Horrors like these were, it may be hoped, exceptional, but there is a vast mass of evidence proving that society as a whole, and the clerical element in particular, was morally in a condition that can scarcely be matched in history. A French writer of the nineteenth century, Abbé Helsen, alludes to the “ordinary custom” that when a priest’s servant “becomes pregnant and cannot be saved by a prudent absence he dismisses her, and takes another, perhaps younger and more attractive.”[9] In many convents the nuns abandoned themselves “to the most hideous licentiousness--those who were good-looking prostituting themselves for hire; those who were not so fortunate hiring men to gratify their passions, while the older ones acted as procuresses.”[10] In Spain, according to Pelayo, a fourteenth-century writer, the illegitimate children of priests were almost as numerous as those of the laity. Of Avignon, Petrarch says that “chastity was a reproach and licentiousness a virtue.” The aged priests were fouler in their wickedness than the younger, while with the Pontiff the vilest crimes were pastimes. And Petrarch claims to tell only part of the truth. Of all European countries the same story is told. Details concerning the French clergy of the eighth century are “unfit for publication” in the twentieth. In nunneries infanticide was common, and priests had to be forbidden to have mothers, aunts, or sisters living in their houses. The Archdeacon of Salzburg in 1175 lamented bitterly his complete failure to reform the clergy or prevent the ordination of priests who continued to live in adultery with the wives of other men; while four centuries later the German prelates were vigorously assailed for allowing such foulness as still existed in the Church. They excused themselves by pointing to the example set by the Pope. A specially culpable Spanish priest was charged in 1535 with blasphemy, theft, cheating, seduction, brothel-haunting, and other offences. He did not go unpunished. He was fined two ducats, the costs of his trial, and thirty days’ seclusion! A protest was made by the Senate of Rome in 1538 against the reforming efforts of Pius V on the ground that the compulsory celibacy of priests would make it impossible for the citizens to preserve the virtue of their wives and daughters. Peter Cantor and others in the twelfth century deplored the moral superiority of the laity; the same thing had been said in England as far back as the times of St. Dunstan; and the Beggars’ Petition of 1535 showed that the anomaly still existed more than four hundred years later.