Saving a few exceptions, who were types of the Temple of the Holy Ghost, the Church set the example of every form and every degree of contempt for its corporate body, for its individual members, and for its consecrated accessories. I have already spoken of the elegant cavaliers, who, in their leisure moments, played the part of priests. In their eyes a bishopric was a sinecure like another sinecure. The office of the priesthood entailed no special conduct, nor any special duty. In general, priests were shepherds who passed their lives at a distance from their flocks, revelling in luxury and in pleasure. "Turning abruptly," said an ecclesiastical writer, "from the pleasures of the Court to the austere duties of the priesthood, without any preparation save the royal ordinance,--an ordinance, peradventure, due to secret and unavowable solicitations,--men assumed the office and became bishops before they had received Holy Orders. Naturally, such haphazard bishops brought to the Episcopate minds far from ecclesiastical." In that day cardinals and bishops were seen distributing the benefits of their dioceses among their lower domestic tributaries. Thus valets, cooks, barbers, and lackeys were covered with the sacred vestments, and called to serve the altar.[96] Being abandoned to their own devices, the lesser clergy--heirs to all the failings and all the weaknesses of the lower classes of the people--grovelled in ignorance and in disorder. The continually augmenting evil was aggravated by the way in which the Church recruited the rank and file of her legions. As a rule, the cure, or living of the curé, was in the gift of the abbot. No one but the abbot had a right to appoint a curé. The abbot's power descended to his successor. That would have been well enough, had the abbot's virtues and good judgment--if such there had been--descended to the man immediately following him in office, but the abbot thus empowered to appoint the curé was seldom capable of making a good choice or even a decent choice.