i.e. to its embodiment of the other-worldly substance of the Gospel at the very moment when the Church was in danger of being dissolved in the “natural” order, and of forgetting that she belonged to the Aeon of the Kingdom of God.38 Monasticism arose as an almost unconscious and instinctive reaction against the secularization of the Church—not only in the sense of a reduction of her moral ideal or pathos of sanctity, but also in the sense of her entrance, so to speak, into the “service of the world”—