The asceticism of the early Church was simply the protest against that materialism which was undermining society and preparing the way to ruin; and hence the loftiest type of piety assumed the form of deadly antagonism to the luxuries and self-indulgence which pervaded every city of the empire.

The terms show that asceticism is a fundamental element in mysticism; asceticism was itself an importation to Islam.

Asceticism is a thing which in its very nature, we tend in these days to misunderstand.

Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and the transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of Faith, from justification by works to redemption through the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live.

Religious asceticism is no novelty.

His poetic remains indicate a social freedom at this period hardly in keeping with the Spartan rigor alleged to have been practiced without break from the ancient time of Lycurgus; perhaps this communal asceticism was really a later growth, when the camp of militant slave-holders saw their fibre weakening under the art and luxury they had introduced.

We cannot say that there will never be such a mind, but the asceticism of a life would be a necessary discipline for it to go through, and that such a life as the world has seldom seen.