On one side the character of the early as of the later clergy of the "Catholic" Church has suffered severely from their own affirmation of a primitive theory of morals to which they could not conform. In an age of lessening science and freedom, with growing superstition, the barbarian ideal of asceticism gained ground like other delusions. The idea that by physical self-mortification men attain magical or intercessory power in spiritual things--an idea found in all ancient religions, and enforced in numerous pagan priesthoods--was imposed to some extent on Christism from the first, and became more and more coercive as the cult passed out of Jewish hands. The average presbyter of the second century, accordingly, won his repute for sanctity in many cases by professing celibacy, which in a large number of cases was too hard for him to maintain; and between his own unhappy ideal and the demand of the crowd that he should fulfil it, his life became in general a deception. In these matters the multitude is always preposterously righteous. Aztecs in the pre-Christian period, we know, were wont to put to death professed ascetics who lapsed; and the normal denunciation of priestly immorality in Europe in the Middle Ages seems rarely to have been checked by the thought that the priest's error consisted in taking up a burden he could not bear. That priests ought to be celibate the average priest-taught layman never doubted. Hence a premium on hypocrisy in the period of church-creation. An artificial ethic created an artificial crime, and Christian morality evolved demoralization. In the second century began the practice of open priestly concubinage, often on the naïve pretence of a purely spiritual union. Denounced periodically by bishops and councils for hundreds of years, it was never even ostensibly checked in the period of the empire; and the later discipline of the Western Church did but drive the symptom beneath the surface to form a worse disorder.
In the Roman period no machinery existed by which celibacy could be enforced. Councils varied in their stringency on the subject, and many bishops were capable of voting for a rule to which they did not in private conform. As for the bishopric of Rome, it had at that time only a ceremonial primacy over the other provinces. In the second century Bishop Victor of Rome is recorded to have passed sentence of excommunication on the easterns who would not conform to his practice in the observation of Easter; but his authority was defied, and his successors do not seem even to have asserted it in any similar degree for centuries. In the third century Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, the first zealous prelatist in the literature of the Church, claimed merely primacy, without superior authority, for the chief bishoprics, and for Rome over the rest. All bishops he held to be spiritually equal--and indeed all presbyters, bishops included. This held good theoretically as late as the fourth and fifth centuries, with the exception that by that time the bishop alone had the right to appoint to Church offices--originally the function of the whole community. But alike the internal and the external conditions made for the creation of a hierarchy. When in the third century the puritan party in the Church at Rome sought to appoint Novatian as its separate bishop, alongside of another, the bishops in the provinces, led by Cyprian, zealously resisted, and secured the principle that no town should have more than one bishop. In other ways the bishops necessarily gathered power. To them had soon to be relegated the right of admitting or refusing new members; and when there arose the question of the treatment of those who lapsed in a time of persecution, there was no way to secure uniformity of method save by leaving the matter to the bishops, who in the main agreed on a rule. For such uniformity they naturally strove in the days of danger; and the Church Synods, which began in the second century and developed in the third, were tolerably unanimous up to the time of the Establishment of the Church under Constantine (313). It was when the Church as a whole had no longer cause to fear the heathen that the worst strifes arose.