While thus attaching so fanciful a holiness to virginity, the church came practically to erect a most singular standard of morality, the influence of which could but be most deplorable on the mass of the laity. In the earlier days of celibacy, the rule was regarded by the severer ecclesiastics as simply an expression of the necessity of purity in the minister of God. Theophilus of Alexandria, in the fifth century, decided that a man, who as lector had been punished for unchastity and had subsequently risen to the priesthood, must be expelled on account of his previous sin.[874] We have seen, however, how, when celibacy was revived under Damiani and Hildebrand, the question of immorality virtually disappeared, and the essential point became, not that a priest should be chaste, but that he should be unmarried, and this was finally adopted as the recognized law of the church. In 1213 the Archbishop of Lunden enquired of Innocent III. whether a man who had had two concubines was ineligible to orders as a _digamus_, and the pontiff could only reply that no matter how many concubines a man might have, either at one time or in succession, he did not incur the disability of digamy.[875] When such was the result of seven centuries of assiduous sacerdotalism in a church which was daily growing in authority; when the people thus saw that sexual excesses were no bar to ecclesiastical preferment in that church which made extravagant pretensions to purity; when the strict rules which forbade ordination to a layman who had married a widow, were relaxed in favor of those who were stained with notorious impurity, it is no wonder that the popular perceptions of morality became blunted, and that the laity did not deny themselves the indulgences which they saw tacitly allowed to their spiritual guides.