a Divine instrument to curb the lawless passions of the laity--they
demanded that all other ministers of God, from the archbishop to the
humblest clerk in orders, should enjoy the same exemption as themselves
on condition of accepting the same threefold obligation--Poverty,
Obedience, Chastity. It was consequently in the religious orders that
the chief movements for reforming the medieval clergy found their
warmest partisans; and the same school supplied the theoretical basis
for each new claim of privilege. The Orders were the salt of the Church,
so long as they preserved the spirit of their founders. But they were
also responsible for the insanely logical pretensions which characterise
the Church's policy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it
was with reason that Wycliffe, the greatest medieval critic of the
sacerdotal theory, attacked the Mendicant Orders as typifying all that
was worst in the hierarchy of his age.

Naturally enough the monastic spirit has been often treated as an
absolute antithesis to the lay statesmanship which it so bitterly
opposed. But in fact they sprang from the same root of a discontent,
which was wholly reasonable, with the anarchical conditions of the early
Middle Ages. The religious reformer, stunned and bewildered by the
wrong-doing of men and the manifest inequity of fortune, argued that a
world so irredeemably bad must be regarded as an ordeal for the faith of
the believer. Man was afflicted in this life that he might realise the
supreme value of the life to come. He was surrounded by evil that he
might learn to hate it. He was placed in society that he might school
himself to control the immoral and non-moral instincts which society
calls into play. The political reformers, at least in their more
disinterested moods, were animated by the same belief in an all-wise
Providence, but drew different deductions from it. The God who created
man as a social being could not have intended that society should remain