So St. Abbo of Fleury might exhaust his eloquence in inculcating the beauty and holiness of immaculate purity, and might pile authority on authority to demonstrate the punishments which, in this world and the next, attended on those who disobeyed the rule;[351] yet when he endeavored, in the monastery of La Réole, a dependency on his own great abbey of Fleury, to put his precepts into practice, the recalcitrant monks flew to arms and murdered him in the most brutal manner, not even sparing the faithful Adalard, who was reverently supporting the head of his beloved and dying master.[352] Damiani might well exclaim, when bewailing the unfortunate fate of abbots, on whom was thrown the responsibility of the morals of their communities— Phinees si imitatur, Fugit vel expellitur; Si Eli, tunc irridetur Atque parvipenditur; Odiosus est, si fervens, Et vilis, si tepidus.[353] How little disposed were the ecclesiastical authorities in general to sustain the efforts of puritans like St. Abbo was clearly shown in the council of St. Denis, convened in 995 for the purpose of restoring the neglected discipline of the church, when, passing over the object of its assembling, the reverend fathers devoted their whole attention to the more practically interesting question of tithes.[354] All prelates, however, were not either feudal chiefs or ascetic puritans. Some, who were pious and virtuous, had so far become infected with the prevailing laxity that they regarded the stricter canons as obsolete, and offered no opposition to the domestic aspirations of their clergy. Thus Constantine, Abbot of the great house of St. Symphorian of Metz, in his life of Adalbero II., who was Bishop of Metz from 984 to 1005, actually praises him for his liberality in not refusing ordination to the sons of priests, and attributes discreditable motives to those bishops who insisted on the observance of the canons prohibiting all such promotions.[355] As Constantine was a monk and a disciple of Adalbero, the tone which he adopts that the higher prelates and the regular clergy were beginning to recognize sacerdotal marriage as a necessity of the age. This view is strengthened by the fact that no effort to reform an abuse so universal was made at the great synod of Dortmund, held in 1005 for the special purpose of restoring the discipline of the church.[356]