The chief person in this group was Gerard Groote, a man of wealthy family and some strange vicissitudes in life. He had studied at the universities of Paris and Prague, and had taken minor orders to qualify himself to hold the two canonries family influence secured to him, but without giving any indication of a vocation to the sacred office. He seems even to have led a dissolute life. Then a great change came over him, chiefly through the influence of a friend of his youth named Henry Eger, now the prior of a Cistercian convent at Munkhuisen. Gerard resigned his benefices, and spent five years in a monastic retreat, from which he emerged as a zealous preacher of the Gospel to the clergy and people of what now is Holland, using both Latin and Dutch as occasion served. He especially dwelt on the utter worldliness of that dreary time, when priests, nobles, and tradesmen alike had lost all idea of serving God and men, and had set up gain and pleasure as the recognized ends of life. His sharp rebukes, and his exaltation of humility, simplicity, and poverty, attracted the lower classes, but roused the opposition of both the burghers and the Mendicants against him. After a brief and stormy career he was silenced by the Archbishop of Utrecht, and was obliged to find vent for his zeal in some other channel. His purity and unworldliness had gathered around him, in his native Deventer, men and women like-minded with him, who, according to the tendency of the time, drifted naturally into a kind of monastic life. Brother-houses and sister-houses were organized, and they became known as the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life. They took no vows, and yet practised celibacy, common ownership and labor, and obedience to the rector of the house. They adopted no common dress, but came to wear the simplest gray robe of the same cut. Both laymen and clergy lived together in the brother-houses, and each took his turn in the common services of the brotherhood. They observed no canonical hours beyond what the Church exacted of the priests among them. They assumed none of the professions of the monks, and yet they realized the monkish ideal better than did the monks themselves. The four principles which governed Gerard’s own life and became the four corner-stones of this fraternity, were “contempt of the world and of self, imitation of the lowly life of Christ, good-will, and the grace of devoutness” (_contemptus mundi et sui ipsius, imitatio humilis vitae Christi, bona voluntas, gratia devotionis_). All this was summed up in the phrase _moderna devotio_, used both by the brethren and the outside world to designate the distinctive character of the order.