fathers, most frequently from Cyril of Alexandria, the so-called Pseudo-Cyril, in which the controverted questions were settled in favour of the Roman pretensions, and especially the most extreme claims to the primacy of the pope were asserted. It was presented in A.D. 1261 to Urban IV., who immediately guaranteed its genuineness in a letter to the emperor Michael Palæologus. On its adoption by Thomas Aquinas, who diligently employed its contents in his controversies against the Greeks as well as in his dogmatic works, it won respect and authority throughout all the countries of the West. § 97. THE CLERGY. By tithes, legacies, donations, impropriations, and the rising value of landed estates, the wealth of churches and monasteries grew from year to year. In this way benefit was secured not only to the clergy and the monks, but also in many ways to the poor and needy. The law of celibacy strictly enforced by Gregory VII. saved the church from the impoverishment with which it was beginning to be threatened by the dividing or squandering of the property of the church upon the children of the clergy. But while an absolute stop was put to the marriage of the clergy, it tended greatly to foster concubinage, and yet more shameful vices. Yet notwithstanding all the corruption that prevailed among the clerical order it cannot be denied that the superior as well as the inferior clergy embraced a great number of worthy and strictly moral men, and that the sacerdotal office which the people could quite well distinguish from the individuals occupying it, still continued to be highly respected in spite of the immoral lives of many priests. Even more hurtful to the exercise of their pastoral work than the immorality of individual clergymen was the widespread illiteracy and gross ignorance of Christian truth of those who should have been teachers.