Although the clergy, and especially the members of the monastic orders, were, in these facetious productions, uniformly represented as objects of hatred and contempt, the practice of the vices and weaknesses imputed to them was evidently so common to their calling as not even to arouse those feelings of resentment which would naturally arise from accusations so nearly affecting their piety and virtue. So little attention, indeed, was paid to these disclosures of the habits of ecclesiastics, that their recital formed one of the ordinary diversions of conventual life, and the Gesta Romanorum, which long maintained a questionable celebrity, is a monkish compilation. When the spiritual guides of a community are deliberately held up to ridicule as the incarnation of all that is vile, rapacious, and bestial, their usefulness as directors of the public conscience and arbiters of private morals is at an end. Their pernicious example was not lost upon the people, although their influence for good declined. Universal corruption became the most prominent trait of every rank of society. The most glaring acts of impiety remained unrebuked. National faith and personal obligations were alike unblushingly violated. Every revolting crime was committed by those whose means were sufficient to appease sacerdotal venality and purchase temporary absolution. No epoch in European history presents a more distressing picture of social demoralization, of royal perfidy, of priestly hypocrisy, of universal wickedness, than the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But while this condition of affairs was productive of widespread moral debasement, it was not wholly an unmixed evil. The weakening of the sentiments of fatuous reverence with which things denominated sacred had for ages been regarded, awakened among the masses a spirit of intellectual independence. The right of the exercise of private judgment began to be first tolerated, and afterwards tacitly recognized. Then originated the great moral revolution which, subsequently checked and almost overwhelmed by the power of the Papacy and disgraced by scenes of horror to which history affords no parallel, ended in the momentous struggle of the sixteenth century, and the permanent triumph of reason over dogma, of intelligence over ecclesiastical authority.