His election was received by the Roman people with the utmost satisfaction, and celebrated with all possible demonstrations of joy. His transcendent abilities and his reckless methods could not fail to render him obnoxious to his companions and his rivals in Italy; but it is due rather to his foreign origin, his Valencian independence of character, and above all his insolent avoidance of hypocrisy in the affairs of his private life, that he has been made a kind of ecclesiastical and Papal scapegoat, a Churchman upon whose enormous vices Protestant controversialists are never tired of dilating, and whose private wickedness is ingenuously admitted by Catholic apologists as valuable for the purposes of casuistic illustration, as the one instance of a divinely infallible judge whose human nature yet remained mysteriously impure, and whose personal or individual actions may be admitted to have been objectively blamable. To measure the relative depths of human infamy is an impossible as well as an ungrateful task. It is not given to mortals to know the secrets of the heart. But bad as Alexander undoubtedly was, he was possibly no worse than many of his contemporaries in the Consistory, less wicked than some of his predecessors at the Vatican. The guilt of greater and more vigorous natures passes for superlative infamy with the crowd; but when dispassionately compared with that of his immediate predecessors, Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., the character of Alexander VI. is in almost every respect less flagitious and more admirable. So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See in the fourteenth century that sacred dialecticians and jurists of high authority were found seriously to argue that the Pope was not subjectively capable of committing the offense of Simony. It might have been contended with equal justice that in every other respect he was at once above, or without, the scope of the entire moral law. Nor can it be said that the fifteenth century brought any serious amendment.