In an age when everything was unsettled, yet with tendencies so strongly marked, it thus became a matter of vital importance to the church to prevent anything like hereditary occupation of benefices or private appropriation of property, and against these abuses its strongest efforts were directed. The struggle lasted for centuries, and it is indeed most fortunate for our civilization that sacerdotalism triumphed, even at the expense of what at the moment may appear of greater importance. I cannot here pause to trace the progress of the contest in its long and various vicissitudes. It will be found constantly reappearing in the course of the following pages, and for the present it will suffice to group together a few evidences to show how rapidly the hereditary tendency developed itself in the period under consideration. The narrowness of the escape from ecclesiastical feudalization is well illustrated by an incident at the council of Tours, in 925, where two priests, _father and son_, Ranald and Raymond, appeared as complainants, claiming certain tithes detained from them by another priest. They gained the suit, and the tithes were confirmed to them and their successors forever.[326] Even more suggestive is the complaint, some thirty years later, of Ratherius, Bishop of Verona, who objects strenuously to the ordination of the children sprung from these illegal marriages, as each successive father made his son a priest, thus perpetuating the scandal indefinitely throughout the church; and as he sorrowfully admits that his clergy could not be restrained from marriage, he begs them at least to bring their children up as laymen.[327] This, however, by his own showing, would not remove the material evil, for in another treatise he states that his priests and deacons divided the church property between them, that they might have lands and vineyards wherewith to provide marriage portions for their sons and daughters.[328] This system of appropriation also forms the subject of lamentation for Atto, Bishop of Vercelli, whose clergy insisted on publicly keeping concubines—as he stigmatizes those who evidently were wives—to whom they left by will everything that they could gather from the possessions of the church, from the alms of the pious, or from any other source, to the ruin of ecclesiastical property and to the deprivation of the poor.[329] How well founded were these complaints is evident from a document of the eleventh century concerning the churches of St. Stephen and St. Donatus in Aretino. The priests in charge appropriated to themselves all the possessions of the churches, including the revenues of the altars, the oblations, and the confessional. These they portioned out among each other and handed down from father to son as regularly as any other property, selling and exchanging their shares as the interest of the moment might suggest, and the successive transmission of each fragment of property