r in Japan in the sixteenth century. After the lapse of
many years from the death of St. Francis, when a French squadron was
permitted to enter the Japanese ports, a native Christian, named Peter,
having learned that French Priests were on board, put their faith to the
test by proposing to them these three questions: "Are you followers of the
great Father in Rome? Do you honor Mary, the Blessed Virgin? Have you
wives?" The French priests having satisfied their interrogator on these
points, and especially on the last, Peter and his companions fell at the
missioners' feet, exclaiming with delight "Thanks, thanks! they are
virgins and true disciples of our Apostle Francis."(531)

A contemporary writer has wittily remarked that "perhaps the most ardent
admirer of hymeneal rites would cheerfully admit that he could not
conceive St. Paul or St. John starting on a nuptial tour, accompanied by
the latest fashions from Athens or Ephesus, and the graceful brides whom
they were destined to adorn. They would feel that Christianity itself
could not survive such a vision as that. Nor could the imagination, in its
wildest moods, picture the majestic adversary of the Arian Emperor
attended in his flight up the Nile by Mistress Athanasius, nor St. John
Chrysostom escorted in his wanderings through Phrygia by the wife of his
bosom arrayed in a wreath of orange-blossoms. Would Ethelbert have become
a Christian if St. Augustine had introduced to him his lady and her
bridesmaids?"(532)

We frequently hear of unmarried Bishops and Priests laying down their
lives for the faith in China and Corea and imprisoned in Germany. Heroic
sacrifices such as these are, however, too much to be expected from men
enjoying the domestic luxury and engrossed by the responsibility of a wife
and children.

But does not St. Paul authorize the marriage of the clergy when he says:
"Have we not power to carry about a woman, a sister, as well as the rest
of the Apostles?"(533) The Protestant text mis-translates this passage by
substituting the word _wife_ for _woman_. It is evident that St. Paul does
not speak here of his wife, since he had none; but he alludes to those
pious women who voluntarily waited on the Apostles, and ministered to them
in their missionary journeys.

It is also objected that the Apostle seems to require that a Bishop be
"the husband of one wife."(534) The context certainly cannot mean that a
Bishop must be a married man, for the reason alr