xcommunicated neighbour; and thus offence begot
offence, guilt spread like a contagion through the influence of natural
humanity, and a single refusal of obedience to a frivolous citation might
involve entire families in misery and ruin.

The people might have endured better to submit to so enormous a tyranny, if
the conduct of the clergy themselves had given them a title to respect, or
if equal justice had been distributed to lay and spiritual offenders.
"Benefit of clergy," unhappily, as at this time interpreted, was little
else than a privilege to commit sins with impunity. The grossest moral
profligacy in a priest was passed over with indifference; and so far from
exacting obedience in her ministers to a higher standard than she required
of ordinary persons, the church extended her limits under fictitious
pretexts as a sanctuary for lettered villany. Every person who could read
was claimed by prescriptive usage as a clerk, and shielded under her
protecting mantle; nor was any clerk amenable for the worst crimes to the
secular jurisdiction, until he had been first tried and degraded by the
ecclesiastical judges. So far was this preposterous exemption carried, that
previous to the passing of the first of the 23rd of Henry the Eighth,[197]
those who were within the degrees might commit murder with impunity, the
forms which it was necessary to observe in degrading a priest or deacon
being so complicated as to amount to absolute protection.[198]

Among the clergy, properly so called, however, the prevailing offence was
not crime, but licentiousness. A doubt has recently crept in among our
historians as to the credibility of the extreme language in which the
contemporary writers spoke upon this painful topic. It will scarcely be
supposed that the picture has been overdrawn in the act books of the
Consistory courts; and as we see it there it is almost too deplorable for
belief, as well in its own intrinsic hideousness as in the unconscious
connivance of the authorities. Brothels were kept in London for the
especial use of priests;[199] the "confessional" was abused in the most
open and abominable manner.[200] Cases occurred of the same frightful
profanity in the service of the mass, which at Rome startled Luther into
Protestantism;[201] and acts of incest between nuns and monks were too
frequently exposed to allow us to regard the detected instances as
exceptions.[202] It may be said that the proceedings upon these charges