To say nothing of the perpetual scandal about concubinage--an artificial form of sin, in itself no more decisive against a priest's character than celibacy in its favour--there is in the canons of the councils a most significant repetition of vetoes on various lines of conduct which stand for a lack of single-mindedness, and of serious interest in moral tasks. Century after century, the bishops are found forbidding the clergy to tell fortunes, to practise magic, to get drunk, to commit perjury, to take usury, to swear, and to haunt taverns, as well as to keep concubines. At the same time many of the bishops themselves had to be perpetually admonished. Under Justinian we hear of two eastern bishops convicted of unnatural vice, and--the law as usual exceeding the crime--punished by mutilation. Throughout the Middle Ages, as to-day, the normal complaints against bishops are on the score of avarice, luxury, and worldliness; but drunkenness is not unheard of; and whatever might be said in councils as to concubinage, it was certain that bishops took at least as much liberty of life as popes and presbyters. So far as moral example went, then, the social influence of the priesthood was mostly on the wrong side, since its normal concubinage was a perpetual lesson in hypocrisy. On this side, doubtless, the priests were no worse than other men; the trouble was that they set up to be better, and that the hierarchy was always seeking to keep up the repute of clerical sanctity by a claim to asceticism rather than by social beneficence. Thus they put it in the power of the "average sensual man" to convict of moral imposture a priesthood which, if free to marry, would have been much less vulnerable; and by constantly stressing self-denial on a wrong line they missed promoting self-control on right lines. The primary social needs of the Middle Ages were peace, civism, and cleanliness; and for none of these things did clerical teaching in general avail. On the contrary, it was in effect hostile to all three, since it made virtue consist in a right relation to the other world rather than to this, made religion a special ground for warfare, and made uncleanliness a meritorious form of "self-mortification," which in the Middle Ages was about the last thing that could be truly said of it.