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 Scotus were the great ornaments of these new orders.  Their peculiarity—­in contrast with the old orders—­was, that they wandered from city to city and village to village at the command of their superiors.  They had convents, like the other monks; but they professed absolute poverty, went barefooted, and submitted to increased rigors.  Their vows were essentially those of the Benedictines.  In less than a century, however, they too had degenerated, and were bitterly reproached for their vagabond habits and the violation of their vows.  Their convents had also become rich, like those of the Benedictines.  It was these friars whom Chaucer ridiculed, and against whose vices Wyclif declaimed.  Yet they were retained by the popes for their services in behalf of ecclesiastical usurpation.  It was they who were especially chosen to peddle indulgences.  Their history is an impressive confirmation of the tendency of all human institutions to degenerate.  It would seem that the mission of the Benedictines had been accomplished in the thirteenth century, and that of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the fourteenth.

But monasticism, in any of its forms, ceased to have a salutary influence on society when the darkness of the Middle Ages was dispersed.  It is peculiarly a Mediaeval institution.  As a Mediaeval institution, it conferred many benefits on the semi-barbarians of Europe.  As a whole, considering the shadows of ignorance and superstition which veiled Christendom, and the evils which violence produced, its influence was beneficent.