avail, and it was not until the Church had regained much of its power in the counter Reformation that a really strict censorship could be established. _The Greek Church._ Although one Pope, Boniface VIII, issued a Bull decreeing that every human being, including the members of the Greek Church, was bound to obey the Roman Pontiff, a prudent and tolerant attitude was usually maintained towards that unsound but powerful rival. Stray members of the Greek communion who happened to be found in Western Europe were at times persecuted as heretics, and in 1351 all Greeks were ordered once a year to confess and take the sacrament according to the Latin usage. Any person who after this decree violated it was a relapsed heretic, and entitled to no mercy. But to coerce effectively a great religious organization, every member of which was in the eyes of Rome a heretic, proved too arduous a task for orthodoxy, and the Inquisition failed to utilize the glorious opportunities for persecution afforded by Eastern Europe, with its variety of races and religious ideas. The Church was therefore prudent enough to follow a line of policy as mild and tolerant as it was novel. _Indulgences and Simony._ The scandal to the cause of true religion which accompanied the sale of Indulgences was so notorious all over Europe that it is surprising to find that this abuse--deeply prejudicial to the Church and to public morals--was not considered to deserve vigorous repression. It is true that the practice was sometimes officially denounced, as when Pope Alexander IV gave the Inquisitors power to deal with the evil. But Lea asserts that, so far as he can discover, only one man was tried by the Inquisition for this prevalent offence. He admitted that he had been in the habit of telling monstrous falsehoods and filling the superstitious people with absurdities, but it is doubtful whether he was punished--if at all, it was by nothing more than a light penance. The remarkable lenity of the Church towards this traffic was, of course, due to the fact that it furnished a very substantial source of profit; but if the Popes had expended on the internal reform of the Church a hundredth part of the energy which they devoted to the suppression of minor differences of opinion the Reformation might conceivably have been averted. It was the Reformation that made imperative that moral renewal which prolonged the influence of the Church and still constitutes one of the chief elements of its strength.