nd blood eaten and
drunk by the worshippers. Without these rites there was no salvation,
and they acted automatically (_ex opere operato_) on the soul of the
faithful who put no active hindrance in their way. Save baptism, they
could be administered only by priests, a special caste with "an indelible
character" marking them off from the laity. Needless to remark the
immense power that this doctrine gave the clergy in a believing age.
They were made the arbiters of each man's eternal destiny, and their
moral character had no more to do with their binding and loosing sentence
than does the moral {28} character of a secular officer affect his
official acts. Add to this that the priests were unbound by ties of
family, that by confession they entered into everyone's private life,
that they were not amenable to civil justice--and their position as a
privileged order was secure. The growing self-assurance and
enlightenment of a nascent individualism found this distinction
intolerable.

[Sidenote: Other-worldliness]

Another element of medieval Catholicism to clash with the developing
powers of the new age was its pessimistic and ascetic other-worldliness.
The ideal of the church was monastic; all the pleasures of this world,
all its pomps and learning and art were but snares to seduce men from
salvation. Reason was called a barren tree but faith was held to blossom
like the rose. Wealth was shunned as dangerous, marriage deprecated as a
necessary evil. Fasting, scourging, celibacy, solitude, were cultivated
as the surest roads to heaven. If a good layman might barely shoulder
his way through the strait and narrow gate, the highest graces and
heavenly rewards were vouchsafed to the faithful monk. All this grated
harshly on the minds of the generations that began to find life glorious
and happy, not evil but good.

[Sidenote: Worship of saints]

Third, the worship of the saints, which had once been a stepping-stone to
higher things, was now widely regarded as a stumbling-block. Though far
from a scientific conception of natural law, many men had become
sufficiently monistic in their philosophy to see in the current
hagiolatry a sort of polytheism. Erasmus freely drew the parallel
between the saints and the heathen deities, and he and others scourged
the grossly materialistic form which this worship often took. If we may
believe him, fugitive nuns prayed for help in hiding their sin; merchants
for a rich haul; g