The gradual, silent and half-unconscious modification in the type of Morals which took place after the Reformation was certainly not the least important of its results. If it may be traced in some degree to the distinctive theology of the Protestant Churches, it was perhaps still more due to the abolition of clerical celibacy which placed the religious teachers in the centre of domestic life and in close contact with a large circle of social duties. There is even now a distinct difference between the morals of a sincerely Catholic and a sincerely Protestant country, and this difference is not so much, as controversialists would tell us, in the greater and the less as in the moral type, or, in other words, in the different degrees of importance attached to different virtues and vices. Probably nowhere in the world can more beautiful and more reverent types be found than in some of the Catholic countries of Europe which are but little touched by the intellectual movements of the age, but no good observer can fail to notice how much larger is the place given to duties which rest wholly on theological considerations, and how largely even the natural duties are based on such considerations and governed, limited, and sometimes even superseded by them. The ecclesiastics who at the Council of Constance induced Sigismund to violate the safe-conduct he had given, and, in spite of his solemn promise, to condemn Huss to a death of fire,[14] and the ecclesiastics who at the Diet of Worms vainly tried to induce Charles V. to act with a similar perfidy towards Luther, represent a conception of morals which is abundantly prevalent in our day. It is no exaggeration to say that in Catholic countries the obligation of truthfulness in cases in which it conflicts with the interests of the Church rests wholly on the basis of honour, and not at all on the basis of religion. In the estimates of Catholic rulers no impartial observer can fail to notice how their attitude towards the interest of the Church dominates over all considerations of public and private morals. In past ages this was much more the case. The Church filled in the minds of men a place at least equal to that of the State in the Roman Republic. Men who had made great sacrifices for it and rendered great services to it were deemed, beyond all others, the good men, and in those men things which we should regard as grossly criminal appeared mere venial frailties. Let any one who doubts this study the lives of the early Catholic saints, and the still more instructive pages in which Gregory of Tours and other ecclesiastical annalists have described the characters and acts of the more prominent figures in the secular history of their times, and he will soon feel that he has passed into a moral atmosphere and is dealing with moral measurements and perspectives wholly unlike those of our own day.[15]