In the history of the Church it has repeatedly happened that a dynamic idea, taking shape in a great religious institute, has found numerous admirers who have modelled new and similar families upon the first exemplar or who, originally members of a separate but kindred establishment, have come into the magnetic field of the more powerful agent, and have been drawn to merge with it, or at least to take their colour from it. Thus in the early twelfth century the congregation of Savigny, originally an independent growth of the same spiritual movement that had driven Stephen Harding and his fellows into the wilderness, merged its own individuality in that of Cîteaux; thus also, though in a different way, Cîteaux gave much of its spirit and outward organization to the institutes of Norbert of Xanten and Gilbert of Sempringham. Four hundred years later, in a manner still more striking, the Company of Jesus not only served as a close model for innumerable independent congregations of men and women, but also attracted and was imitated by not a few of the older monastic bodies, in whose constitutions features borrowed from the Jesuits may still be recognized to-day.

So, in the early thirteenth century, it was with the friars. The two original institutes of Francis and Dominic had each given something entirely new to the religious world. The gift of the former had been in the main spiritual: the ideal of poverty and simplicity added to that of apostolic service of the poor; all, in fact, that the world associates with the name of friar.