Aiming, both in his sermons and ascetical writings, at development of the religious view, the danger of the times as he saw it was not so much in the Protestant reformation, which was an outside influence, but in the direction that religion had taken among the masses.
St Basil's claim to the authorship of the Rules and other ascetical writings that go under his name, has been questioned; but the tendency now is to recognize as his at any rate the two sets of Rules.
In time, however, the tendency to withdraw from society and give oneself up wholly to the practice of religious and ascetical exercises set in; and at any rate in Egypt, at the middle of the 3rd century, it was the custom for such ascetics to live in solitary retirement in the neighbourhood of the towns and villages.