The battle with the society they had been born into, and with their own old impulses and habits, became so severe that they often found themselves compelled to retire from the world altogether.

Thus it was that the parched solitudes of Egypt were peopled with hermits largely occupied with the problem of subduing their own flesh.

Their pre-occupation, and indeed the pre-occupation of much early Christian literature, with sexual matters, may be said to be vastly greater than was the case with the pagan society they had left.

Paganism accepted sexual indulgence and was then able to dismiss it, so that in classic literature we find very little insistence on sexual details except in writers like Martial, Juvenal and Petronius who introduce them mainly for satirical ends.

But the Christians could not thus escape from the obsession of sex; it was ever with them.