1. _Religious._ In making "war on nature" the ascetics made war also on God. They aimed not too high religiously but in the wrong direction. They exaggerated sin and advocated the wrong means to get rid of it. They took religion away from the crowded centres of population, where it was most needed, to the desert or monastery. Thus an abnormal, unwholesome type of piety was created. In replacing faith by works the monks thus gave birth to a long list of abuses in the Church, and in nourishing an insane religious fanaticism they entailed many grave evils. From one point of view monasticism became a "morbid excrescence" of Christianity and tended to degrade man into a mere religious machine. At the same time the doctrine of future rewards and punishments reached an abhorrent evolution. The awful pangs of hell, the terrific judgments of God, and the ubiquitous and wily devil of the monks' vivid imagination sound strange to a modern mind. But the gravest error in the monastic system was the false and harmful distinction so clearly drawn both in theory and practice between the secular and the religious. The modern world easily harmonises the two. 2. _Social._ Monasticism disrupted family ties and caused the desertion of social duties on the ground of a more sacred duty. It lowered respect for the marriage state by magnifying the virtue of celibacy. In making the monk the ideal man of the Middle Ages, it advocated social suicide. All natural pleasures and enjoyments of life were labelled sinful. Practices, which were little more than superstitions, were advocated. Society in general was demoralised because monasticism failed to practise its own teachings. 3. _Political._ By inducing thousands, and many of them men of character, ability, and experience, to desert their posts of civic duty, the state was weakened and patriotism forgotten. The monk "died to the world" and abjured his country. Monasticism aided powerfully in developing the secular side of the papal hierarchy and soon came to exercise a large amount of political power itself. The monks frequently became embroiled in social disputes and military quarrels, and thus incited rather than allayed the fiercer brute passions of men. 4. _Cultural._ By holding the education of the people in their hands the monks had a powerful weapon for evil as well as good. In making the monk the ideally cultured man a false standard was set up and certain fundamentals in education ignored. Secular learning was not generally encouraged. The supreme end of all their education was not to produce a man, but a priest. 5. _Industrial._ Thousands withdrew from the various lines of industrial activity, some to obtain the higher good, but many to enter as they supposed a life of ease and idleness. Much of the good that was done in the earlier days was negatived by the begging friars later.