Credit for holiness brought large gifts and legacies from well-meaning but ill-judging laymen and women; and nothing could prevent the enrichment of orders which had begun under special vows of poverty. Francis had expressly ruled that his friars should not on any pretext hold property, and should not even be able to profit by it through trustees; but the latter provision was annulled, and ere long the order was as well provided for as any. The better the financial footing, the more self-seekers entered; and these overruled the more single-minded. This was the law of development of every "self-denying" order of the Dark and Middle Ages, from the Benedictine monks to the Knights Templars. One of the most rigorously planned monasteries of the Middle Ages, that of the lonely Chartreuse, founded by St. Bruno late in the eleventh century, at length relaxed its austerities, and came latterly to be known as a wholesale manufactory of a liqueur--the distinction by which most men now know also the name of the Benedictines. In the end, the orders of monks and friars did something for scholarship and education, after the institution of "lay brothers," who did the menial work, left the domini in certain orders, especially the Benedictine, free to devote themselves to learning; but socially they achieved nothing. When once they had acquired "foundations" they became plunderers instead of helpers of the poor, exacting from them gifts, selling them post-mortem privileges, taking the widow's mite and the orphan's blanket for verbal blessings. It is always to be remembered, here as before, that Christianity is not the efficient cause of the failures or the evils which happen under its auspices: we are not to suppose that had Osirianism or Judaism or Manichæism or Mithraism chanced to be the religion of Europe these failures and evils would have been averted. What we are to realize is, on the other hand, that the conventional view as to Christianity having been an abnormally efficient cause for good is a delusion. It is not Christianity that has civilized Europe, but Europe--the complex of political and culture forces--that has civilized Christianity. Byzantium and Abyssinia show what the religious system could amount to of itself. Western Europe surpassed these States in virtue of conditions more propitious to energy and to freedom: that was the difference. At the best, medieval Europe was a world of chronic strife, daily injustice, normal cruelty, abundant misery, and ever-present disease. To show that Christianity, that is, the holding of the Christian creed by the men of that world, made these evils less than they would have been in the same place under any other creed, is impossible. On the other hand, it is clear that the influence of Christian doctrine and tradition was on some sides conservative of evil and obstructive of good.