st any point, and especially when disobedience was supposed to
entail the burnings of a physical hell forever and ever? So celibacy was
re-established as a law of the Christian Church at the bidding of that
far-seeing genius who had devised the means of spiritual despotism. That
law--so gloomy, so unnatural, so fraught with evil--has never been
repealed; it still rules the Catholic priesthood of Europe and America.
Nor will it be repealed so long as the ideas of the Middle Ages have
more force than enlightened reason. It is an abominable law, but who can
doubt its efficacy in cementing the power of the popes?

But simony, or the sale of ecclesiastical benefices, was a still more
alarming evil to the mind of Gregory. It was the great scandal of the
Church and age. Here we honor the Pope for striving to remove it. And
yet its abolition was no easy thing. He came in contact with the
selfishness of barons and kings. He found it an easier matter to take
away the wives of priests than the purses of princes. Priests who had
vowed obedience might consent to the repudiation of their wives, but
would great temporal robbers part with their spoils? The sale of
benefices was one great source of royal and baronial revenues.
Bishoprics, once conferred for wisdom and piety, had become prizes for
the rapacious and ambitious. Bishops and abbots were most frequently
chosen from the ranks of the great. Powerful Sees were the gifts of
kings to their favorites or families, or were bought by the wealthy; so
that worldly or incapable men were made overseers of the Church of
Christ. The clergy were in danger of being hopelessly secularized. And
the evil spread to the extremities of the clerical body. The princes and
barons were getting control of the Church itself. Bishops often
possessed a plurality of Sees. Children were elevated to episcopal
thrones. Sycophants, courtiers, jesters, imbecile sons of princes,
became great ecclesiastical dignitaries. Who can wonder at the
degeneracy of the clergy when they held their cures at the hands of lay
patrons, to whom they swore allegiance for the temporalities of their
benefices? Even the ring and the crozier, the emblems of spiritual
authority,--once received at the hand of metropolitan archbishops alone,
were now bestowed by temporal sovereigns, who claimed thereby fealty and
allegiance; so that princes had gradually usurped the old rights of the
Church, and Gregory resolved to recover them. So long a