If the spiritual life of the English Church in the time of Henry I. were to be judged solely from her highest official representatives, it would certainly appear to have been at a low ebb. S. Anselm had lived just long enough to accomplish the settlement of the investitures, but not to direct its working or experience its results. On his death early in 1109 Henry so far fell back into his brother’s evil ways as to keep the metropolitan see vacant for five years. The supreme direction of affairs in the Church as well as in the state was thus left in the hands of the party represented by Roger of Salisbury. Roger’s policy and that of his master was indeed less flagrantly insulting to religion than that of Rufus and Flambard; but it was hardly less injurious in a moral and spiritual point of view. The most important sees were no longer farmed by Jewish usurers for the king’s benefit; the most sacred offices of the Church were no longer openly sold to the highest bidder; but they were made appendages to the great offices of the state; the Church herself was practically turned into a mere handmaid of the state, and her ministers into tools for the purposes of secular government. The system had undoubted advantages in a worldly point of view. A great deal of the most important political and administrative work was of a nature which, in the condition of society then existing, required the services of a clerk rather than of a layman; moreover, a man in holy orders, incapable of founding a family, and standing, so to say, alone in the world, was less exposed to the temptations and corruptions of place and power than a layman surrounded with personal and social ties and open to all sorts of personal and social ambitions, and could thus be safely intrusted with a freedom of action and authority such as in the hands of a lay baron with territorial and family influence might have led to the most dangerous results. On these and similar grounds Henry made a practice of choosing his chief ministers from the ranks of the clergy, and bestowing vacant bishoprics upon them, by way either of rewarding their past labours or of insuring a continuance of their zeal and devotion in the discharge of their temporal functions. Thereby he undoubtedly secured to the state the services of a more able, vigorous and honest set of administrators than could have been obtained by any other means; but from another side the system lay open to grave objection. The men whom it set over the dioceses of England were, beyond all question, men of very superior intelligence and energy, and, on the whole, of fair moral character, men whom it would be most unjust to compare for a moment with the hirelings who bought their sees of William Rufus. But they were essentially of the world, worldly; their minds and their hearts were both alike fixed on their thoroughly well fulfilled duties as treasurer or justiciar, not on their too often neglected duties as bishop of Ely or Salisbury.