another, in reading Mr. Lea's work, it is that, on the whole, the Church
must have been at any moment a tolerably faithful reflection of the
manners and feelings of the time. Its empire was practicable only by
means of a constant renewal of the exquisite and everlasting compromise
between man's transient interests and his external destiny. Taken as a
whole, it never pretended to ride rough-shod over his natural passions
and instincts. It pretended to convert them to its own service and
aggrandizement. It respected them, it handled them gently. And as these
passions and instincts have never been exclusively evil or exclusively
good, so the Church has never been wholly corrupt or wholly pure. It has
been animated by the average moral enlightenment of the time, and it has
grown with men's moral growth. Reared, as it was, upon the primitive
needs of men's nature, it is difficult to see how the result should have
been different. And if the Catholic Church has lost that firmness of
grasp upon human affection which it once possessed, it is not that
laymen have become more virtuous than priests; it is that they have
become more intelligent. The intellectual growth of the Church has
lagged behind its moral growth. Secular humanity is perfectly willing to
admit that its sacerdotal counterpart observes the Decalogue equally
well with itself; but it contests the right of an institution, of whose
long spiritual efforts this insignificant accomplishment is the only
surviving result, to impose itself further upon men's respect and
obedience. The reader has only to remember, then, that Mr. Lea's volume
is not a history of the Church at large, but only a history of a single
province, and he will find it full of profit and edification.

It is no exaggeration to repeat, as we have said, that the Church never
achieved anything like complete celibacy. A rapid survey of the ground
under Mr. Lea's guidance will confirm and explain this statement. During
the first three centuries there is no evidence that celibacy was deemed
essential to the clerical character, or even that it was thought
especially desirable. It was natural that during the early years of the
Church, and under the stress of persecution, it should not multiply the
restrictions placed upon the freedom of its adherents. Up to the period
of the Council of Nicaea, therefore, the virtues of chastity were
maintained only by isolated groups of ascetics, animated by that spirit
of Puri