It is no exaggeration to repeat, as we have said, that the Church never achieved anything like complete celibacy. A rapid survey of the ground under Mr. Lea's guidance will confirm and explain this statement. During the first three centuries there is no evidence that celibacy was deemed essential to the clerical character, or even that it was thought especially desirable. It was natural that during the early years of the Church, and under the stress of persecution, it should not multiply the restrictions placed upon the freedom of its adherents. Up to the period of the Council of Nicæa, therefore, the virtues of chastity were maintained only by isolated groups of ascetics, animated by that spirit of Puritanism which seems to have existed in every faith in every stage of its history. When men are looking about them for means to mortify the flesh and to stifle the heart, a prohibition of marriage is the first expedient that suggests itself. Until this is done away with, further severities are impossible. Marriage, however, was not condemned at a single blow. The first step was to forbid second marriages. A bachelor in holy orders might marry with impunity; a widower did so at his peril. Having effected this concession, the ascetic spirit found means to increase its influence. It received a strong impulse at the close of the second century, as Mr. Lea affirms, by the rise of the Neoplatonic philosophy, with all its mystical and stoical tendencies, and by the introduction into Europe and the rapid spread of the great Manichæan heresy. In the view of this doctrine, man's body was the work of the Devil, and condemned as such to ceaseless abuse and mortification by his soul. Among the ascetic excesses which were the logical consequences of such a dogma, inveterate chastity was, of course, not the last to be enjoined. Manichæism was an object of violent detestation to the Church; but as the latter could not afford to let itself be outdone in austerity by a vulgar heresy, it began to adopt a similar uncompromising attitude towards marriage. The Council of Nicæa was held in 325. This body, however, was chiefly occupied with debates upon Arianism, and is responsible but for a single enactment bearing on the subject in hand. The bearing of this enactment is, moreover, indirect, inasmuch as Mr. Lea conclusively proves that it refers not to lawful wives, (as in later ages of the Church it became needful to assume that it _did_ refer,) but to female companions of the unlicensed sort. For more than half a century after the Nicæan Council, the movement of the celibatarian spirit is lost sight of in the all-absorbing disputes on the Arian heresy. A strong reaction, however, is signalized by the issue, under Pope Damasus, in the year 385, of the first definite command imposing perpetual celibacy as an absolute rule of discipline on the ministers of the altar. This was very well as an injunction, but it was nothing without enforcement.