of their growth and forward progress, recognize the
moral conventions of the society which they pretend to regulate:
secondly, that it is well-nigh impossible for men of one century to
sympathize with the ethics of a past and different epoch. We cannot
comprehend the regicidal theories of the Jesuits, or the murderous
intrigues of a Borghese Pontiff's Court, without admitting that priests,
specially dedicated to the service of Christ and to the propagation of
his gospel, felt themselves justified in employing the immoral and
unchristian means which social custom placed at their disposal for
ridding themselves of inconvenient enemies. This is at the same time
their defense as human beings in the sixteenth century, and their
indictment as self-styled and professed successors of the Founder who
rebuked Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane.

To make general remarks upon the state of sexual morality at this epoch,
is hardly needful. Yet there are some peculiar circumstances which
deserve to be noticed, in order to render the typical stories which I
mean to relate intelligible. We have already seen that society condoned
the murder of a sister by a brother, if she brought dishonor on her
family; and the same privilege was extended to a husband in the case of
a notoriously faithless wife. Such homicides did not escape judicial
sentence, but they shared in the conventional toleration which was
extended to murders in hot blood or in the prosecution of a feud. The
state of the Italian convents at this period gave occasion to crimes in
which women played a prominent part. After the Council of Trent reforms
were instituted in religious houses. But they could not be immediately
carried out; and, meanwhile, the economical changes which were taking
place in the commercial aristocracy, filled nunneries with girls who had
no vocation for a secluded life. Less money was yearly made in trade;
merchants became nobles, investing their capital in land, and securing
their estates on their eldest sons by entails. It followed that they
could not afford to marry all their daughters with dowries befitting the
station they aspired to assume. A large percentage of well-born women,
accustomed to luxury, and vitiated by bad examples in their homes, were
thus thrown on a monastic life. Signor Bonghi reckons that at the end of
the sixteenth century, more than five hundred girls, who had become
superfluous in noble families, crowded the convents in the singl