Page:Historical Lectures and Addresses.djvu/86

 making some little progress before they were swept back into the abyss. For each of these new Orders was able to do something while its inspiration was fresh, but as each gained wealth and power it fell back into the general condition of the monastic Orders, it lost its vigour and power, it became secularised and of the world, worldly. The result was that the beginning of the thirteenth century saw that the beneficent power of the monastic system was at an end, and this feeling was expressed by a decree of the Lateran Council of 1214 which forbade the foundation of any new religious Orders on the ground of the confusion already caused by their multiplicity.

Things were now at a standstill, and rarely had they been worse. Every organisation had been tried that seemed likely to do good, and yet the net result of all the various efforts was that on every side failure stared thinking men in the face. That failure arose from the decline of the ecclesiastical organisation, or rather from its perversion. Instead of considering the needs of the human soul, it was absorbed in the maintenance of an external system. The Church was overgrown; it was too wealthy; it had too many lands and possessions; there were far too many monasteries. In fact the moment had come when reforming organisations had followed one another with such rapidity, that they had become abuses in their turn. It is reforming organisations which have lost their meaning that become the chief abuses in the world's history. The Church, too, was not only overgrown, but it was avowedly secular. The bishops were important men in the State, and they were so