From now on the religious reform movement became the most important topic of general discussion everywhere and among all intelligent classes of Polish society. The abuses, faults, and shortcomings of the church were being keenly felt and freely talked about. Questions of faith, doctrine, and church dogmas were engaging everybody’s attention, and were discussed on every occasion and at every opportunity. They constituted the main topic of conversation, and sometimes of heated discussion, at dinners, feasts, and social gatherings, particularly if members of the clerical profession were present.[99] This general interest of the intelligent classes of the Polish people in the Reformation and the free discussion of the very fundamentals on which the existing ecclesiastical system rested were creating a great deal of uneasiness among the higher clergy, and caused them to put forth still more determined efforts in defense of the old faith and the old form of worship, not altogether from religious motives but also from economic and social considerations. The new movement was undermining their material resources as well as their social position and influence.[100] Every effort must, therefore, be made and every means employed to check this movement, if such a thing were possible. Thus at the Synod of Piotrków in 1542 the clergy resolved to demand of the king a strict enforcement of the royal edicts against heresy. It resolved, also, to forbid parents to send their children to heretical schools; to prohibit the reading of heretical books, which many were doing under the pretense of trying to qualify themselves to refute the heresy; to search homes for heretical writings; to enjoin the local authorities to keep a close watch over the booksellers and printers; to seize suspected works; and to punish all transgressors immediately and without delay. The synod of 1544 reaffirmed the stand of the church on these points, taken at the synod of 1542. All these decrees remained largely ineffective, for they needed for their enforcement the cooperation of civil authorities, which, however, could not now readily be obtained, since all the royal edicts and the synodical decrees against heresy violated constitutional rights granted the nobility in the fifteenth century.[101] The synod of 1547 was, therefore, forced to acknowledge the powerlessness of the church to cope with the new movement, and to admit that in many dioceses of Poland even the clergy were seriously affected by the spreading heresy, and that the church was in imminent danger of being swamped by it.[102]