Money being the real qualification for the ministry of the Gospel, the priests were generally as illiterate as they were immoral. “They haunt the taverns and brothels, consuming time and substance in eating, drinking, and gambling; they quarrel, fight, and blaspheme, and hasten to the altar from the embraces of their concubines.”[2] The higher clergy, who could readily purchase exemptions, considered themselves free to indulge in every kind of excess; the monks were licentious and unruly vagabonds, who carefully avoided keeping their vows; the mendicants, who pretended to greater strictness, gave themselves up to every kind of fleshly indulgence; the morals of nunneries were such that to join one was the same thing as becoming a public prostitute. A Jew is said to have become convinced that Christianity must be of God, since it continued to exist in spite of the wickedness of the clergy. The visions of St. Birgitta and the vehement warnings of St. Catherine of Siena were fruitless to stem the torrent of iniquity. Nearly the whole Church being in this condition, reform from within was hopeless, as indeed was stated in 1437 by a Dominican bishop. Exaggeration may be suspected, but that it was not easy to exaggerate the following incident will show. “In 1459 there died at Arras at the age of eighty Nicaise le Vasseur, canon and head of the Chapter of Arras. He not only had daughters and committed incest with them, but also with a granddaughter whom he had by one of them. Yet so blunted was the moral sense of Church and people that, as we are told, this monster officiated _très honorablement_ in Divine service on all feasts and holidays, and the only comment of the chronicler is that he did it most becomingly. When in 1474 news of the death of Sixtus IV was received in Rome with a pæan of joy, people commented not so much upon his selling benefices to the highest bidder and his other devices for extorting money as upon the manner in which he rewarded the boys who served his unnatural lusts by granting to them rich bishoprics and archbishoprics.”[3] When Pope Alexander VI was reproached with Papal connivance with crime, he is said to have made the cynical reply: “God does not desire the death of a sinner, but that he should pay, and live.”[4]