What the sovereign pontiff was to the bishops, the mendicant monks, the venders of indulgences, and the other vagabond agents of the Papacy, were to the simple curates and the parish priests. Regular and legitimate authority was compelled to give way to these intruders, who, while they promised to reinstate the flocks, did nothing but pervert them. All was disorder and anarchy. A despotic power was at the summit of the Church; midway and below, were growing usurpations, scandalous and never-ceasing contests; Christianity had much less reason to complain of being too much governed, than of being badly governed. Illusory in the ranks of the clergy, discipline had actually become a source of demoralization for the laity. To the long and severe penances of ancient times had succeeded the redemption of sins at a money price. If, at least, it had been necessary to pay for each transgression separately, it would yet have been necessary to number one’s vices. The extreme evil was, that they might be redeemed all at once, they might be redeemed beforehand, for all one’s lifetime, for all one’s family, for all one’s posterity, for a whole parish altogether. Thenceforward, there was no more authority. The absolution of the priest was derided, because absolution had already been paid for out of the purse; and the clerical power that Rome maintained on one side, she overthrew on the other. The traffic of indulgences was carried on by the same means as ordinary barter; it had its contractors on a large scale, its directors and sub-directors, its offices, its tariffs, its travelling factors. Indulgences were vended by auction, at the beat of the drum, in the public places. They were sold by wholesale and by retail, and those agents were employed, who best knew the art of deceiving and plundering mankind. It was, above all, this sacrilegious industry which gave the fatal blow to the Romish church. Nothing irritates a people so much as to find in religion less morality than in themselves; and this instinct is just. Every religion should ameliorate those who believe in it. When it depraves them, when it makes them descend beneath that condition in which they would be without it, its fall is certain; for it possesses no longer its essential and supreme reason of existence. How, moreover, could the members of the clergy enforce a respect for moral duties, which they were the first to transgress? We will not here recount the disgraceful and universal licentiousness so numerously attested by authentic declarations, among others by the _hundred grievances_ which were presented to the diet of Nuremberg, in 1523, with the signature of a legate even of Pope Adrian. Many priests paid a public tax for the privilege of living in an unlawful commerce, and in many localities in Germany this disorder had been rendered obligatory, so that still greater offences might be avoided.