But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor? That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious. In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he, "are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_ from payment.---- Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the billow of money, and began:-- "Your Highness! "The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_ for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope: why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven! if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_ worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."