It need hardly be said that the scourge must have been most demoralising to discipline, destructive to traditional practice, and fatal to observance. It is a well-ascertained fact, strange though it may seem, that men are not as a rule made better by great and universal visitations of Divine Providence. It has been noticed that this is the evident result of all such scourges, or, as Procopius puts it, speaking of the great plague in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, "whether by chance or Providential design it strictly spared the most wicked."[394] So in this visitation, from Italy to England, the universal testimony of those who lived through it is that it seemed to rouse up the worst passions of the human heart, and to dull the spiritual senses of the soul. Wadding, the Franciscan annalist, has attributed to this very plague of 1348-9 the decay of fervour evident throughout his own order at this time. "This evil," he writes, "wrought great destruction to the holy houses of religion, carrying off the masters of regular discipline and the seniors of experience. From this time the monastic orders, and in particular the mendicants, began to grow tepid and negligent, both in that piety and that learning in which they had up to this time flourished. Then, our illustrious members being carried off, the rigours of discipline relaxed by these calamities, could not be renewed by the youths received without the necessary training, rather to fill the empty houses than to restore the lost discipline."[395] We may sum up the results of the great mortality in the words of a recent writer. "For our purpose," writes Dr. Cunningham, "it is important to notice that the steady progress of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was [p217] suddenly checked in the fourteenth; the strain of the hundred years' war would have been exhausting in any case, but the nation had to bear it when the Black Death had swept off half the population and the whole social structure was disorganised."[396]