hes where in this matter the strictest
discipline is rigorously enforced Amusements, not necessarily or even
often vicious, are objected to as being fraught with dangers which would
never occur to any but the rigidly ascetic or the puritanical mind. In
many parishes the Sunday cyclist will observe the strange phenomenon of
a normally light-hearted peasantry marshalled in male and female groups
along the road, eyeing one another in dull wonderment across the
forbidden space through the long summer day. This kind of discipline,
unless when really necessary, is open to the objection that it
eliminates from the education of life, especially during the formative
years, an essential of culture--the mutual understanding of the sexes.
The evil of grafting upon secular life a quasi-monasticism which, not
being voluntary, has no real effect upon the character, may perhaps
involve moral consequences little dreamed of by the spiritual guardians
of the people. A study of the pathology of the emotions might throw
doubt upon the safety of enforced asceticism when unaccompanied by the
training which the Church wisely prescribes for those who take the vow
of celibacy. But of my own knowledge I can speak only of another aspect
of the effect upon our national life of the restrictions to which I
refer. No Irishmen are more sincerely desirous of staying the tide of
emigration than the Roman Catholic clergy, and while, wisely as I think,
they do not dream of a wealthy Ireland, they earnestly work for the
physical and material as well as the spiritual well-being of their
flocks. And yet no man can get into the confidence of the emigrating
classes without being told by them that the exodus is largely due to a
feeling that the clergy are, no doubt from an excellent motive, taking
joy--innocent joy--from the social side of the home life.

To go more fully into these subjects might carry me beyond the proper
limits of lay criticism. But, clearly, large questions of clerical
training must suggest themselves to those to whom their discussion
properly belongs--whether, for example, there is not in the instances
which I have cited evidence of a failure to understand that mere
authority in the regions of moral conduct cannot have any abiding
effect, except in the rarest combination of circumstances, and with a
very primitive people. Do not many of these clergy ignore the vast
difference between the ephemeral nature of moral compulsion and the
enduring