Three institutions--the monastery, the castle, and the town--dominated successively the life of the Middle Ages. Each developed a distinct ethical ideal. The monastery cradled the conscience of the monk; the castle, the conscience of the knight; and the town, the conscience of the burgher. What particular virtues were approved by the moral sense of the town dweller we shall note a little farther on. We here merely observe that in the atmosphere of the town, in the relationships of the workshop and the market, were nourished the lowly lay virtues of the artisan and the trader, virtues which, though disesteemed by classical antiquity, regarded as of subordinate worth by the monk, and held in positive contempt by the knight, were yet to constitute the heart and core of the ethical ideal of the modern world. II. SOME ESSENTIAL FACTS IN THE MORAL HISTORY OF THE AGE [Sidenote: Revival of the classical conception of life: the new birth of the European conscience] When Christianity entered the Greco-Roman world with its new moral ideal, the old classical ideal of character, as we have seen, was practically superseded. There were, it is true, certain elements of this pagan morality which were consciously or unconsciously absorbed by Christianity; but the classical ideal as a whole was rejected, just as the greater part of the cultural elements of Greco-Roman civilization were cast aside. For a thousand years Hebrew-Christian conceptions of the world and of life shaped the thought and conduct of men. Then came the Renaissance.[697]