et, little solicitous as to the hands they might fall into,
provided only they were well paid according to the terms of the
agreement. The archbishops, bishops, and cardinals of France were almost
all at the court of the king and the princes. The abbots, priors and
curates resided in the large cities and in other places, wherein they
took more delight than within the limits of their charges and preaching
the true word of God to their subjects and parishioners. From their
indifference the Lutheran heretics took occasion to slander the Church
of Jesus Christ and to seduce Christians from it."[102]

[Sidenote: No regard to the spiritual wants of the people.]

Such a condition of utter indifference on the part of the clergy to the
interests of the souls committed to their charge cannot surprise us when
we learn that benefices were conferred without regard to the wants of
the people. The Venetian Soranzo, in an address delivered after the
fruits of the concordat had had full time to mature,[103] declared that
in the majority of cases these ecclesiastical positions were dispensed
with little respect to things sacred, and through simple favor. They
served as a convenient method of rewarding good services. Little account
was made of the qualifications of the candidate, who might have earned
his reward in the army or in the civil service. And so it often happened
that he who to-day was a merchant or a soldier, to-morrow was made
bishop or abbot. When, indeed, the fortunate man had a wife or was
reluctant to assume the habit, he could readily get permission to place
the benefice in the name of another, himself retaining the income.[104]
"These new pastors," said Correro, "placed in charge of the churches men
who had taken it into their heads to be clergymen only to avoid the
toils of some other occupation--men who, by their avarice and
dissoluteness of life, confused the innocent people and removed their
previous great devotion. _This was the door, this was the spacious
gateway, by which heresies entered France._ For the ministers sent from
Geneva were easily able to create in the people a hatred of the priests
and friars, _by simply weighing in the balance the life led by the
latter_."[105]

[Sidenote: The clergy before the concordat.]

It was the fashion among those who passed for philosophers to ascribe
the universal dissolution of morals among French ecclesiastics to the
operation of the concordat between Francis the First