hat city became the most wicked, and especially the
most licentious, in Christendom.[497] The first case of the presence of
women at a feast in the Vatican is said to have been at the marriage of
Teodorina, daughter of Innocent VIII, in 1488. Comedies were played
before the mixed company.[498]

+228. Abelard.+ A cleric who married flinched from the standard of his
calling, in the view of the church. Hildebrand's decrees were like the
other crowning acts of great men,--they came at the culmination of a
great movement in the mores. They accorded with the will and wish of
the masses. In all ages acts are due to mixed motives, but in the Middle
Ages the good motives were kept for show and the bad ones controlled.
Clerics did not cease to have concubines until after the Council of
Trent, and the difference between law and practice (bridged over by
pecuniary penalties) called for special ethics and casuistry. The case
of Abelard (1079-1142) shows what tragedies were caused. He claimed to
be, and to some extent he was, a champion of reason and common sense,
and he was a skeptic as to the current philosophy. He was vain, weak,
and ambitious. He selected the loveliest woman he knew, and won her
love, which he used to persuade her to be his concubine, that she might
not hinder him in his career.[499] The treatment accorded to Heloise
shows that a woman could be a concubine of an ecclesiastic, but not his
wife, without condemnation. That was the allowance for human despair
under the ecclesiastical rules.[500] Thus the church first suggested
views of life and dogmas of religion, with which the masses combined
their mores and returned them to the church as a gift of societal power.
The church then formulated the mores and created disciplinary systems to
use the power and make it institutional and perpetual. Then the mores
revolted against the authority and the religion, and the ethics which it
taught. A Roman Catholic writer says that a study of the Middle Ages
will produce this result: "We shall have recognized in the church the
professional peacemaker between states and factions, as well as between
man and man, the equitable mediator between rulers and their subjects,
the consistent champion of constitutional liberty, the alleviator of the
inequalities of birth, the uninterested and industrious disseminator of
letters, the refiner of habits and manners, the well-meaning guardian of
the national wealth, health, and intellect, and th