fferings of the priest. I have them all
present, both before my imagination and in my heart. I have
followed this unfortunate man in the career of privations, and in
the miserable life into which he is dragged by the hand of a
hypocritical authority. And in his loneliness, on his cold and
melancholy hearth, where he sometimes weeps at night, let him
remember that a man has often wept with him, and that I am that
man."

We partly know the object and origin of the middle age institution of
celibacy among the clergy. It was intended to check the tendency to
secularize benefices. It was adapted to the condition of a church
militant. It might do good, or at least it could do little harm, where
aged and self-mortified men were the occupants of the office. But a
youthful priesthood, established in all the comforts or the luxuries of
a state endowment, moving and officiating in a sphere where leisure and
refinement give an impulse to the heart and fancy, and yet condemned to
a renunciation of all the charities of family union, of all the
affections of a lover, a husband, a father--how unnatural a position is
this, how detrimental to usefulness, how dangerous to virtue! Supposing,
even, that the vow is kept in its spirit, and perhaps its violation is
not the greatest imaginable mischief, what must be the effect of such
solitary seclusion on ordinary minds! What power shall protect the mass
of the profession on an envious sourness of heart at the sight of that
happiness in others, which in a moment, it may be of rashness, they have
relinquished for themselves. "Croire qu'un voeu, quelques prieres, une
robe noire sur le dos, vont vous delivrer de la chair, et vous faire un
pur esprit, n'est-ce pas chose puerile?" We hope and are sure it is not
often so; but can we say that sometimes the dark and deserted spirit of
the priest may not look on the happiness of families with an approach to
the feelings of the Evil One, when gazing at our First Parents in their
state of innocence?--

"Sight hateful! sight tormenting! thus these two
Emparadised in one another's arms--While I--"

But this is not all. Thus doomed to the dreary isolation of a _manque_
and mutilated life, yet, in the midst of his privations, retaining his
natural passions, his longings of the heart and affections, the Romish
priest is employed in no ordinary task of clerical occupation or
superintendence--in preaching merely or in pray