All civilization proceeds by alternate emphasis on individualism and collectivism. In one age, men lay most stress on the unhampered development of the individual, in spite of the claims of his surroundings. In another, they most emphasize the fact that individuals must be disciplined to act in masses, or the world cannot advance. Man (they feel) shows his superiority to the brute in nothing more than in this power of forming groups, and then groups of groups, and still wider, still more complicated groups of groups of groups; so that, for such formations, selfcontrol is even more necessary for the multitude than energy and self-assertion. It would be no gain to civilization that the exaggeration of “My country, right or wrong!” should give place to a counter-exaggeration: “My own personality, right or wrong!” Monasticism, Chivalry, and the Gild were perhaps the greatest collectivist movements of the Middle Ages. All of them are unduly depreciated by many people nowadays, while they are loaded with exaggerated praise by others; the difficulty is to reach a fair balance. We have to reconcile two widely different facts which seem equally indisputable in the light of historical documents. First, that monasticism grew up by what seemed an overmastering impulse, and became one of the chief social forces of the Middle Ages; at one time, even perhaps the chief. Secondly, that (apart from those boys who form the vast majority of converts under the Roman and the Greek Church) so few even of the chosen, even of the most religious men, adopt nowadays that life which, before the Reformation, was called the religious life par excellence.