“Omnis enim caste vivens templum Dei dicitur;
Si quis tantum sacramentum violare nititur,
Unus de porcorum grege protinus efficitur.
Facti cœlibes ardentem fugiamus Sodomam:
Hierosolymam petamus, Christianis commodam.”
Comment. de Reb. Hen. IV. Lib. V. c. 6.
[562] Honorius III. in Vit. Gregor. VII. No. 15.
[563] Bernald. Constant. ad Herman. Contract. Append. ann. 1085.
[564] Henricus multitudinem sequens, accessit eis qui sacerdotum conjugium sublatum volebant. Quare resistentes ei opinioni condemnati sunt.—H. Mutii German. Chron. Lib. XV.
I do not remember to have met with any contemporary authority for this assertion, nor is there any provision of this nature in the decrees of the Diet as given by Goldastus (I. 245); but the chroniclers of the period were generally papalists, and would be apt to omit recording anything which they would deem so creditable to their adversaries. Yet that the imperialists were no longer held responsible for clerical irregularities is evident from a letter written in 1090 by Stephen, the papalist Bishop of Halberstadt, to Waltram of Magdeburg, who was a follower of Henry. In all his violent invectives against the imperialists, and in his long catalogue of their sins, he makes no allusion to priestly incontinence, showing that they must have disavowed these irregularities so formally as to leave no ground for imputations of complicity (Dodechini Append. ad Mar. Scot. ann. 1090).