Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/75

 A century before the birth of Wyclif, the monks were confronted with dangerous rivals, who, whilst they began by carrying back the minds of men to the earlier models of ascetic discipline, with marvellous promptitude imitated and surpassed the evil examples of their predecessors. In the thirteenth century alone, as many as seven or eight new Orders of religious brethren found their way to England. In London, at Oxford and Cambridge, and at scores of places throughout the country, they received gifts of houses and land, forgetting their fervour in proportion as they accumulated their wealth. Amongst them were the Crossed or Crutched Friars, the Augustinian Friars, the Penitential Friars, and the Carmelites or White Friars. But the largest and most famous of the new Orders were the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose arrival in England and Oxford was practically simultaneous.

It would be difficult to find a greater contrast amongst the devoted pioneers of the Catholic Church than that which is afforded by the two saints Benedict and Dominic. Both set the stamp of their vigorous personality upon many succeeding ages; and the brotherhoods which they founded have done as much as any other single cause to determine the character of their Church in its relations with the world. It is in the ideas which underlie their institutions that the contrast becomes marked and significant. The Benedictine monasteries, brotherhoods and sisterhoods alike, were in the first place essentially refuges from the world. In the case of Benedict himself, and of his immediate followers,