Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

AND INNOCENT IV.
231
the Lord of the harvest as to the tares and the
wheat, nor the saints, his contemporaries, in their
meek endurance of scandals. Pope Innocent had
the memorandum read to him. It is easy for
the bishop of one small, or even large, diocese to
expose evils, which the Pope knows as wrell, or
rather much better than himself. The difficulty
does not lie in seeing,
"
but in remedying them.
The Pope cannot do what he would. He has to bear
the unchristian conduct of his large family when it
is unchristian, and utter his protest. The Bishop of
Lincoln applied the memorandum addressed to the
whole Church to his particular diocese, for which all
praise is due to him. His visitations became stricter,
his rigour towards those who possessed benefices
without the priesthood more marked. 1 He would
not have idlers in the Lord's Vineyard. In the
beginning of his episcopate he had bestowed
%
a
canonry on the nephew of Pope Gregory IX., with
the wrords that " neither death nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers could separate his
nothingness from the holy Koman Church," yet to
the cursory observer his attitude seemed to have
changed, when in 1253 Innocent IV. ordered the
bishop to make his nephew, Frederic of Lavagna, a
canon of Lincoln. The Pope justly viewed England
as part of the Universal Church, therefore he had a
perfect right to nominate to benefices, whilst the
hardship to the English of having foreigners ignorant
1 AW" rt Grossetete, p. 69.