Lastly, the knight must possess dignity or self-respect. The age of chivalry interpreted this virtue or duty as requiring the knight to stand on his rights as a man. He must not let an injury to himself or to a friend go unpunished. He must resent every insult and return blow for blow. Not to do so argued cowardice and pusillanimity. All this was of course directly opposed to the Christian requirements of humility, meekness, nonresistance, and forgiveness of injuries, and was distinctly a part of the moral code of chivalry which was borrowed from pre-Christian or non-Christian morality. To these essentially pagan virtues the knight, after the institution of chivalry had been approved and consecrated by the Church, must add all the distinctly Christian virtues, particularly the virtue of right religious belief. Only the true believer could be a true knight. A striking illustration of the mixture of moralities with which we have to do in the period of chivalry is afforded by the celebrated religious military orders of the Hospitalers and Templars, which were formed just before the Second Crusade, when the enthusiasm for the chivalric ideal was at its height, while that for the ascetic had not yet sensibly abated. The Hospitalers were monks who, to their monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience or humility, added the martial obligations of knighthood; the Templars were knights who to their military vows added those of the monk. Thus in these remarkable orders of knight-monks we see incongruously united the monastic and military ideals, two of the most sharply contrasted conceptions of worthy life that it is possible to find in the whole history of ethical ideals. [Sidenote: Defects of the ideal] The ideal of chivalry had serious defects. First, the military spirit, borrowed from paganism, which the ideal apotheosized, was in absolute opposition to the spirit of Christianity, so that the perfect reconciliation and fusion of the different moral qualities entering into the ideal was impossible. Second, from feudalism, with its sharply defined social classes, the ideal received an aristocratic stamp. In this respect it was the direct opposite of the monastic ideal. Any person, freeman or slave, king or peasant, could become a monk, and by following the more excellent way gain the homage of men and win the crown of sainthood. But the chivalric ideal was one to which no plebeian might aspire. Only a person of noble birth could become a knight. This exclusive aristocratic character of the ideal constituted one of its most serious defects. Yet in spite of this and other defects it was a noble and attractive ideal, and one which not only left a deep stamp upon medieval history, but contributed precious elements to the ethical heritage which the modern world received from the Middle Ages. III. THE CHIEF MORAL PHENOMENA OF THE PERIOD [Sidenote: Influence of the ideal of chivalry upon the history of the epoch]