It was a period when the dark triumph of what is called materialism, or animalism, was as yet relieved only by a sporadic gleam of idealism. There was purity in places, but over the broad face of the land passion knew little law. If the unlettered Greek had immoral gods to encourage him, the mediæval had immoral pastors. The Church was just endeavouring to enforce its unfortunate law of celibacy on them. With a stroke of the pen it had converted thousands of honest wives into concubines. The result was utter and sad demoralisation. In thus converting the moral into the deeply immoral, the Church could appeal to no element in the consciences of its servants; nor even to its basic Scriptures. Writers of the time use hyperbolic language in speaking of the prevalent vice, and the facts given in the chronicles, and embodied in the modern collections of ancient documents, fully sustain it. Speaking of the close of the eleventh century, Dubois, in his _Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis_, says: ‘The condition of the Church [in general] at that time was unhappy and wretched ... nearly all the clergy were infected with the vice of simony ... lust and shameful pleasure were openly rampant.’ It is true that he excepts his ‘Church of Paris,’ but his own facts show that it is only a piece of foolish loyalty. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, who studied at Paris towards the close of the century (it must have been worse in Abélard’s time), gives a clearly overdrawn, yet instructive, picture of its life in his _Historia Occidentalis_. ‘The clergy,’ he says, probably meaning the scholars in general, of whom the majority were clerics, ‘saw no sin in simple fornication. Common harlots were to be seen dragging off clerics as they passed along to their brothels. If they refused to go, opprobrious names were called after them. School and brothel were under the same roof—the school above, the brothel below.... And the more freely they spent their money in vice, the more were they commended, and regarded by almost everybody as fine, liberal fellows.’ The vice that has ever haunted educational centres and institutes was flagrant and general. It is a fact that the authorities had at length to prohibit the canons to lodge students in their houses on the island. In the country and in the other towns the same conditions were found. In Father Denifle’s _Chartularium_ there is a document (No. V.) which throws a curious light on the habits of the clergy. A priest of Rheims was dancing in a tavern one Sunday, when some of the scholars laughed at him. He pursued them to their school, took the place by storm, half-murdered, and then (presumably recalling his sacerdotal character) excommunicated them. At another time, Cardinal Jacques tells us, the lady of a certain manor warned the priest of the village to dismiss his concubine. He refused; whereupon the noble dame had the woman brought to her, and ordained her ‘priestess,’ turning her out before the admiring villagers with a gaudy crown.