. Indeed, the Swiss clergy in 1230, frankly
stated that they "were flesh and blood, unequal to the task of living
like angels." The Council of Cologne, in 1307, tried in vain to give the
nuns a chance to live virtuous lives; to protect them from priestly
seduction. Conrad, Bishop of Wurzburg, in 1521, accused his priests of
habitual "gluttony, drunkenness, gambling, quarrelling, and lust."
Erasmus warned his clergy against concubinage. The Abbot of St. Pilazo
de Antealtarin was proved by competent witnesses to have no less than
seventy concubines. The old and wealthy Abbey of St. Albans was little
more than a den of prostitutes, with whom the monks lived openly and
avowedly. The Duke of Nuremburg, in 1522, was concerned with the
clerical immunity of monks who night and day preyed upon the virtue of
the wives and daughters of the laity.

The Church openly carried on a sale of indulgences in lust to
ecclesiastics which finally took the form of a tax. The Bishop of
Utrecht in 1347 issued an order prohibiting the admittance of men to
nunneries. In Spain, conditions became so intolerable that the
communities forced their priests to select concubines so that the wives
and daughters would be safe from the ravages of the clergy.

"The torture, the maiming, and the murder of Elgira by Dunstan
illustrates further, amongst thousands and thousands of similar bloody
deeds, the diabolical brutality of superstition perpetuated in the name
of Christianity upon women in the earlier centuries of our epoch.
Indeed, religious superstition always has contrived to rob, to pester,
to deceive, and to degrade women." (_Bell: "Women from Bondage to
Freedom."_)

During the Middle Ages, the ages in which the Church was in complete
domination of all forms of endeavor, the status of woman was no better
than the general conditions of the time. This Age of Faith is
characterized by "the violence and knavery that covered the whole
country, the plagues and famines that decimated towns and villages every
few years, the flood of spurious and indecent relics, the degradation of
the clergy and monks, the slavery of the serfs, the daily brutalities of
the ordeal and the torture, the course and bloody pastimes, the
insecurity of life, the triumphant ravages of disease, the check of
scientific inquiry and a hundred other features of medieval life."
(_Joseph McCabe: "Religion of Woman."_)

The Church was chiefly responsible for the terrible persecutions
in