Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

A REFORMED.
107
" Tluit no priest receive a scholar without the leave
of the other by whom he was formerly
*
retained " ;
"that every priest do teach manual arts with diligence
; " that no learned priest reproach him that
"
is less learned, but mend him if he know how" ;
" that no noble-born priest despise one of less noble
birth, if it be rightly considered that all men are of
one origin". The penitential canons form the
second class which I mentioned, but they are much
less individual. One instrument of Dunstaii's ecclesiastical
reforms was the restoration of the monastic
life. He had also to contend with a low state of
morality in secular priests.
The Anglo-Saxon clergy had fallen away not only
from their first fervour but from any fervour at all.
Certain causes for degeneracy lie on the surface.
Civilisation, in its first stage, does not always act
favourably upon the moral life of a country, and it
may safely be said that the refining process begun
by St. Augustine had been interrupted by two and a
half centuries of foreign invasion, which had told
disastrously on internal growth. The ceaseless in-
cursioDS of the Danes had had a depressing, not an
elevating, effect upon the Saxons; and now, at the
latter end of the tenth century, they were little more
than half-civilised barbarians, knowing, indeed, those
things which they had to do, but possessing not
energy enough wherewith to do them. Fear had
cast out love instead of the reverse. Thus William
Malmesbury describes the clergy as " given up to