The only church legally tolerated was that of Rome; and this, as the unchallenged authority in the school and the pulpit, the keeper of confessional secrets and family skeletons, and the sole dispenser of organized charity, long wielded a tremendous power. The clerical _fuero_, which exempted all ecclesiastics from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, reinforced it, and the wealth and financial connections of the Church did the same. In certain respects, however, the strength of the organization began to diminish early in the nineteenth century; and in particular the Inquisition was abolished in Mexico, as it was in Spain. Soon after the colony became independent, a disposition to bar ecclesiastics from legislative bodies, to philosophize on religious matters and to view Protestants with some toleration manifested itself. Ten years more, and the urgent need of public schools led to certain steps, as we shall see, toward secular education. Political commotions, the exactions of powerful civil authorities under the name of loans, and various other circumstances cut into the wealth of the Church; and the practical impossibility of selling the numberless estates upon which it had mortgages or finding good reinvestments in the case of sales, compelled it, as the country became less and less prosperous, to put up with delays and losses of interest.[1.5] Moreover the Church was to no slight extent a house divided against itself. Under Spanish rule and substantially down to 1848, all the high dignities fell to Gachupines, who naturally faced toward Spain, whereas the parish priests were mainly Creoles with Mexican sympathies; and while the bishops and other managers had the incomes of princes, nearly all of the monks and ordinary priests lived in poverty. There was, therefore, but little in common between the two ranks except the bare fact of being churchmen, which was largely cancelled on the one side by contempt and on the other side by envy; and the common priests, having generally sided against Spain during the revolution and always been closely in touch with the people, exercised, in spite of their pecuniary exactions, an influence that largely balanced the authority of their heads. Finally, the ignorance of most ecclesiastics and the immorality of nearly all greatly diminished their moral force. A large number, even among the higher clergy, were unable to read the mass; and the monks, who in the early days of the colony had rendered good service as missionaries, were now recruited--wrote an American minister--from "the very dregs of the people," and constituted a public scandal.[1.5]