Nor was it only in stimulating this general laxity of principle that the influence of the church was disastrous. The personal evil wrought by a dissolute priesthood was a wide-spreading contagion. The abuse of the awful authority given by the altar and the confessional, was a subject of sorrowful and indignant denunciation in too many synods for a reasonable doubt to be entertained of its frequency or of the corruption which it spread through innumerable parishes and nunneries.[876] The almost entire practical immunity with which these and similar scandals were perpetrated led to an undisguised and cynical profligacy which the severer churchmen acknowledged to exercise a most deleterious influence on the morals of the laity, who thus saw the examplars of evil in those who should have been their patterns of virtue.[877] In his bull of 1259, Alexander IV. does not hesitate to declare that the people, instead of being reformed, are absolutely corrupted by their pastors.[878] Thomas of Cantinpré, one of the early lights of the Dominican order, indeed, is authority for the legend which represents the devil as thanking the prelates of the church for conducting all Christendom to hell;[879] and the conviction which thus expressed itself is justified by the reproach of Gregory X., who, in dismissing the second council of Lyons, in 1274, told his assembled dignitaries that they were the ruin of the world.[880] Unfortunately, his threat to reform them if they did not reform themselves, remained unexecuted, and the complaint was repeated again and again.[881] That this state of things was clearly understood by the laity is only too visibly reflected in contemporary records. When, in 1374, the dancing mania, one of those strange epidemics which afflicted the Middle Ages, broke out through Germany and Flanders, the populace called to mind the forgotten regulations of Damiani and Hildebrand, and found a ready explanation of the visitation by assuming it to be a consequence of the vitiated baptism of the people by a concubinary priesthood.[882] Chaucer, with his wide range of observation and shrewd native sense, took a less superstitious, and more practical view of the evil, and in the admirable sermon which forms his “Persone’s Tale” he records the convictions which every pure-minded man must have felt with regard to the demoralizing tendencies of the sacerdotal licentiousness of the time.[883] How instinctively, indeed, the popular mind assumed the immorality of the pastor is illustrated by a passage in the earliest French pastoral that has reached us, dating from the latter half of the thirteenth century WARNIERS. Segneur je sui trop courechiés. GUIOS. Comment? WARNIERS. Mehalès est agute, M’amie, et s’a esté dechute; Car on dist que ch’est de no prestre. ROGAUS. En non Dieu! Warnier, bien puet estre; Car ele i aloit trop souvent.