,
merchants or farmers will go out of that terrible moral battle-field
without being mortally wounded.

The cause of the supreme--I dare say incredible, though
unsuspected--immorality of the priests of Rome is a very evident and
logical one. By the diabolical power of the Pope, the priest is put out of
the ways which God has offered to the generality of men to be honest,
upright, and holy[1]. And after the Pope has deprived them of the grand,
holy, I say Divine (in this sense that it comes directly from God) remedy
which God has given to man against his own concupiscence--holy marriage,
they are placed unprotected, unguarded in the most perilous, difficult,
irresistible moral dangers which human ingenuity or depravity can conceive.
Those unmarried men are forced to be, from morning to night, in the midst
of beautiful girls, and tempting, charming women, who have to tell them
things which would melt the hardest steel. How can you expect that they
will cease to be men, and become stronger than angels?

Not only are the priests of Rome deprived by the devil of the _only_ remedy
which God has given to help them to stand up, but they have, in the
confessional, the greatest facility which can possibly be imagined for
satisfying all the bad propensities of fallen human nature. In the
confessional _they know_ those who are strong, and they know those who are
weak among the females by whom they are surrounded; they know who would
resist any attempt from the enemy; and they know who are ready--nay, who
are longing after the deceitful charms of sin. If they still retain the
fallen nature of man, what a terrible hour for them! what frightful battles
inside the poor heart! What superhuman efforts and strength would be
required to come out a conqueror from that battle field, where a David, a
Samson, have fallen, mortally wounded!

It is simply an act of supreme stupidity on the part of the Protestant, as
well as Catholic public, to suppose, or suspect, or hope, that the
generality of the priests can stand that trial. The pages of the history of
Rome herself are filled with the unanswerable proofs that the great
_generality_ of the confessors fall. If it were not so, the miracle of
Joshua, stopping the march of the sun and the moon, would be a childish
play compared with the miracle which would stop and reverse all the laws of
our common fallen nature in the hearts of the 100,000 Roman Catholic
confessors of the Church of Rome. Were