first by way of protest, then by way of frank despair. At first the Eastern monks came back occasionally to express their opinion of the world. They swarmed out of the deserts into the streets of the cities in which the bishops were sitting in council, and denounced heretics and sinners. Sometimes they were in the right; more often, in the wrong. Their monastic seclusion had made them ignorant fanatics. But gradually they ceased to take even an occasional part in the affairs of the world. They turned their backs upon it in despair. They shut themselves up behind their high stone was and let the world go by. In the monotony of their regulated life there was no place for individual expression. Their annals no longer showed great names. They were connected with the church only by the fact that the bishops were selected from their brotherhood. But the bishops came from the monasteries unacquainted with the life of the lay world, and unfitted to take any influential part in it. Far from continuing the original protest, they were submissive servants of the state.

In Western monasticism, on the other hand, the monks developed the institution by the continual assertion of individuality. Their history is filled with the names of those who were leaders of their generation. And these leaders, for the most part, showed their leadership by their defiance of uniformity. The monks contended with the bishops, perpetuating the initial protest against the conventionality and secularity of the church. They contended among themselves, and thereby made their history a series of notable reforms, each of which made the monastic ideal higher and wider than before. And they controlled the world. They had such part in it that no history of Europe can be adequately written without including them.

The three outstanding names of the monastic movement in the West are St. Martin, St. John Cassian, and St. Jerome. Each promoted the new life in his own way: Martin by his example, Cassian by teaching the West the methods of the East, Jerome by a propaganda which amazed and startled the society of Rome.

The disciple and biographer of St. Martin, Sulpicius Severus, begins his book with a preface addressed to his friend Desiderius to whom he entrusts it. I had determined, he says, to keep this little treatise private. I am sending it to you because you have asked me for it so many times, but on the understanding that you will not show it to anybody else: remember, you promised me that. At the same time, I have my fears that in spite of my entreaty and your promise you will nevertheless publish it. If you do, please ask the readers to pay more attention to the facts which are here related than to the imperfect language in which they are set forth; remind them that the kingdom of God consists not of eloquence, but of faith, and that the gospel was preached not by orators, but by fishermen. Or, better still, when you publish the book, erase my name from the title-page, that the book may proclaim its subject-matter, while it tells nothing of the author.

Thus we are made acquainted with the pleasant and modest person whose account of St. Martin is the only considerable source of information concerning him.

Martin was the son of pagan parents, in Pannonia, where his father was a military tribune. In his early childhood he was attracted toward the Christian Church,—so much so that when he was but twelve years of age, he made up his mind to be a hermit. This intention his father hindered, and three years later, upon the occasion of an edict which required that the sons of veterans should be enrolled for military service, he sent him, much against young Martin's will, into the army. There Martin tried to follow his vocation by changing places with his servant, whose boots he insisted upon cleaning. It was evident to all his associates that the warfare in which this soldier was concerned was directed not against the Goths, but against the devil. To this statement Sulpicius adds that all his companions marvellously loved him.

Then one day in the midst of a fierce winter, when there was much suffering among the poor, Martin met at the gate of Amiens a shivering beggar. Thereupon he took off his military cloak, cut it into two pieces with his sword, and put one half upon the beggar's back. That night in a dream Christ appeared to Martin wearing the half of the severed cloak and saying to a multitude of angels, "Martin, who is still but a catechumen, clothed me with this robe." In consequence of this dream Martin was baptized, being then about twenty years of age.

Presently, when the commander of the army reviewed the troops on the eve of a battle with the barbarians, Martin took the opportunity to ask that he might be relieved of his military duties in order to devote himself to the religious life. "I am the soldier of Christ," he said, "it is not lawful for me to fight." When the commander, naturally enough, accused him of cowardice, he offered to go into the battle on the morrow, wholly unarmed and without the protection of shield or helmet, at the head of the army, if after that he might be dismissed. That night the barbarians decided that the odds were too much against them, and the next day they surrendered. And Martin was set free.

Entering thus upon a life devoted to religion, Martin found that his new career offered him quite as many opportunities for adventure as the old. Once, in the Alps, he was attacked by robbers, and was in peril of his life. One of the robbers had his axe uplifted to strike Martin, when another stopped him. This kindly brigand Martin converted. "Who are you?" said the brigand. "I am a Christian," said Martin.—"Are you not afraid?"—"I have never been more sure of my safety in my life. But I am afraid for you: you are in danger of everlasting damnation." Sulpicius had the story from a hermit, whom he found to be the converted robber himself.

Once as he prayed, the place where Martin was kneeling was filled with a glory of purple light, and there appeared one crowned with gold and clad in a royal robe. And the vision said, "Martin, I am the Lord Christ, at last descended out of heaven to earth, and manifested first of all to you." And Martin, instructed by long experience, at first kept silence, till the vision said again, "Martin, do you not believe?" To which the saint replied, "The Lord Jesus never promised to return in purple, with a crown upon his head. Where are the prints of the nails?" At the sound of these words the defeated devil vanished.

Martin suffered much from many enemies, natural and supernatural.

He was reviled by those who felt that his holy life was a criticism upon themselves. Sulpicius says, "Some of his calumniators, although very few, some of his maligners, I say, were reported to be bishops!" The biographer is reluctant to recall the names of any of these injurious ecclesiastics.

"I shall deem it sufficient," he says, "that, if any of them reads this account and perceives that he is himself pointed at, he may have the grace to blush. But if, on the other hand, he shows anger, he will, by that very fact, own that he is among those spoken of, though all the time perhaps I may have been thinking of some other person."

This enmity of officials was the natural result of Martin's increasing influence. He was beginning to disturb the conscience of the contented church. He was exhibiting in his life of renunciation an ideal which contrasted sharply with the lax and secular religion of the time. It was an ideal which devout souls recognized and which they desired to follow. Sulpicius says that when he visited Martin, the saint continually insisted that the allurements of the world and all secular burdens are to be abandoned that one may be free and unencumbered in serving the Lord Jesus. Sulpicius abandoned them. Paulinus of Nola, a great nobleman, forsook his splendid house and his fair estate on the Garonne, and the pleasant society in which he lived, to follow Martin into the solitude of the woods. It made a profound sensation in the Roman world. Many others undertook the ascetic life.

Martin was thus the Antony of the West, the pioneer of an unorganized monasticism, attracting men by the fascination of his holy life, but leaving them for the most part to use such spiritual methods as they pleased. His settlement near Poictiers, in 360, almost coincident with the monastic life of Basil and Gregory, was probably the first monastery in Europe. The Life of Martin which Sulpicius wrote became a kind of monastic gospel, like the Life of Antony written by Athanasius. It was read everywhere. It was the most popular book of the fourth century.

Martin was like Antony in his belief that he was visited by devils; whom, however, he encountered without fear. He had even a kindly feeling for the chief of the devils, to whom he once ventured to promise salvation, if he would but repent him of his sins.

The people of Tours called Martin from his prayers and meditations to be their bishop. They had to deceive him to get him from his monastery. One of them pretended that his wife was desperately ill, and begged him to come and visit her. Then they all crowded about him, and he was made bishop in spite of himself. He went on foot about his vast diocese, preaching from town to town, contending with paganism, destroying idols, converting the heathen, and everywhere winning the love and reverence of men. He was the evangelist of France; the apostle to the Gauls.

He never ceased to be a monk. Two miles out of Tours, beside the river Loire, he found a retreat so secret and retired that he was able to hide himself in it. It was like the glen of Annesi as described by Basil. "On one side it was surrounded by a precipitous rock of a lofty mountain, while the Loire had shut in the rest of the plain by a bay extending back for a little distance; and the place could be approached only by a single passage, and that a very narrow one." But even in this concealment he was discovered. Young men, like-minded with him, found him out, and settled near him in caves of the overhanging mountain, till there were eighty of them, meeting daily for prayer and having their meals in common, clothed in garments of camel's hair.

Once Martin appeared at the court of the emperor Maximus, to intercede for the Priscillianists. These were gentle, enthusiastic and mistaken persons who had fallen into a heresy concerning which we are informed only by references in the writings of their enemies. The descriptions sound like a sort of gnosticism. The Priscillianists were educated and even literary persons, and some of them were rich. They were attacked by two neighboring bishops, regarding whose bad character even the orthodox accounts agree. These bishops gathered a council of their brethren and condemned the heretics. They appealed to the emperor, and the emperor was about to confirm the condemnation when Martin appeared. He had no inclination toward the errors of the Priscillianists, but he knew that their lives were innocent and holy. In response to his intercession the emperor promised to set them free. Hardly was the saint's back turned, however, when the angry bishops persuaded the emperor and he had Priscillian beheaded, with six of his companions. The event is memorable as the first formal handing over of a condemned heretic to a secular court for punishment. It was the beginning of a long series of shameful tragedies.

Martin indignantly protested, and at first refused to hold communion with the offending bishops. In order, however, to save the lives of some of the lesser members of the sect, he felt it necessary to yield. He attended a synod of bishops, and he dined at the table of the emperor. It is said that when the wine was passed to him, and he was expected to pass it to the emperor, he gave it to his chaplain, thus declaring that the humblest priest is above the proudest prince. So, at least, the incident was interpreted in a day when the church was contending with the state for the mastery of the world. As for the bishops, St. Martin declared that if God would forgive him for sitting with them in that synod, he would never attend another. He was of the mind of St. Gregory of Nazianzus regarding ecclesiastical conventions.

"No one ever saw him enraged or excited," says Sulpicius, "or lamenting or laughing; he was always one and the same, displaying a kind of heavenly happiness in his countenance. Never was there a feeling in his heart except piety, peace and tender mercy." The cape which he wore—capella—became one of the most precious possessions of the kings of France, and the sanctuary which was built to contain it was called Capella, hence our word chapel. The position of his memorial day in the church calendar gives to the most beautiful weeks of autumn the name of St. Martin's Summer.