Thenceforth the practice went from bad to worse, despite many earnest protests from the better and saner sort of Churchmen, till it became possible for popes to allot the traffic in indulgences in given districts as kings allotted trading monopolies, and the enormity of the practices of the agents gave a sufficient ground for the decisive explosion of the Reformation. Before that explosion an attempt was made, on the lines of ancient Roman law, to give the practice plausibility by the formula that the indulgence was granted "out of the superfluous merits of Christ and the saints," a treasure of spare sanctity which it lay with the pope to distribute. But this doctrine, which savoured so much of the counting-house, was contemporaneous with the worst abuse the principle ever underwent after the age of the Crusaders.
As we have seen in connection with the growth of idolatry, there was even in the Dark Ages an earnest minority within the Church which resisted the downward bias of the majority and of their hierarchical rulers. In no period, probably, was the spirit of reason wholly absent; and from time to time it bore distinct witness. Thus we find alongside of the effort of Claudius and Agobard against idolatry and extraneous superstitions a less vigorous but no less remarkable testimony against the central superstition of the priestly system. When the Frankish monk Paschasius Radbert (831) put flatly what had become the orthodox doctrine of Rome as to the transubstantiation of the eucharist, some of the northern scholars who had preserved the pre-barbaric tradition were found to gainsay him. As the discussion continued long, the liberal-minded Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, invited special replies; and a learned monk, Ratramnus, wrote a treatise to the effect that the "real presence" was spiritual, not corporeal. But John the Scot (then = Irishman), otherwise known as Erigena, wrote on the same invitation to the effect that the bread and wine were merely symbols or memorials of the Last Supper--a heresy so bold that only the emperor's protection could have saved the utterer. And his freethinking did not end there, for in the discussion on predestination begun by the monk Gottschalk, in which John was invited to intervene by the bigoted abbot Hincmar, the Irish scholar was again recalcitrant to authority; while on the question of Deity and Trinity he held a language that anticipated Spinoza, and brought upon his memory, when he was long dead, the anathema of the papacy. Another Irishman of the same period, Macarius or Macaire, taught a similar pantheism in France.