unnatural, so fraught with evil--has never been repealed; it still
rules the Catholic priesthood of Europe and America. Nor will it
be repealed so long as the ideas of the Middle Ages have more force
than enlightened reason. It is an abominable law, but who can
doubt its efficacy in cementing the power of the popes?

But simony, or the sale of eeclesiastical benefices, was a still
more alarming evil to the mind of Gregory. It was the great
scandal of the Church and age. Here we honor the Pope for striving
to remove it. And yet its abolition was no easy thing. He came in
contact with the selfishness of barons and kings. He found it an
easier matter to take away the wives of priests than the purses of
princes. Priests who had vowed obedience might consent to the
repudiation of their wives, but would great temporal robbers part
with their spoils? The sale of benefices was one great source of
royal and baronial revenues. Bishoprics, once conferred for wisdom
and piety, had become prizes for the rapacious and ambitious.
Bishops and abbots were most frequently chosen from the ranks of
the great. Powerful Sees were the gifts of kings to their
favorites or families, or were bought by the wealthy; so that
worldly or incapable men were made overseers of the Church of
Christ. The clergy were in danger of being hopelessly secularized.
And the evil spread to the extremities of the clerical body. The
princes and barons were getting control of the Church itself.
Bishops often possessed a plurality of Sees. Children were
elevated to episcopal thrones. Sycophants, courtiers, jesters,
imbecile sons of princes, became great ecclesiastical dignitaries.
Who can wonder at the degeneracy of the clergy when they held their
cures at the hands of lay patrons, to whom they swore allegiance
for the temporalities of their benefices? Even the ring and the