eit of property
(Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_, ii. 420). Monasticism was
inconsistent with the social good. As to the family--like the moderns
who depreciate thrift and are careless of the life of the family, the
monks, believing that marriage was a lower form of morality, if not
indeed, as would at times appear, hardly moral at all, could feel but
little enthusiasm for what is socially a chief source of health to the
community and a well-spring of spontaneous charitable feeling. By the
sacerdotal-monastic movement the moralizing force of Christianity was
denaturalized. Among the secular clergy the falsity of the position as
between men and women revealed itself in relations which being
unhallowed and unrecognized became also degrading. But worse than all,
it pushed charity from its pivot. For this no monasteries or
institutions, no domination of religious belief, could atone. The
church that with so fine an intensity of purpose had fostered chastity
and marriage was betraying its trust. It was out of touch with the
primal unit of social life, the child-school of dawning habits and the
loving economy of the home. It produced no treatise on economy in the
older Greek sense of the word. The home and its associations no longer
retained their pre-eminence. In the extreme advocacy of the celibate
state, the honourable development of the married life and its duties
were depreciated and sometimes, one would think, quite forgotten.

We may ask, then, What were the results of charity at the close of the
period which ends with St Gregory and the founding of the medieval
church?--for if the charity is reflected in the social good the results
should be manifest. Economic and social conditions were adverse. With
lessened trade the middle class was decaying (Dill, _Roman Society in
the Last Century of the Western Empire_, p. 204) and a selfish
aristocracy rising up. Municipal responsibility had been taxed to
extinction. The public service was corrupt. The rich evaded taxation,
the poor were oppressed by it. There were laws upon laws, endeavours to
underpin the framework of a decaying society. Society was bankrupt of
skill--and the skill of a generation has a close bearing on its
charitable administration. While hospitals increased, medicine was
unprogressive. There were miserable years of famine and pestilence, and
constant wars. The care of the poorer classes, and ultimately of the
peop