But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions. Their monasteries were the repositories of learning; they themselves were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely through training and position, but by a species of natural selection, the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation, or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred. Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning and the upholders of their human rights. On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social points round which the national life centred, and from which have radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.