body of the Son of the Virgin, clasping the hand of a woman before the altar?

Can he to whom the eternal priest has said: Go, teach all nations under the sun, bind himself to one spot by the various ties of family?

Is the spiritual head of four or five hundred families, who is obliged to share his bread with those who have none, to guide all ages, from the earliest infancy to extreme old age, in the arduous path of salvation, and to diffuse, among countless numbers of the spiritually diseased, the very delicate care that the divine art of healing souls demands-can he take upon himself the solicitudes of married life?

Finally, who would consent to make him the possessor of his secrets, who has made a wife the possessor of his own? *

Let us listen to the eloquent thinker above quoted. "That wonderful power which checked Theodosius at the gate of the temple, Attala before that of Rome, and Lewis XIV. before the altar; that still more wonderful power, which can soften, confound, and restore to life; which enters the palace to extort gold from the unfeeling or thoughtless man of wealth, in order to pour it into the lap of poverty; which confronts everything, and overrules everything, as soon as a soul is to be soothed, enlightened, or saved; which insinuates

"In countries where the marriage of priests is customary, confession, the most beautiful of moral institutions, has, and must necessarily have ceased at once. It is natural that persons should not put him in possession of their secrets who has put a wife in possession of his own; there is a reasonable fear of trusting to a priest who has violated his contract of fidelity with God, and repudiated the Creator to wed the creature." (Chateaubriand, Génie du Chretien, liv. i. ch. 8.) De Maistre, in the work above quoted, has completely answered those who would produce the example of the schismatic churches of Greece and Russia, where confession has survived celibacy. The able author of l'Hermite en Russie, has shown in his true or factitious history of Varinka, one of the many dangers that confession incurs in the priest who is half a woman, ch. 48.

itself gently into the conscience, to obtain from it its dreadful secrets, and to root out vice; the indefatigable organ and guardian of sacred unions, the no less active enemy of all license; wild without weakness, terrible, yet loving; the invaluable support of reason, probity, honor, and all human strength, at the moment when they declare themselves powerless; a precious and inexhaustible source of reconciliations, reparations, restitutions, and effectual repentance, of all that God loves most next to innocence; standing by the cradle of man with a benediction, still standing by his death-bed, and saying to him, in the midst of the most pathetic exhortations and the tenderest adieus: Depart; this supernatural power is not found "in the country where the priest takes a wife." There the priesthood is powerless, and trembles before those whom it should cause to tremble. It dares not, it cannot say to him who acknowledges he has robbed: Restore. The vilest man is bound to him by no promise. The priest is employed like a machine. It might be said that his words are a kind of mechanical operation which effaces sin, as the soap effaces material stains." *

Let us consult history, and ask what would have become of Christianity in the hands of a clergy rendered stationary by matrimony. Neither the sword of the Cesars, nor the pen of a Celsus nor a Julian, would have been needed to stifle it in its cradle; the prisons of the Sanhedrim and the officers of the high-priest Caiphas would have sufficed. At the first tempest which arose against them, the ambassadors of Christ would have forgotten their mission to attend to their wives and children.

Protestant ministers are seen every day traversing the seas, accompanied by their wives and children, and going to esta blish themselves in the English possessions of India and Polynesia, with the certainty of finding there a lordly mansion,

* Du Pape, liv. iii. ch. 3. § ii.

and the means of making a sudden fortune; but we never see them, and we shall never see them, going to plant the cross or the Bible in China, Corea, or Japan, at the evident risk of soon expiring in frightful tortures.

A married clergy must necessarily be separated from the queen of virtues, and the mother of great self-devotion, charity, from profound study, and all that wins favor from God and man. It will neither aspire to the martyr's crown, nor the sceptre of science, nor the triumphs of benevolence over every variety of misery. Vainly should we demand from it an Ambrose, an Augustine, a Chrysostom, a Leo, a Gregory, a Bossuet, a Fenelon, a Bourdaloue, a Mabillon, a Francis Xavier, a Francis de Sales, a Vincent de Paul, a John-of-God, a John Baptiste de la Salle, &c.; it will supply only what is to be found everywhere-hirelings.

In presence of the admirable moral effects of religious celibacy, and the universal veneration which it inspires, of what importance is the favorite argument of the host of Epicureans of all ages, from Vigilantius to Luther, and from Luther to the libertines of our day, who repeat their disgraceful homilies upon the necessity of obeying nature, and the danger of doing violence to it? How shall we answer men who do not fear to charge, with a horrible hypocrisy, the innumerable imitators of the virginity of Christ, whom Christian history presents to our veneration, and who, while they refuse to believe in the possibility of virtue, prove that they have reached the lowest limits of brutality? We will answer them in words which they have doubtless read in one of their own books, which we hardly venture to name (La nouvelle Heloise), that this necessity is imaginary, and only acknowledged by persons of bad life: that all these pretended wants have not their origin in nature, but in the voluntary degradation of the senses. Let us proceed to the political point of view.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF RELIGIOUS CELIBACY.-POSITION OF THE PRIEST IN SOCIETY.-NULLITY AND INCONVENIENCE OF A MARRIED PRIESTHOOD.

WE are far removed from those times when the great politicians of the Encyclopedia feared the approaching end of the human race, if priests did not take wives, and nuns husbands. The nineteenth century is not sufficiently profound to imagine what tenor lies in that oracle of Rousseau: Celibacy is so injurious to the human race, that it would perish if it were everywhere practised.*

The Catholic clergy cannot be reproached with discouraging marriage. They might rather be accused of increasing pauperism by their alleged blind encouragement of it. A writer filled with the narrow prejudices of the last century has recently done this.†

All modern political economists, with Malthus at their head, agree in declaring that society is threatened with terrible. catastrophies, if that unknown force is not checked, which is constantly swelling population beyond the means of subsistence.

Some persons would counsel governments to place a formal interdict on the marriage of the poor; others, which nearly amounts to the same thing, would not hesitate to forbid marriage to the laborer who did not hold ten acres of property, or rent twenty acres. §

*Lettre à M. de Beaumont, Archevêque de Paris.

†M. Sismonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d'économie politique, quoted and refuted by M. the Viscount Alban de Villeneuve, Economie politique chrétienne, tom. i. p. 207.

Among others, M. Stewart, in his work previously quoted, p. 198. § M. Sismondi, ibid.

It appears that this counsel has been followed in many Protestant States of Switzerland and Germany. The restrictions of all kinds that have been imposed upon the marriage of the poor, and of laborers who have only their industry for a support, prove that, with all our intelligence and civilization, we could give lessons in barbarism to the Caffres and Hottentots.*

To the honor of political economy it must be said, that most of the writers who discuss these vital questions, reject all means of constraint, which are contrary to humanity and good morals, and insist on the moral restraint so much recommended by Malthus. Thus, they would wish, that while enlightening the people with regard to their true interests, individuals of the working and poorer classes should be induced not to involve themselves in marriage without great prudence. But, as M. de Maistre observes, "this is the fable of the bell; the difficulty is to attach it to the bearer. Propose to the youth of ardent feelings to relinquish marriage, in order to maintain the equilibrium of society, how would you be received?"+

What no human power could do, the Church has done by the law of celibacy, "And with all the perfection which human affairs will allow; since Catholic restraint is not only moral, but divine, and the Church supports itself on motives so sublime, on means so efficacious, on menaces so terrible, that it is not in the power of the human mind to imagine anything equal or approaching to it."

Besides the advantage of opposing a barrier to the exces sive increase of population, ecclesiastical celibacy possesses another of still greater weight in the social scale; it is to

* On this subject may be recommended a work of great research, and full of interesting facts, by M. F. N. L. Naville, De la charité légale, Geneva, 1836, tom. i. part ii. sect. ii.

† Du Pape, tom. ii. p. 107.

Du Pape, tom. i. p. 108.