It is not to be forgotten, indeed, that among the monks or other clerical scholars of the Dark Ages was to be found most of what learning and philosophy survived. The reason was that men and youths with the studious instinct, averse to the brawling life around them, turned to the monasteries and monastic schools as their one refuge. But sloth and impotence equally turned thither; and where the stronger spirits could find a peaceful and useful life without, the sluggards failed. Monasteries were thus always half filled with men to whom their vows were irksome; and as women were at the same time frequently sent to convents against their will, nothing but an iron discipline could keep the professed order. Given an easy abbot or abbess, they became centres of scandal; and in the average they were homes of fairly well-fed idleness. But the full fatality of the case is seen only when we realize that their very successes, their provision of a dim retreat for many men and women of refined and unworldly type, worsened society by leaving the reproduction of the race to the grosser and harder natures. The ostensible merit of monasteries, in the medieval period, was their almsgiving. Without endorsing the mercantilist impeachment of all such action, we are forced to recognize that theirs demoralized as many as it relieved. Of a higher order than mere almsgiving, certainly, was the earlier self-sacrificing service of the mendicant orders of friars, whose rise is one of the great moral phenomena of the Middle Ages. For a time, in the thirteenth century, the order of St. Francis in particular not only organized but greatly stimulated human devotion of the kind that, happily, is always quietly present somewhere; and the contrast between the humble beneficence of the earlier friars and the sleek self-seeking of the average secular priest at once accredited the former and discredited the latter. But the history of the mendicant friars as of the previous orders is a crowning proof of the impossibility of bettering society on a mere religious impulse, without social science.