Generally these specific forms of the ideal have been created by an exaggerated enthusiasm for one or another particular virtue of the standard, which has caused this special virtue so to overshadow all the others, save the indispensable one of correct belief, as to bring into existence a distinctive Christian type. Thus through the exaltation of the virtue of chastity there arose in the early Church the ascetic type of excellence, which for several centuries inspired unbounded moral enthusiasm and drew away into the desert and into the seclusion of the cloister great multitudes of both men and women; later, through the reaction upon the Church of the pagan and barbarian world it had nominally converted, and through the incorporation into the ideal of a number of heathen virtues, there came into existence a composite type of character--a combination of the virtues of the saint and the virtues of the hero--known as the chivalric ideal, which colored the events of European history from the ninth to the fourteenth century; and still later, through the suppression of some of the distinctive virtues of the Roman Catholic type of excellence and a fresh emphasis laid upon others, there was created the Protestant type of moral character, which has given a special cast to the theological morality of a large section of modern Christendom. [Sidenote: Limitations and defects of the ideal] That we may better be prepared to follow intelligently the various phases of the moral history of the Christian centuries, to the tracing of which the remaining chapters of this volume will be devoted, there is need that to the brief description we have now given of the chief virtues making up the ideal which was to give guidance to the moral life of the European peoples, we add a word concerning its limitations and defects, since these negative qualities of the ideal have exercised an influence scarcely less decisive than its positive qualities in making the history of the Christian world what it has been--a history, on the whole, of inspiring moral progress, yet a history of moral losses as well as of moral gains. The first limitation of the ideal which we notice is its practical exclusion of those civic, patriotic duties and virtues which had been so highly esteemed by both the Greeks and the Romans. Man was henceforth to be the citizen of no earthly city, but of a heavenly city whose builder and maker is God. We can easily understand how this new conception of life, which transferred all its chief interests to another world, which substituted the Church--symbolized in accordance with the modes of thought of the time as “the city of God”--for the ancient city state as the object of moral enthusiasm and self-devotion, should leave no place for those civic, military, and heroic virtues that had constituted the very soul of the morality of classical antiquity.