an
age in which personal modesty was as little studied as hypocrisy, and in
which men, wore their vices as openly as their virtues.

No amount of simple statement can convey an adequate notion of the
corrupt state of the clergy at the time. To form any just appreciation
of this, it is necessary to take a peep at some of the documents that
have survived--such a document, for instance, as that Bull of this Pope
Pius II which forbade priests from plying the trades of keeping taverns,
gaming-houses, and brothels.

Ponder also that under his successor, Sixtus IV, the tax levied upon the
courtesans of Rome enriched the pontifical coffers to the extent of
some 20,000 ducats yearly. Ponder further that when the vicar of
the libidinous Innocent VIII published in 1490 an edict against
the universal concubinage practised by the clergy, forbidding its
continuation under pain of excommunication, all that it earned him was
the severe censure of the Holy Father, who disagreed with the measure
and who straightway repealed and cancelled the edict.(1)

1 See Burchard's Diarium, Thuasne Edition, Vol. II. p.442
et seq.

All this being considered, and man being admittedly a creature of his
environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the
fact that being the man he was--prelate though he might be--handsome,
brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by
nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by which he was
surrounded?

One factor only could have caused him to use more restraint--the good
example of his peers. That example he most certainly had not.

Virtue is a comparative estate, when all is said; and before we can find
that Roderigo was vile, that he deserves unqualified condemnation for
his conduct, we must ascertain that he was more or less exceptional in
his licence, that he was less scrupulous than his fellows. Do we find
that? To find the contrary we do not need to go beyond the matter which
provoked that letter from the Pontiff. For we see that he was not even
alone, as an ecclesiastic, in the adventure; that he had for associate
on that amorous frolic one Giacopo Ammanati, Cardinal-Presbyter of
San Crisogno, Roderigo's senior and an ordained priest, which--without
seeking to make undue capital out of the circumstance--we may mention
that Roderigo was not. He was a Cardinal-Deacon, be it remembered.(1) We
know that the very Pontiff who admonished these