And as were the bishops, so were the priests. When once it became clear that the main road to ecclesiastical preferment lay through the temporal service of the crown, the whole body of secular clergy turned into a nursery of statesmen, and while they rose to their highest point of worldly importance the little spiritual influence which they still retained passed altogether away. But the Church’s life was not in her bishops and her priests; it was in her humble, faithful laity. Down below the dull utilitarianism, the “faithless coldness of the times,” the finer sympathies and higher instincts of the soul lay buried but not dead; ready to spring to the surface with a burst of enthusiasm at the touch first of the Austin canons, and then of the monks of Citeaux. Of the two religious movements which at this time stirred the depths of English society, the earlier, that of the Austin canons, was in its origin not monastic but secular. It arose, in fact, out of a protest against monasticism. About the middle of the eleventh century an attempt had been made to redress the balance between the regular and secular clergy, and restore to the latter the influence and consideration in spiritual matters which they had, partly by their own fault, already to a great extent lost. Some earnest and thoughtful spirits, distressed at once by the abuse of monastic privileges and by the general decay of ecclesiastical order, sought to effect a reform by the establishment of a stricter and better organized discipline in those cathedral and other churches which were served by colleges of secular priests. For this end a rule composed in the eighth century by Archbishop Chrodegang of Metz for the members of his own chapter, and generally followed in the collegiate churches of Gaul, was the model adopted by cathedral reformers in England in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and William the Conqueror. Bishops Gisa of Wells and Leofric of Exeter under the former king, Archbishop Thomas of York under the latter, severally attempted to enforce it upon their canons, but without success. The English clergy were accustomed to the full enjoyment not only of their separate property but of their separate houses; many were even yet, in spite of Pope Gregory, married men and fathers of families; and the new rule, which required them to break up their homes and submit to community of table and dwelling, was naturally resented as an attempt to curtail their liberty and bring them under monastic restraint. Lanfranc soon found that the only way to get rid of the old lax system was to get rid of the canons altogether; accordingly, from some few cathedrals the secular clerks were once again, as in Eadgar’s days, driven out and replaced by monks, this time to return no more till the great secularization in the sixteenth century. But in the greater number of churches the canons were influential enough to resist expulsion as well as reform,