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pacities, i.e. in provincial synods in respect of regional rules laid down by them, and in bishops in respect of rules laid down by them for their dioceses. According to Du Cange, the earliest record of the use of the word _dispensatio_ in this connexion is in the letter of Pope Gelasius I. of the 11th of March 494, to the bishops of Lucania (in Jaffe, _Reg. Pont. Rom._, ed. 2, tom. i. no. 636): necessaria rerum Dispensatione constringimur, ... sic canonum paternorum decreta librare, ... ut quae praesentium necessitas temporum restaurandis Ecclesiis relaxanda deposcit, adhibita consideratione diligenti, quantum fieri potest temperemus.[1] Dispensations from the observance of traditional rules were, however, during the early centuries exceedingly rare, and there are more instances of the popes repudiating than of their exercising the power to grant them. Thus Celestine I. (d. 432) wrote: "The rules govern us, not we the rules: we are subject to the canons, since we are the servants of the precepts of the canons" (_Epist. 3 ad Episcopos Illyrici_); and Pope Zozimus wrote even more strongly: "This see possesses no authority to make any concession or change; for with us abides antiquity firmly rooted (_inconvulsis radicibus_), reverence for which the decrees of the Fathers enjoined." As time went on, however, and the Church expanded, this rigidly conservative attitude proved impossible to maintain, and the principle of "tempering" the law when forced to do so "by the exigencies of affairs or of the times" (_rerum vel temporum angustia_), as laid down by Gelasius, was adopted into the canon law itself. The principle was, of course, singularly open to abuse. In theory it was laid down from the first that dispensations were only to be granted in cases of urgent necessity and in the highest interests of the Church; in practice, from the 11th century onwards, the power of dispensation was used by the popes as one of the most potent instruments for extending their influence. Dispensations to hold benefices in plurality formed, with provisions and the papal claim to the right of direct appointment, a powerful means for extending the patronage of the Holy See and therefore its hold over the clergy, and from the 13th century onwards this abuse assumed vast proportions (Hinschius iii. p. 250). Even more scandalous was the almost unrestrained traffic in licences and dispensations at Rome, which grew up, at least as early as the 14th ce
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