practice of every imaginable vice, and shrank from no conceivable crime.
The mere fact that such an election was possible is sufficient proof of the
utter absence of religious feeling in the ruling ranks of the clergy: nor
was its presence compatible with the appointment either of his free living
and warlike successor Julius II. or of Leo X. who followed--a person of no
little culture, a patron of art and of letters, whose morals were not
exceptionally lax as compared with those of the average Italian noble, but
in all essentials a pagan. With few exceptions, the princes of the Church
owed their position to their connexion, by birth or otherwise, with great
families; not a few of them were territorial lords of considerable
dominions, for whom it was a sheer necessity to be politicians first,
whether they were scholars, ministers of the Gospel, or mere pleasure-
seekers afterwards. Italians completely dominated the college of cardinals,
looking upon the control of the Church as a national prerogative. The
characteristics of the ecclesiastical princes were shared in due degree by
bishops and abbots. The fact that until recent years learning had been
practically a clerical monopoly necessarily made the clergy the fittest
instruments for carrying on much State business, thereby withdrawing many
of the better men from the service of religion to the service of politics.
In brief, the whole system tended to entangle the able members of the
ecclesiastical body in the temptations not so much of the Flesh and the
Devil as of the World.

[Sidenote: Monastic corruption]

Further, the monastic system had utterly fallen away from its pristine
ideals. It had served a great purpose. Born as it was when the world was
just emerging from paganism, and the Roman civilisation was being engulfed
in the flood of barbarian invasion, the men and women who withdrew from the
desperate turmoil without to the sheltering walls of the monastery or the