No one comprehended the necessity of celibacy, among the clergy, more clearly than Hildebrand,—­himself a monk by education and sympathy.  He looked upon married life, with all its hallowed beauty, as a profanation for a priest.  In his eyes the clergy were married only to the Church.  “Domestic affections suited ill with the duties of a theocratic ministry.”  Anything which diverted the labors of the clergy from the Church seemed to him an outrage and a degeneracy.  How could they reach the state of beatific existence if they were to listen to the prattle of children, or be engrossed with the joys of conjugal or parental love?  So he assembled a council, and caused it to pass canons to the effect that married priests should not perform any clerical office; that the people should not even be present at Mass celebrated by them; that all who had wives—­or concubines, as he called them—­should put them away; and that no one should be ordained who did not promise to remain unmarried during his whole life.

Of course there was a violent opposition.  A great outcry was raised, especially in Germany.  The whole body of the secular priests exclaimed against the proceeding.  At Mentz they threatened the life of the archbishop, who attempted to enforce the decree.  At Paris a numerous synod was assembled, in which it was voted that Gregory ought not here to be obeyed.  But Gregory was stronger than his rebellious clergy,—­stronger than the instincts of human nature, stronger than the united voice of reason and Scripture.  He fell back on the majestic power of prevailing ideas, on the ascetic element of the early Church, on the traditions of monastic life.  He was supported by more than a hundred thousand monks, by the superstitions of primitive ages, by the example of saints and martyrs, by his own elevated rank, by the allegiance due to him as head of the Church.  Excommunications were hurled, like thunderbolts, into remotest hamlets, and the murmurs of indignant Christendom were silenced by the awful denunciations of God’s supposed vicegerent.  The clergy succumbed before such a terrible spiritual force.  The fear of hell—­the great idea by which the priests themselves controlled their flocks—­was more potent than any temporal good.  What priest in that age would dare resist his spiritual monarch on almost any point, and especially when disobedience was supposed to entail the burnings of a physical hell forever and ever?  So celibacy was re-established as a law of the Christian Church at the bidding of that far-seeing genius who had devised the means of spiritual despotism.  That law—­so gloomy, so unnatural, so fraught with evil—­has never been repealed; it still rules the Catholic priesthood of Europe and America.  Nor will it be repealed so long as the ideas of the Middle Ages have more force than enlightened reason.  It is an abominable law, but who can doubt its efficacy in cementing the power of the popes?