CHAPTER IV.
CONSECRATED PERSONS.
We have seen the religious instinct leading to the consecration
of actions, to the consecration of places, and to the consecration
of things. We are now to follow it in a yet more striking
exhibition of its power, the consecration by human beings
of their own lives and their own persons (or sometimes of the
lives and persons of their children). Not only is such self-dedication
to the service of religion common; it is well-nigh universal.
There is no phenomenon more constant, none more
uniform, than this. Differing in minor details, the grand features
of self-consecration are everywhere the same, whether we
look to the saintly Rishis of ancient India; to the wearers of
the yellow robe in China or Ceylon; to the Essenes among the
Jews; to the devotees of Vitziliputzli in pagan Mexico; or to
the monks and nuns of Christian times in Africa, in Asia, and
in Europe. Throughout the various creeds of these distant lands
there runs the same unconquerable impulse, producing the same
remarkable effects. This is not the place to attempt a psychological
explanation of asceticism as a tendency of human nature.
We have now only to notice some of its most conspicuous
manifestations, and thus to assign to it its proper place in
a history of the mode in which man endeavors to approach and
to propitiate his god.
Generally speaking, we may premise that the consecration of individuals to a life in which religion is the predominating element, means the abandonment of the ordinary pleasures of the world. This is of the very essence of self-devotion. Sanctity, and the enjoyment of all those things in which the body is largely concerned, have always been regarded as inconsistent and opposite. Hence, in the first line of things prohibited to
