and Ælfríc, and pious the spirit in which they wrought; but the foundation of their house was upon sand, and when the rains fell and the tempests roared around it vanished in a moment from before the sight of God and man, never to be reconstructed, even until the closing of the ages. The sources of revenue by which the bishops supported their temporal power will be considered in a subsequent chapter: it is enough that we find them to have been amply endowed with fitting means, in every part of Europe. During the Anglosaxon period, poverty and self-denial were not the characteristics of the class, however they may have distinguished certain members of the body. Nor will the philosophical enquirer see cause for regret in this: far more will he rejoice in the establishment of any system which tends to draw closer the bonds of intercourse between the clerical and lay members of the church, which leads to the identification of their worldly as well as their eternal interests, and unites them in one harmonious work of praise and thanksgiving, one active service of worship and charity and love, before the face of Him in whom they are united as one holy priesthood. It is the separation of the clergy from the laity, as a class, to which the world owes so many ages of misery and error; and to the comparative union of both orders in the church, we may perhaps attribute the general quiet which, in these respects, characterized the Anglosaxon polity. On these points of separation I shall also have something to say hereafter; but for the present one more subject alone remains to be treated of in this chapter, the last but not least remarkable function of the episcopal authority and power. By far the most important point of the public ecclesiastical jurisdiction,—for the _iurisdictio fori interni_ is quite another thing,—lay in the questions of marriage, which were especially reserved for the bishop’s cognizance. The prohibitions which the clergy enforced were obviously unknown to the strict Teutonic law, which permitted considerable licence in these respects. From Tacitus we learn that a sort of polygamy was not unknown on the part of the princes; it was probably looked upon as a useful mode of increasing the alliances of the tribe[896],—the only conceivable ground on which it could have been allowed by a race so strict in the observance of marriage. We do not know within what degrees the Germans permitted unions which the Roman clergy considered incestuous, but we do know that Gregory considered a relaxation of the strict rule necessary to the success of Augustine in Britain; that he gave the missionary positive instructions upon the subject, and, when blamed by his episcopal brother of Messina for this concession, justified his course by the danger which he apprehended for his plan of conversion, if the prejudices of the Saxons on so vital a point were too hastily shocked[897]. From these directions of Gregory we learn not only that the marriage of first