Having traced the rise of the Church of Rome to this point, it yet remains to say that the corruption of her clergy and members kept pace with the developing splendor of the hierarchy. The pride, ambition and wickedness which bishops and other ministers of the church practiced in the second and third centuries have already been pointed out, and at the same time it was suggested that in these matters there was not likely to be any improvement after ease and luxury--ever the panderers to immorality--had increased the appetite for sensual pleasures and supplied the means of gratification. Early in the history of the church the morality of the times not only excused but justified lying and deceit whenever it was supposed that the interests of religion could be promoted by it; and hence the existence of that mass of childish fable and falsehood respecting the infancy and youth of Messiah, and the wonder-working power of the relics of the saints and martyrs which has brought the Christian religion into contempt. Not even the greatest and most pious teachers of the first five or six centuries are free from this leprosy; [16] and if such characters as Ambrose, Hilary, Augustine, Gregory Nazianzen, and Jerome are not free from it, how much more may we expect to find it a vice with men of less reputation! The attempt to live in a state of celibacy gave rise to many scandals in the church. Ambitious of a peculiar sanctity, the clergy began to abstain from marriage, but not from the pleasures supposed to be peculiar to the married state. It became the custom for the priests to live with "sub-introduced women," who "passed as sisters of the priests, the correctness of whose taste was often exemplified by the remarkable beauty of their sinful partners." [17] It is only fair to say that a law of Honorius condemned this practice, but it is to be feared that the only effect of the law upon those undertaking to live in the unnatural condition which celibacy imposes was merely to drive the practice from the public gaze. Of all the writers who have given us a description of the moral condition of the church in the period of which I write, I think Salvian, who wrote about the middle of the fifth century, is the most vivid, and hence I quote in part his arraignment: