amblers for luck; and prostitutes for generous {29}
patrons. Margaret of Navarre tells as an actual fact of a man who prayed
for help in seducing his neighbor's wife, and similar instances of
perverted piety are not wanting. The passion for the relics of the
saints led to an enormous traffic in spurious articles. There appeared
to be enough of the wood of the true cross, said Erasmus, to make a ship;
there were exhibited five shin-bones of the ass on which Christ rode,
whole bottles of the Virgin's milk, and several complete bits of skin
saved from the circumcision of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Temporal power of the church]

Finally, patriots were no longer inclined to tolerate the claims of the
popes to temporal power. The church had become, in fact, an
international state, with its monarch, its representative legislative
assemblies, its laws and its code. It was not a voluntary society, for
if citizens were not born into it they were baptized into it before they
could exercise any choice. It kept prisons and passed sentence
(virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments
as one power with another; it took principalities and kingdoms in fief.
It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6]

The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church. It needed a
new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the
Reformation. Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct
efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the
Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by
the patriots and by the humanists.

[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time
when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.

[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied
considerably in value. It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about
8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing
power that it now has.

[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were
sponsors to the same child at baptism.

[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing
to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one
time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of
Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.

[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non
conceduntur