The immediate consequences of this change in men’s conceptions of what constitutes the highest moral excellence was that throughout one half of Europe the monasteries, which the religious-moral enthusiasm of the earlier centuries of Christianity had created, were dismantled and razed to the ground, and an institution which had dominated Christian Europe for a thousand years was suppressed in all the northern lands. This revolution, we believe, effected on the whole a great gain for morality and marked a forward movement in the moral evolution of the Western world; but at the same time it must be recognized that the destruction of this system, which throughout a full historical period had fostered some of the most admirable of Christian virtues and nurtured unnumbered saintly lives, resulted in the exclusion of valuable ethical elements from the moral life of Protestant communities. There are types of character nourished by the conventual system that society can ill afford to spare. Very few will dissent from Lecky’s view that “in the Sisters of Charity the religious orders of Catholicism have produced one of the most perfect of all types of womanhood.”[718] [Sidenote: Effects upon industrial morals of the dissolution of the monasteries] In destroying monasticism the Protestant reformers destroyed an anti-industrial type of character, and thus helped to clear the ground for the great industrial development which during the last three centuries has given a new aspect and outlook to civilization. The reformed Church gave prominence to the active masculine virtues as opposed to the passive feminine virtues exalted by the conventual system. Hence it was more favorable than the old Church to the development of civilization on its material side. It hardly admits of doubt that in these opposed tendencies of the ethical ideals of the two churches is to be sought one cause of the amazing contrast, industrially viewed, long observed between the distinctively Protestant and the distinctively Catholic countries of Europe. It is true that the line of demarcation once so observable is now becoming blurred, and that modern industrialism with its ideal of industrial virtues is fast becoming equally characteristic of all lands of advancing culture, whether Protestant, Catholic, or pagan. [Sidenote: Effects upon morals of the abolition of purgatory] The Protestant denial of the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which followed as a direct logical result of the reformers’ doctrine of justification by faith, had consequences for morality no less positive than those that followed the denial of the Catholic teaching of the meritoriousness of the ascetic life.