But simony, or the sale of ecclesiastical benefices, was a still more alarming evil to the mind of Gregory.  It was the great scandal of the Church and age.  Here we honor the Pope for striving to remove it.  And yet its abolition was no easy thing.  He came in contact with the selfishness of barons and kings.  He found it an easier matter to take away the wives of priests than the purses of princes.  Priests who had vowed obedience might consent to the repudiation of their wives, but would great temporal robbers part with their spoils?  The sale of benefices was one great source of royal and baronial revenues.  Bishoprics, once conferred for wisdom and piety, had become prizes for the rapacious and ambitious.  Bishops and abbots were most frequently chosen from the ranks of the great.  Powerful Sees were the gifts of kings to their favorites or families, or were bought by the wealthy; so that worldly or incapable men were made overseers of the Church of Christ.  The clergy were in danger of being hopelessly secularized.  And the evil spread to the extremities of the clerical body.  The princes and barons were getting control of the Church itself.  Bishops often possessed a plurality of Sees.  Children were elevated to episcopal thrones.  Sycophants, courtiers, jesters, imbecile sons of princes, became great ecclesiastical dignitaries.  Who can wonder at the degeneracy of the clergy when they held their cures at the hands of lay patrons, to whom they swore allegiance for the temporalities of their benefices?  Even the ring and the crozier, the emblems of spiritual authority,—­once received at the hand of metropolitan archbishops alone, were now bestowed by temporal sovereigns, who claimed thereby fealty and allegiance; so that princes had gradually usurped the old rights of the Church, and Gregory resolved to recover them.  So long as emperors and kings could fill the rich bishoprics and abbacies with their creatures, the papal dominion was weakened in its most vital point, and might become a dream.  This evil was rapidly undermining the whole ecclesiastical edifice, and it required a hero of prodigious genius, energy, and influence to reform it.

Hildebrand saw and comprehended the whole extent and bearing of the evil, and resolved to remove it or die in the attempt.  It was not only undermining his throne, but was secularizing the Church and destroying the real power of the clergy.  He made up his mind to face the difficulty in its most dreaded quarters.  He knew that the attempt to remove this scandal would entail a desperate conflict with the princes of the earth.  Before this, popes and princes were generally leagued together; they played into each other’s hands:  but now a battle was to be fought between the temporal and spiritual powers.  He knew that princes would never relinquish so lucrative a source of profit as the sale of powerful Sees, unless the right to sell them were taken away by some tremendous conflict.  He therefore prepared for the fight,