Yet the readiness to relax the rule when a substantial advantage was to be gained still continued, and when the effort, commenced at the council of Lyons in 1274, to reunite the Greek church under the supremacy of the Holy See was apparently successful, Nicholas III. stoutly insisted upon the addition of “_filioque_” to the Symbol, but was discreetly silent as to separating the wives of priests from their husbands, promising in general terms that in all that merely concerned ritual observances the way should be made easy for them.[823] In Southern Italy, when the churches were actually brought together under the domination of Rome, priests of Greek origin were allowed to retain their wives, but married clerks of Latin parentage were not permitted to enter holy orders without separation. It not infrequently happened that the latter endeavored to elude the prohibition by getting themselves ordained in the Greek church, and it became necessary to denounce severe penalties not only against them, but against the prelates who permitted it.[824] XXI. RESULTS. The unrelaxing efforts of two centuries had at length achieved an inevitable triumph. One by one the different churches of Latin Christendom yielded to the fiat of the successor of St. Peter, and their ecclesiastics were forced to forego the privilege of assuming the most sacred of earthly ties with the sanction of heaven and the approbation of man. Sacerdotalism vindicated its claim to exclusive obedience; the church successfully asserted its right to command the entire life of its members, and to sunder all the bonds that might allure them to render a divided allegiance. In theory, at least, all who professed a religious life or assumed the sacred ministry were given up wholly to the awful service which they had undertaken: no selfishly personal aspirations could divert their energies from the aggrandizement of their class, nor were the temporal possessions of the establishment to be exposed to the minute but all-pervading dilapidation of the wife and family. If these were the objects of the movement inaugurated by Damiani and Hildebrand, and followed up with such unrelenting vigor by Calixtus and Alexander and Innocent, the history of the mediæval church attests how fully they were attained. It is somewhat instructive, indeed, to observe that in the rise of the papal power to its culmination under Innocent III. it was precisely the pontiffs most conspicuous for their enforcement of the rule of celibacy who were likewise most prominent in their assertion of the supremacy, temporal and spiritual, of the head of the Roman church. Whether or not they recognized and acknowledged the connection, they labored as though the end in view was clearly appreciated, and their triumphs on the one field were sure to be followed by corresponding successes on the other.