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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
Such a comfortless and barren lifc was naturally tormented by evil spirits, which are nothing but the vision of vainly suppressed desires and haunted by hallucinations. The life of every Christian Saint is a tale of heroic struggle against the temptation of Satan and of miraculous victories over those sources of evil. Since cvery prisoner of monasticism was either a miniature or an incipient saint, he also must cxperience the struggles and triumphs of the thorny road to holiness. How familiar are we in India with the tales of such spiritual exploits ! But here as well as in many other countries, these tales were so hungrily devoured by the credulous multitude, because the hopeless conditions of their miserable life could be possibly changed only by a miracle. Recording some of those legends about the Christian Saints, and exposing their spurious origin, Gibbon writes : "These extravagant tales, which display the fiction, without the genius of poetry, have seriously affected the reason, the faith, and the morals of the Christians. Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind; they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science. Every mode of religious worship which had been practised by the Saints, every mysterious doctrine which they had believed, was fortified by the sanction of divine revelation, and all the manly virtues 266
