With the substitution of an ignorant for a learned priesthood the influence of the Church upon Western Europe ceased. Down to the conquest it had not only claimed an equality with the Latin Church, but its learning was respected by popes, cardinals, and scholars, who recognised that it merited gratitude for its guardianship of Christian learning and for the succession of scholars who had expounded the treasures of its literature. [Sidenote: Benefits conferred by Church.] Yet amid all the meanness and debasement of the Christian Churches it should ever be remembered that they rendered to their people two inestimable services. They helped to preserve family life and to keep the great mass of their members from abandonment of the Christian profession. However abject the Church, however subservient at times its leaders became to the Ottoman rulers, and however we of the twentieth century may despise priestly pretensions and the claims of any body of men to have a supernatural commission, it is a duty to recognise that the service rendered by the Churches to the Christian subjects of the sultan, and indeed to humanity, in preserving the habits of family life was immeasurably great. One may fully admit that the priests were ignorant, and that the Church became more than ever saturated with pagan superstition; but it safeguarded the idea of Christian marriage based upon the union of the husband for life with one wife. Children were reared in the companionship of a father and mother to each of whom chastity and the necessity of forsaking all others was not merely a tradition and an ideal, but a duty enjoined by the universal teaching of the Church. The results of the education of children amid such teaching, tradition, and environment can only be appreciated when they are compared with those which are produced among their Moslem neighbours, where, under a system fatal to family life, the mother holds a position immeasurably inferior to that of the father. [Sidenote: Inducements to renounce Christianity.]