Indulgences for a hundred years were readily granted for a consideration.

The manufacture of relics became an organized branch of industry; and festivals of fools and festivals of asses were invented by the jovial priests themselves in travesty of sacred mysteries, as a welcome relaxation from the monotony of prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony.

Pilgrimages increased in number and frequency; new saints were created by the dozen; and the disbelief of the clergy in the doctrines they professed was manifest even to the most illiterate, whilst contempt for the ceremonies they practised was openly displayed in the performance of their clerical functions.

An illustration of this is the joke of the priests related by Luther, who were wont during the celebration of the Mass, when the worshippers fondly imagined that the sacred formula of transubstantiation was being repeated, to replace the words _Panis es et carnem fiebis_, "Bread thou art and flesh thou shalt become," by _Panis es et panis manebis_, "Bread thou art and bread thou shalt remain." The scandals as regards clerical manners, growing, as they had been, for many generations, reached their climax in the early part of the sixteenth century.

It was a common thing for priests to drive a roaring trade as moneylenders, landlords of alehouses and gambling dens, and even in some cases, brothel-keepers.