Besides indulgences, Rome had invented all kinds of methods for increasing its revenues: appellations, reservations, exemptions, provisions, dispensations, expectatives, annates. The gold of Europe would have been completely absorbed if the governments had not placed some barrier; and even the poorest nations were compelled to impoverish themselves yet more to gorge pontiffs, who, like the grave, never exclaimed—“It is enough.” The bishops and the heads of monastic orders did the same in the different provinces of Catholicity. Everything helped them to swell the possessions of the Church; peace and war, public triumphs and misfortunes, private successes and reverses, the faith of these, and the heresy of those. What they could not obtain from the liberality of the faithful, they sought in the spoliation of those who disbelieved. And so, as the grievances of Nuremberg state, the regular and secular clergy possessed in Germany one-half the territory; in France it held the third; elsewhere, still more. And the ecclesiastical domains being exempt from all taxation, priests and monks, without bearing the burdens of the state, monopolized all its benefits. Not only did they enjoy enormous privileges for their property; they had others for their persons. Every clerk was an anointed of the Lord, a sacred thing for the civil judge. No one had a right to place his hand upon him, until he had been tried, condemned, and degraded by the members of his own order. The clergy thus formed a society wholly distinct from the general society. It was a caste placed without and above the common law; its immunities prevailed over the sovereignty of justice, and authors entitled to our credence relate that wretches entered the sacerdotal order or the cloister, solely to commit crimes with impunity. If the priests did not suffer the magistrates to attach them, they arrogated to themselves the right of interposing without end in the suits of the laity. Testaments and wills, marriages, the civil condition of children, and a host of other matters which were called mixed, were carried before their tribunal; so that a considerable part of justice depended upon the clergy, who themselves depended upon their peers and chief alone; an organization, useful perhaps in the times of ignorance, when none but ecclesiastics possessed any knowledge, but which, by perpetuating itself down to the sixteenth century, after the revival of letters, became the most iniquitous of prerogatives, the most intolerable of usurpations. There are in the present day writers who draw a magnificent ideal of the state of Catholicism before Luther. But have they ever studied that epoch? And those who declaim with the greatest violence against the Reformation, would they suffer for one day the abuses it has destroyed?