The influence the first form of monachism has exercised upon the world, so far as it has been beneficial, has been chiefly through the imagination, which has been fascinated by its legends. In the great periods of theological controversy, the Eastern monks had furnished some leading theologians; but in general, in Oriental lands, the hermit life predominated, and extreme maceration was the chief merit of the saint. But in the West, monachism assumed very different forms, and exercised far higher functions. At first the Oriental saints were the ideals of Western monks. The Eastern St. Athanasius had been the founder of Italian monachism. St. Martin of Tours excluded labour from the discipline of his monks, and he and they, like the Eastern saints, were accustomed to wander abroad, destroying the idols of the temples.(385) But three great causes conspired to direct the monastic spirit in the West into practical channels. Conditions of race and climate have ever impelled the inhabitants of these lands to active life, and have at the same time rendered them constitutionally incapable of enduring the austerities or enjoying the hallucinations of the sedentary Oriental. There arose, too, in the sixth century, a great legislator, whose form may be dimly traced through a cloud of fantastic legends, and the order of St. Benedict, with that of St. Columba and some others, founded on substantially the same principle, soon ramified through the greater part of Europe, tempered the wild excesses of useless penances, and, making labour an essential part of the monastic system, directed the movement to the purposes of general civilisation. In the last place, the barbarian invasions, and the dissolution of the Western Empire, dislocating the whole system of government and almost resolving society into its primitive elements, naturally threw upon the monastic corporations social, political, and intellectual functions of the deepest importance. It has been observed that the capture of Rome by Alaric, involving as it did the destruction of the grandest religious monuments of Paganism, in fact established in that city the supreme authority of Christianity.(386) A similar remark may be extended to the general downfall of the Western civilisation. In that civilisation Christianity had indeed been legally enthroned; but the philosophies and traditions of Paganism, and the ingrained habits of an ancient, and at the same time an effete society, continually paralysed its energies. What Europe would have been without the barbarian invasions, we may partly divine from the history of the Lower Empire, which represented, in fact, the old Roman civilisation prolonged and Christianised. The barbarian conquests, breaking up the old organisation, provided the Church with a virgin soil, and made it, for a long period, the supreme and indeed sole centre of civilisation.