48o OjitIi)ies of Eiiropmn History The parish priest and his duties The exalted position of the clergy Nature of penance Only clergy- men ordi- narily knew how to read and write The lowest division of the Chu'rch was the parish. At the head of the parish was the parish priest, who conducted services in the parish church and absoh^ed, iDaptized, married, and buried his parishioners. The priests were supposed to be supported by the lands belonging to the parish church and by the tithes. But both of these sources of income were often in the hands of lay- men or of a neighboring monastery, while the poor priest re- ceived the merest pittance, scarcely sufficient to keep soul and body together. The clergy were set apart from the laity in several ways. The higher orders — bishop, priest, deacon, and subdeacon — were required to remain unmarried, and in this way were freed from the cares and interests of family life. The Church held, moreover, that the higher clergy, when they had been properly ordained, received through their ordination a mysterious imprint, the " indelible character," so that they could never become simple laymen again, even if they ceased to perform their duties altogether. Above all, the clergy alone could ad- minister the sacraments upon which it was believed the salva- tion of every individual soul depended. The punishment for sin imposed by the priest was called penance. This took a great variety of forms. It might consist in fasting, repeating prayers, visiting holy places, or abstaining from one's ordinary amusements. A journey to the Holy Land was regarded as taking the place of all other penance. Instead, however, of requiring the penitent actually to perform the fasts, pilgrimages, or other sacrifices imposed as penance by the priest, the Church early began to permit him to change his penance into a contribution, to be applied to some pious enterprise, like building a church or bridge, or caring for the poor and sick. The influence of the clergy was greatly increased by the fact that they alone were educated. For six or seven centuries after the overthrow of the Roman government in the West, very few outside of the clergy ever dreamed of studying, or even of learn- ing to read and write. Even in the thirteenth century an offender
