In this new conception of what constitutes the worthiest and most meritorious life, the quietistic virtues of the earlier ascetic ideal, which had developed during the period of terror and suffering which followed the subversion of classical civilization by the northern barbarians, gave place to the active, benevolent virtues. In the earlier monastic movement there was a self-regarding element. The monk fled from the world in order to make sure of his own salvation. The world was left to care for itself. In the new orders, the brother, in imitation of the Master who went about among men teaching and healing, left the cloister and went out into the world to rescue and save others. In its lofty call to absolute self-forgetfulness and complete consecration to the service of humanity, the early ideal of the Mendicants was one of the noblest and most attractive that had grown up under Christian influence. The loftiness of the ideal attracted the select spirits of the age--for noble souls love self-sacrifice. “Whenever in the thirteenth century,” says the historian Lea, “we find a man towering above his fellows, we are almost sure to trace him to one of the Mendicant Orders.”[693] It is in the exaltation of this virtue of self-renunciation that we find one of the chief services rendered by the Mendicant Orders, especially by the Franciscan, to European morality. Just as the early monks, through the emphasis laid on the virtue of chastity, made a needed protest against the sensuality of a senile and decadent civilization, so did the friars, through the stress laid on the virtue of self-denial for others, make a needed protest against the selfishness and hardness of an age that seemed to have forgotten the claims of the poor and the lowly.[694] It can hardly be made a matter of reasonable doubt that the slowly growing fund of altruistic feeling in Christendom was greatly enriched by the self-devoted lives and labors of the followers of Saints Francis and Dominic. But the value of the ideal of the friars as an ethical force in the evolution of European civilization was seriously impaired by certain theological elements it contained. It was an ideal in which, as in the ordinary monastic ideal, the duty of correct opinion came to be exalted above all others. The ethics of belief took precedence of the ethics of service. Thus the friars, particularly the Dominicans, through their zeal for orthodoxy, fostered the grave moral fault of intolerance. The growth of this conception of Christian duty, concurring with other causes of which we shall speak in the next chapter, ushered in the age of the Inquisition. [Sidenote: The ethics of Scholasticism]