Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/101

Rh to see the dangers that would arise if married persons were excluded from holy orders. The historian Landulf has preserved a remarkable record (if to some extent imaginary, hardly less valuable as expressing opinions current in Milan not long after the event took place) of a disputation they held with their opponents on the subject.

One declared that to deprive a priest of his wife meant simply to multiply his mistresses: vetando unam et propriam uxorem, centum fornicatrices ac adulteria multa concedis. Another, the archdeacon Wibert, recited the praises of married virtue from the Bible and from saint Ambrose, and boldly declared that whatever was lawful to a layman was lawful also to a clergyman; for all are priests, whosoever be sons of the church, be they laymen or clerks. They invoked the freedom of the apostolic age, and charged the upholders of celibacy with the taint of those of Montforte, a castle not far from Asti which afforded shelter to a sect whose heresy was a matter of common notoriety at the time. The Milanese had chosen a telling argument. The reproach was so far a just one that the party of Peter Damiani and of Hildebrand, and these despised sectaries were in this regard equally fallen from the primitive humanity of their religion.

The fortunes of the western Paulicians need not detain us long. There was no principle of development in their creed; it reflected no genuine freedom of thought. It