pity those dismal times when the great mass of the people had so little
pleasure and comfort in this life, and such gloomy fears of the world to
come; when life was made a perpetual sacrifice and abnegation of all the
pleasures that are given us to enjoy,--to use and not to pervert. Hence
monasticism was repulsive, even in its best ages, to enlightened reason,
and fatal to all progress among nations, although it served a useful
purpose when men were governed by fear alone, and when violence and
strife and physical discomfort and ignorance and degrading superstitions
covered the fairest portion of the earth with a funereal pall for more
than a thousand years.

The thirteenth century saw a new development of monastic institutions in
the creation of the Mendicant Friars,--especially the Dominicans and
Franciscans,--monks whose mission it was to wander over Europe as
preachers, confessors, and teachers. The Benedictines were too numerous,
wealthy, and corrupt to be reformed. They had become a scandal; they had
lost the confidence of good men. There were needed more active partisans
of the Pope to sustain his authority; the new universities required
abler professors; the cities sought more popular preachers; the great
desired more intelligent confessors. The Crusades had created a new
field of enterprise, and had opened to the eye of Europe a wider horizon
of knowledge. The universities which had grown up around the cathedral
schools had kindled a spirit of inquiry. Church architecture had become
lighter, more cheerful, and more symbolic. The Greek philosophy had
revealed a new method. The doctrines of the Church, if they did not
require a new system, yet needed, or were supposed to need, the aid of
philosophy, for the questions which the schoolmen discussed were so
subtile and intricate that only the logic of Aristotle could make
them clear.

Now the Mendicant orders entered with a zeal which has never been
equalled, except by the Jesuits, into all the inquiries of the schools,
and kindled a new religious life among the people, like the Methodists
of the last century. They were somewhat similar to the Temperance
reformers of the last fifty years. They were popular, zealous,
intelligent, and religious. So great were their talents and virtues
that they speedily spread over Europe, and occupied the principal
pulpits and the most important chairs in the universities. Bonaventura,
Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scot