Yet in all this the ostensible object was always represented to be the purity of the church and of its ministers. The other advantages were either systematically ignored or but casually alluded to. One warning voice, indeed, was raised, in a quarter where it would have at least commanded respectful attention, had not the church appeared to imagine itself superior to the ordinary laws of cause and effect. While Innocent II. was laboring to enforce his new doctrine that ordination and religious vows were destructive of marriage, St. Bernard, the ascetic reformer of monachism and the foremost ecclesiastic of his day, was thundering against the revival of Manichæism. The heresies of the Albigenses respecting marriage were to be combated, and, in performing this duty, he pointed out with startling vigor the evils to the church and to mankind of the attempt to enforce a purity incompatible with human nature. Deprive the church of honorable marriage, he exclaimed, and you fill her with concubinage, incest, and all manner of nameless vice and uncleanness.[825] It was still an age of faith; and while earnest men like St. Bernard could readily anticipate the evils attendant upon the asceticism of heretics, they could yet persuade themselves, as the Council of Trent subsequently expressed it, that God would not deny the gift of chastity to those who rightly sought it in the bosom of the true church—though St. Bernard himself confessed that crimes which he dared not even to name commonly followed after the fornication, adultery, and incest which specially characterized innumerable ministers of Christ.[826] It remains for us to see what was the success of the attempt thus deliberately to tempt the Lord.