When the results and influences of monasticism are carefully weighed, it is seen that the good and evil "are blended together almost inextricably." These diametrically opposite effects are perplexing and astonishing. Conspicuous among the positive results are the following: 1. _Religious._ The effort to save pure Christianity from the secularised state-Church by carrying it to the desert or shutting it up in a monastery, produced the first great reform movement within the Christian Church. "It was always the monks who saved the Church when sinking, emancipated her when becoming enslaved to the world, defended her when assailed."[221:1] Monasticism was, therefore, a realisation of the ideal in Christianity. In no small sense it likewise paved the way for the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The monastic conquest of Christianity left in its train higher ideals of a holy Christian life and a keener religious enthusiasm, and emphasised the necessity of humility and purity. Likewise monasticism, through its aggressive missionary efforts, completed the overthrow of heathenism in the Empire and in its stead planted the true faith over western Europe. The monks were the fiercest champions of orthodoxy, and the intellectual giants of that age, like Jerome and St. Augustine, were in their ranks. The monk rather than the priest was the apostle of the Middle Ages who taught men and nations the simple Christian life of the Gospel. In monasticism were developed the germs of many humanitarian institutions through which Christianity expressed itself in a most practical manner. The monastery offered a home to the poor and unfortunate, and gave hope and refuge to both the religious invalid, who was sick of the world, and to the religious fanatic. The Papacy, too, was supported and strengthened in a thousand different ways by monasticism, and the whole religious history of the Middle Ages was coloured by it. 2. _Social._ Monasticism tended to purify and regenerate society with lofty ideas. It became an unexcelled machine for the administration of charity. It fed the hungry, cared for the sick and dying, entertained the traveller, and was an asylum for all the unfortunates. It helped to mitigate the terrors of slavery. It inculcated ideas of obedience and usefulness. It advocated and practised equality and communism, and it tutored the half-civilised nations of western Europe in the arts of peace.