2. The other reaction was stronger and even more permanent. It consisted of the formation within the Christian community of an inner class, who framed for themselves and endeavoured to realize a higher than the common ideal. They stood to the rest of the community as the community itself stood to the rest of the world. The tendency itself came, as I have tried to point out in a previous Lecture,[728] mainly from the Greek philosophical schools, and was fostered to a large extent by the influence on the main body of Christians of the philosophic parties upon its borders. But it asserted its place as a permanent element in the Christian world mainly as a reaction against the change of the basis of the Christian communities, and the lowering of the current standard of their morality. Henceforward there was, side by side with the τάγμα τῶν κληρικῶν and the τάγμα τῶν λαϊκῶν, a third rank, τάγμα τῶν ἀσκητῶν. The ideal has been obscured by its history: but that ideal was sublime. It was impracticable and undesirable; and yet sometimes in human life room must be found for impossible ideals. And the blurred and blotted picture of it which has survived to our own times, cannot take the place of the historical fact that it began as a reaction against Christianity as it was and as it is—an effort to regenerate human society. But Monachism, by the very fact of its separation, did not leaven the Church and raise the current morality. The Church became, not an assembly of devout men, grimly earnest about living a holy life—its bishops were statesmen; its officers were men of the world; its members were of the world, basing their conduct on the current maxims of society, held together by the loose bond of a common name, and of a creed which they did not understand. In such a society, an intellectual basis is the only possible basis. In such a society also, in which officialism must necessarily have an important place, the insistence on that intellectual basis comes from the instinct of self-preservation. But it checked the progress of Christianity. Christianity has won no great victories since its basis was changed. The victories that it has won, it has won by preaching, not Greek metaphysics, but the love of God and the love of man. Its darkest pages are those which record the story of its endeavouring to force its transformed Greek metaphysics upon men or upon races to whom they were alien. The only ground of despair in those who accept Christianity now, is the fear—which I for one cannot entertain—that the dominance of the metaphysical element in it will be perpetual. * * * * *