e fearless censor of
public and private morality."[501] These are, indeed, the functions
which the church ought to have fulfilled, and about which ecclesiastics
said something from time to time. Also, the church did do something for
these interests when no great interest of the church was at stake on
the other side. No unbiased student of the Middle Ages has been
convinced that, in truth and justice, the work of the mediaeval church
could be thus summed up. The one consistent effort of the church was to
establish papal authority. Its greatest crime was obscurantism, which
was war on knowledge and civilization. This nothing can palliate or
offset.

+229. The English church and the mores.+ The church, however, from 1000
A.D. on was a machine of societal selection, and it pursued its work,
suggesting and administering a work of that kind, grand results of which
have come down to us in the civilization we have inherited. Our work
largely consists in rational efforts to eliminate the elements which the
church introduced. In some respects the history of clerical celibacy in
England best illustrates the mores. In the sixteenth century the rule
and usage of the church had inculcated, as a deep popular prejudice, the
notion that a priest could not be married. Cranmer, in ordering a
visitation, directed investigation "whether any do contemn married
priests, and for that they be married will not receive the communion or
other sacrament at their hands."[502] This prejudice very slowly died
out, but it did die out and the popular judgment favored and required
clerical marriage. In the nineteenth century popular judgment rose in
condemnation of fox-hunting parsons, and also of pluralists, and it has
caused reforms and the disappearance of those classes.

+230. The selection of sacerdotal celibacy.+ If it had not been for
sacerdotal celibacy, there would have been ecclesiastical feudalization
and the ecclesiastical benefices would have become hereditary. The
children of priests inherited benefices and intermarried so long as the
marriage of priests was allowed. There would have been a priestly
caste.[503] The church as an institution would have been greatly
modified. The consequences we cannot imagine. If Hildebrand and the
other eleventh-century leaders foresaw the effect, it was statesmanship
on their part to establish the celibacy of the clergy. That institution
has molded the priesthood and the mores of all who have adhered to th