The monks of Citeaux, of Morimond, of Pontigny, of Clairvaux, amid the wastes of a barren country, with their white habits and perpetual vigils and haircloth shirts and root dinners and hard labors in the field, were yet the counsellors and ministers of kings and the creators of popes, and incited the nations to the most bloody and unfortunate wars in the whole history of society,—­I mean the Crusades.  Some were great intellectual giants, yet all repelled scepticism as life repels death; all dwelt on the sufferings of the cross as a door through which the penitent and believing could surely enter heaven, yet based the justice of the infinite Father of Love on what, when it appeals to consciousness, seems to be the direst injustice.  We cannot despise the Middle Ages, which produced such beatific and exalted saints, but we 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.