Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/87

 students, although the general direction of the Orders came from Rome.

The corruption of the new Orders from their preliminary professions of poverty, simplicity of life, and singleness of purpose was sooner or later inevitable. The originative influence of St. Dominic in regard to his own Order has been insisted on above. He is not likely to have had any influence in establishing the other Orders which arose in the thirteenth century. Yet there doubtless was a common origin for them all; and it is not far to seek. The Benedictines were so widely spread, so wealthy, and so powerful in the social relations which they maintained with the laity, that if they had continued to bring a balance of advantage to the Church and its rulers there would have been no need for the institution of new Orders. But the balance of advantage had virtually disappeared. The general contempt into which so many worldly, idle, and vicious monks had fallen in every country could not fail to weaken the hold of religion on the popular mind. Innocent III. and his successors appear to have been convinced that a crusade in Christendom was quite as necessary as a crusade against the avowed infidels, and that the most effective weapons for the new crusaders would be those of apostolic poverty and fervour. Nor was it only, or even mainly, as a corrective against the corruption of the monks that the Mendicant Friars were sent forth. Their object was also to supply the defects of the secular clergy, whose lack of energy, and often of practical piety, was gravely reflected on by their contemporaries.