He had been and was a deeply pious man, with the piety of the type most esteemed by his contemporaries, and therefore easily understood and sympathised with by the common man. His piety had driven him into the convent, as then seemed both natural and necessary. Inside the monastery he had lived the life of a "young saint"--so his fellow monks believed, when, in the fashion of the day and of their class, they boasted that they had among them one destined to revive again the best type of mediæval saintship. No coarse, vulgar sins of the flesh, common enough at the time and easily condoned, smirched his young life. When he attained to peace in believing, he had no doubt of his vocation; no sudden wrench tore him away from the approved religious life of his time; no intellectual doubt separated him from the beliefs of his Church. His very imperviousness to the intellectual liberalising tendencies of Humanism made him all the more fit to be a trusted religious leader. He went forward step by step with such a slow, sure foot-tread that the common man could see and follow. When he did come forward as a Reformer he did not run amuck at things in general. He felt compelled to attack the _one_ portion of the popular religious life of the times which all men who gave the slightest thought to religion felt to be a gross abuse. The way he dealt with it revealed that he was the great religious genius of his age--an age which was imperatively if confusedly calling for reform within the sphere of religion.