In the course of a few generations the vast enthusiasm awakened for the ascetic life covered all Christian lands with convents and monasteries, which in their ethical influence constituted one of the most important of the institutions of the Church. In truth, the monasteries stand in closer and more vital relation than does any other ecclesiastical institution to the ethical evolution of the Western world. The service they rendered to civilization in preserving and transmitting to the modern world various elements of the intellectual and material cultures of antiquity has been fully recognized and gratefully acknowledged; but not so full justice has been rendered them for their contribution to the moral life of modern times. Yet it is probably true that the most precious thing conserved by the monasteries from the wreck of ancient civilization was that social conscience which was generated in the heart of old Judaism and bequeathed to Christianity. Professor Nash, in his work entitled _The Genesis of the New Social Conscience_, maintains, and we think with right, that the distinctive qualities of the modern conscience--tenderness for the unfortunate, a lofty altruism, a noble capacity for self-sacrifice--were qualities conserved and cradled in the medieval monasteries. This view of the relation of the monasteries to the moral evolution in Western civilization may be accepted by the student of morals as a correct interpretation of medieval monastic history, while at the same time he admits the truth of Lecky’s contention that there was a self-regarding motive in Christian asceticism--it was personal salvation, he says, that the monk was primarily seeking--which made the morality of the Christian saints inferior to the morality of the heroes of Greece and Rome. It is undoubtedly true that many entered upon the monastic life from self-regarding motives; but it is also true that constant meditation upon religious themes, and especially the holding ever before the imagination the ideal of the Master, who for love of man made the supreme self-sacrifice of the Cross, had as a natural result the deepening of the altruistic feelings, the sensitizing of the conscience, and the moving of the will to self-denying service for others. As a consequence the spirit of true self-renunciation was often exalted among the recluses of the cloister to an unwonted degree, and thus it came about in the course of time that many who out of solicitude for their own salvation had sought the solitude of the cloister are later found in the outside world, going about, in imitation of their Master, doing good, ministering in the spirit of absolute self-forgetfulness to the needs, temporal as well as spiritual, of the poor, the afflicted, the heavy-laden, and the life-weary. A large part of the philanthropic work of the Church during the Middle Ages was carried on by the monks.