l power, and depriving
them of every other object of ambition, engage them to promote, with
unceasing industry, the grandeur of their own order. He was sensible,
that so long as the monks were indulged in marriage, and were
permitted to rear families, they never could be subjected to strict
discipline, or reduced to that slavery under their superiors, which
was requisite to procure to the mandates issued from Rome, a ready and
zealous obedience. Celibacy, therefore, began to be extolled, as the
indispensable duty of priests; and the pope undertook to make all the
clergy throughout the western world renounce at once the privilege of
marriage: a fortunate policy; but at the same time an undertaking the
most difficult of any, since he had the strongest propensities of
human nature to encounter, and found, that the same connexions with
the female sex, which generally encourage devotion, were here
unfavourable to the success of his project. It is no wonder
therefore, that this master-stroke of art should have met with violent
contradiction, and that the interests of the hierarchy, and the
inclinations of the priests, being now placed in this singular
opposition, should, notwithstanding the continued efforts of Rome,
have retarded the execution of that bold scheme, during the course of
near three centuries.
[FN [e] Osberne in Anglia Sacra, tom. 2. p. 92. [f] Osberne, p. 91.
[g] See Wharton's notes to Anglia Sacra, tom. 2. p. 91. Gervase, p.
1645. Chron Wint. MS. apud Spell. Conc. p. 434.]

As the bishops and parochial clergy lived apart with their families,
and were more connected with the world, the hopes of success with them
were fainter; and the pretence for making them renounce marriage was
much less plausible. But the pope, having cast his eye on the monks
as the basis of his authority, was determined to reduce them under
strict rules of obedience, to procure them the credit of sanctity by
an appearance of the most rigid mortification, and to break off all
their other ties which might interfere with his spiritual policy.
Under pretence, therefore, of reforming abuses, which were, in some
degree, unavoidable in the ancient establishments, he had already
spread over the southern countries of Europe the severe laws of the
monastic life, and began to form attempts towards a like innovation in
England. The favourable opportunity offered itself, (and it was
greedily seized,) arising from the weak, superstition of Edre