About her she saw vice shamelessly displayed or cloaked in sacerdotal robes; she was conscious of the ambition and avarice which hesitated at no crime; she beheld a religion more pagan than paganism itself, and a church service in which the sacred actors,--with whose conduct behind the scenes she was perfectly familiar,--were the priests, the cardinals, her brother Caesar, and her own father.

All this Lucretia beheld, but they are wrong who believe that she or others like her saw and regarded it as we do now, or as a few pure-minded persons of that age did; for familiarity always dulls the average person's perception of the truth.
In that age the conceptions of religion, of decency, and of morality were entirely different from those of to-day.

When the rupture between the Middle Ages and its ascetic Church and the Renaissance was complete, human passions threw off every restraint.

All that had hitherto been regarded as sacred was now derided.

The freethinkers of Italy created a literature never equaled for bold cynicism.