For in every race, gentiles or Jews or Christians, there have always been a few who excelled their fellows in faith or in the purity of their lives, and who were set apart from the multitude by their continence or by their abstinence from worldly pleasures.
Among the Jews of old there were the Nazarites, who consecrated themselves to the Lord, some of them the sons of the prophet Elias and others the followers of Eliseus, the monks of whom, on the authority of St.Jerome (Epist.

4 and 13), we read in the Old Testament.

More recently there were the three philosophical sects which Josephus defines in his Book of Antiquities (xviii, 2), calling them the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes.

In our times, furthermore, there are the monks who imitate either the communal life of the Apostles or the earlier and solitary life of John.

Among the gentiles there are, as has been said, the philosophers.