by our pauperisation may be reduced to the condition of the primitive
Church, and living the contemplative life they may, as is seemly, show
to us who spend an active life miracles which for a long time have
disappeared from the world."

[Sidenote: Simony.]

The result, then, of the efforts of the Church reformers to free the
Church from the State had been an enormous increase in the power of
the Church. But these efforts were in the beginning only a means to an
end, and that end was the purification of the Church itself. We have,
therefore, to ask how far the attempts to get rid of simony and to
enforce the celibacy of the clergy had met with permanent success.
Before the movement in favour of reform the traffic in churches and
Church property was indulged in by laity and clergy alike. Not only
Kings and nobles but bishops and abbots received payments from those
who accepted ecclesiastical preferment at their hands, and were by no
means always careful that ecclesiastical offices were acquired by
those in Holy Orders. Church property, in fact, was treated by those
who represented the original donors as if it were the private property
of the patron. The reform movement of the eleventh century, at any
rate, succeeded in making a distinction between the right of ownership
and the right of presentation, and in limiting the power of the patron
to the latter. Beyond this nothing much was permanently effected in
checking the traffic in things ecclesiastical. Preferment continued to
be used as patronage: offices and dignities in the Church were given
to children, and preferments were accumulated upon individuals until
pluralities became a standing grievance. Councils and Popes still
thundered against simony, but with the extending authority of Rome the
staff of the papal curia was increased, and the traffic in things