It should be borne in mind, however, that the primary object of all these institutions was not a temporal but a spiritual one. Their members, who for the most part had received so small a share of this world's good things, had banded together, not, in the first place, that they might be able to keep the wolf from the door during the few years of life that remained to them, but in order to ensure for themselves in the next world, as they confidently believed, an eternity of bliss. Nor, whilst working out their own salvation, were they unmindful of the spiritual welfare of their neighbours, nor, for the matter of that, of their temporal welfare either. The Celites, a kindred community to the Beghards, were wholly occupied in tending the sick and burying the dead--and, thanks to their intimate connection with the trade companies, they were able to largely influence the religious life, and to a great extent to form the religious opinion of the mediæval towns of Belgium, or, at all events, in the case of their working population, during more than two centuries. They did not, however, escape the fate which, sooner or later, overtakes all human institutions: before the close of the Middle Age they were, most of them, in full decadence. Not, as so often happens, that their life was crushed out by the weight of gold: though, as time went on, they acquired endowments, they never attained to wealth or anything like it; they waned with the waning of the cloth trade, and, when that industry died, gradually dwindled away. Their crazy ships were sorely tried by the storm of the fifteen hundreds. Some of them went to the bottom, some weathered its fury, but were so battered that they afterwards sank in still water; a few, somehow or other, managed to keep afloat till another and a fiercer hurricane at last dashed them to pieces.