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Monks, Popes, and their Political Intrigues

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Title: Monks, Popes, and their Political Intrigues

Author: John Alberger


        
Release date: October 10, 2011 [eBook #37693]

Language: English

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Produced by David Widger





MONKS, POPES, AND THEIR POLITICAL INTRIGUES

By John Alberger

"Like lambs have we crept into power; like wolves have we used it;
like dogs have we been driven out; like eagles shall we renew our
youth."--St. Francis Borgia.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."--Washington.

In One Volume

Baltimore 1871.




PREFACE.

The object of the present work is to show the political nature of the
Catholic church, and its treasonable designs with regard to the American
republic.

In the course of the following pages the author has endeavored to show
that the Catholic Church is intrinsically a gigantic conspiracy against
the liberties of the world; ingenious in its construction, opulent in
its resources, extensive in its ramifications, and formidable in its
character. In proof of this assertion he submits to the consideration of
the reader a mass of irrefragable authority, and indisputable historical
incidents. The authorities on which he chiefly relies are papal bulls,
briefs, and encyclical letters; the canons of Catholic councils;
Catholic periodicals under the supervision of priests, such as the
_Civita Cattolica, Bronsoris Review, the Boston Pilot, the Toilet, the
Rambler, the Shepherd of the Valley, the Paris Univers_; also the works
of Dens, the author of the Catholic system of Divinity; of Llorente,
the secretary of the Spanish Inquisition; of Bellarmine, the celebrated
Catholic controversialist; of Ferraris, the author of the Catholic
Ecclesiastical Dictionary; of Fra Paola, the Catholic ecclesiastical
historian; of St. Thomas Aquinas, entitled by the church "_the Angelic
Doctor" "the Angel of the School," "the Fifth Doctor_" of St. Bernard,
called "_the Honeyed Teacher_" and his works "_Streams from Paradise_;"
of Labbeus, of St. Liquori, of Moscovius, and of a host of other oracles
of Catholicism.

By means of these authorities the veil of piety which conceals and
decorates the papal church is partly drawn aside, and her monarchial
character, political organization, despotic nature, ambitious designs
and treasonable principles, are distinctly presented to view.

The author pretends to no originality. The diction and logic are, of
course his own, but the facts and principles upon which he bases his
charges are the avowals of the church, the records of history, and the
official affirmations of civilized nations.

The Infidels, as faithful sentinels on the watch tower of liberty, have
often uttered the cry of warning; the Protestant pulpit has at intervals
startled from its drowsy slumbers, and echoed the same alarm; but
neither the one nor the other has been able to arouse the people from
their profound slumber. Gavazzi has lectured, Hogan, Colton, Hopkins
have written, but so profound and death-like is the torpidity which
holds the senses of Americans in indifference, that the warnings of
writers and speakers have died away with the tones in which they were
uttered. But Americans must awake--they will awake--if not soon
enough to avert the impending doom overhanging their country and their
posterity, yet soon enough! alas, too soon! to weep in despair over
their present apathy and indifference, amid the ruins of their republic.

JOHN ALBERGER.

Baltimore, Md. July 4th, 1871.




MONKS, POPES, AND THEIR POLITICAL INTRIGUES




CHAPTER I. CATHOLICISM A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

Guizot, speaking of the Christian Church, says: "I say the Christian
Church, and not Christianity, between which a broad distinction is to be
made." (Gen. Hist. Civilization, Lecture 11, p. 48.) The Catholic Church
has little except the name of Christianity, while it is secretly a
political organization to establish "the supremacy of the Pope over all
persons and things," which, according to Bellarmine's view, "is the main
substance of Christianity."

If we have recourse to the lexicon to ascertain the signification of
the term religion, we may arrive at a definite conclusion respecting
its classical use: but if we are guided in our inquiry by the popular
acceptation, we will discover that its definitions are as numerous as
the inhabitants of the globe, and as various as their features. We have
Natural religion, Pagan religion, Hindoo religion, Jewish religion,
Christian religion, and Mahometan religion. Among Christian sects some
believe religion to consist in individual feeling, some in baptism, some
in reverence for the clergy, some in problematical creeds and dogmas,
some in observances of church ordinations, some in rhapsodies, and some
in a species of sentimentalism.

The Boston Pilot says: "There can be no religion without an
Inquisition;" but Thomas Paine, with nobler philosophy, thinks
"religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and
endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy." The diversity and
discordance which have arisen respecting the import of this term,
originate from its compound nature adapting it to designate one idea,
or a variety of ideas. But while we rarely encounter two persons exactly
concurring in an opinion of what is religion, we find all readily
admitting that it essentially consists in just principles and correct
conduct. Principles are the fountains of thought and feeling; to be
just, they must be formed in accordance with truth and reason. Conduct
to be correct must be in harmony with the rights of others, and
the principles and designs of the human organism. According to this
definition, religion may exist with or without ceremonial observances.
All forms are merely external appendages, unessential to the nature of
religion, and as distinct from it as the casket is from the gem, or the
body from the vital principle. If this definition should be construed
into a definition of mere morality, it cannot invalidate any objection
founded on it to Catholicism, as every such objection will then become
demonstrative proof that the Catholic Church is not only destitute of
religion, but even of morality.

The signification of a corporate organization is well understood, but
how shall we ascertain its principles and designs? Not from the tenor of
its professions; but from the nature of its constitution, the tendency
of its measures, the sanctions which it has given, the recognitions
which it has made in its official capacity; and above all, from the
avowals it has uttered, under such a prosperous condition of affairs as
made disguise unnecessary. In courting popular favor, an organization
concocted to subvert the rights and interests of the people, would, from
motives of policy, be prompted to conceal its nature and design; but
when wealth and power had sufficiently fortified its security to enable
it to scorn and defy public opinion, it would then as naturally unfold
its latent principles, as a summer's sun would hatch an innocently
looking cluster of eggs into a nest of poisonous asps.

If among the members of an organization, which professes to be of
an exclusively religious character, men should be found who are
unquestionably religious or moral, this fact would no more prove it to
be a religious or moral institution, than would the membership of
the same persons to a railroad or municipal corporation prove such a
corporation to be a religious and not a secular organization. But if
at periods in its history, its most irreproachable and credible members
should denounce it as a political power, and labor to transform it into
a purely religious institution, and for such a "damnable heresy" were
burnt alive, and their ashes thrown into a river to prevent the people
from worshipping them, what would be the legitimate inference from such
facts? Would it not be that it claimed to be a political organization?
that it was high treason in its estimation to question its right to
this character? and that to utter such a question in its domains was
to provoke its heaviest penalty? Did not all these facts occur in Home
respecting Arnold of Brecia? And in Catholic history have not similar
facts, from his time down to the Reformation, been incarnadined in human
blood too deeply for audacity to deny or time to obliterate?

But what is a religious organization? If religion is moral goodness,
a religious organization must be an embodiment of its principles, a
practical exemplification of its maxims, and a scheme in measures and
policy adapted to extend the observance of its obligations. Such an
organization must be consistent with itself, and in harmony with the
natural principles of man. In integrity it must be invulnerable; in
adherence to right inflexible; in hostility to wrong, uncompromising.
It must be the champion of the rights of human nature; the friend of
freedom, equality and liberality; the enemy of bigotry, intolerance,
and despotism. Its claims must be commended by truth; its measures
sanctioned by reason and conscience; its triumphs won by argument
and persuasion. Its hands must be unstained with blood. It must never
perpetrate a fraud, nor descend to intrigue, nor dissemble, nor cherish
malice, nor slander an opponent, nor traffic for self-aggrandizement,
nor prostitute its principles to political objects, nor accommodate
itself to the vices of any age or country. Amid general corruption
it must always be pure, amid bigotry it must always be tolerant, amid
oppression it must always advocate the cause of justice, and amid
ignorance the cause of education.

Such are some of the essential characteristics of a religious or moral
organization. Any departure from them in an institution, proves its
secularism. No church in which they form not a distinguishing feature,
has any claims to be a religious or moral corporation.

Now when we see an institution, professing to be of an exclusively
religious character, organizing its departments upon a financial basis;
enjoining on its members the vow of unconditional obedience, in order to
subject them to its despotic domination; the vow of absolute poverty, in
order to enable them more successfully to administer to the increase of
its wealth; the vow of celibacy, in order to prevent them from having
legitimate heirs, to divert the ecclesiastical possessions from the
church; when we see it establishing schools to select and mould to its
designs the most promising among youth, instituting universities to
enrich itself by the sale of their honors, absolving sins for money,
selling indulgences for the commission of premeditated crime, erecting
missionary stations among Pagans for the purpose of traffic and
emolument, manufacturing evidence, committing forgeries, and corrupting
and interpolating the text of ancient authors, denouncing reason,
crushing liberty, circumscribing knowledge, anathematizing those who
disbelieve in its arbitrary dogmas, torturing those who question its
supreme authority, burning those who oppose its pretensions; having
a national cabinet, ministerial offices, accredited ambassadors,
maintaining a standing army, a naval force, religious military orders
to extend and enlarge its domains, carrying a national banner, wearing
a political crown, declaring war, concluding national covenants, coining
money, and exercising all the rights of an acknowledged independent
monarchy, it is more than credulity can admit, to concede that such
an organization is not a corrupt, cruel, despotic, and political
institution. That such is the constitution of the Catholic Church is a
fact, attested by the existing Papal Government, and by the spirit and
acts of its past history; and that it is now what in the past it has
been, is established by the unanimous testimony of its acknowledged
expounders. Simplicity has been amused by modern Catholic apologists,
who assert that the Papal monarch has resigned his former pretensions
to universal temporal sovereignty, and that he now merley maintains his
right to supreme spiritual authority. But this subterfuge can mislead
only a superficial, ignorant mind. As spiritual sovereignty is absolute
dominion over reason and conscience, it unavoidably involves temporal
sovereignty; nay, temporal sovereignty of the most despotic and
unlimited authority reason and conscience lay at the foundation of
all political power; and if Catholicism is adapted to govern them, it
transcends in despotism the most ingeniously contrived monarchy that
tyranny has ever elaborated, or by which the faculties of man have
ever been enthralled. Spain, Russia, or any other government is less
tyrannical in its constitution than is the Catholic Church. He who would
establish the contrary opinion, must first obliterate the Papal bulls,
the decrees of the Councils, and the authorities of the Catholic Church;
he must go to Rome and convert the present Pope and his college of
Cardinals; nay, he must attend the coming Ecumenical Council and induce
it to annul the canons of all the previous Councils, and to declare
that all the preceding Popes were "damnable heretics," and have them
accordingly excommunicated. These preliminary steps must be taken before
he can avoid absurdity or the imputation of wilful prevarication.

But the Papal See has never resigned its preposterous claim to universal
temporal sovereignty. The bulls and canons asserting this pretension
have never been annulled. They still form the canon law of the Church.
No official declaration has announced an abrogation of them. The
Pope's reiterated and blasphemous claim to infallibility precludes the
possibility of such a sensible act. Infallibility is inconsistent with
change of principle or error of conduct, and when the Church of Rome
arrogates such a divine attribute, she avers that her past history
indicates her present character and future intentions. In this opinion
all her authorities concur. Bishop Kendrick says: "All doctrine of
definitions already made by general Councils and former Pontiffs _are
marks which no man can remove_." (Primacy, p. 356). Brownson says: "What
the Church has done, what she has expressly or tacitly approved in the
past, is exactly what she will do, expressly or tacitly approve, in the
future, if the same circumstances occur." (Review, Jan. 1854). Again:
"The Catholic dogma, in regard to every subject whatever, has always
been the same from the beginning, remains always unchangeably the same,
and will always continue in every part of the world immutable." (Review,
Jan., 1850). Again: "Catholicity, as long as it continues Catholicity,
cannot be carried to excess. It will be all or nothing." (Review, Jan.,
1854). The editors of the _Civilita Cattolica_, the Pope's organ at
Rome, say: "From the darkness of the catacombs she (the Catholic Church)
dictated laws to the subjects of Emperors, abrogating decrees,
whether plebeian, senatorial or imperial, when in conflict with Catholic
ordinances. To-day, as in all time, the Church commands the spiritual
part of man; and, in ruling over the spirit, she rules the body,
rules over riches, over science, over affections, over interests, over
associations--rules, in fine, over monarchs and their ministers." The
Dublin Tablet, Feb. 24,1865, the accredited organ of Romanism in
the British realm, says: "The Pope is at this moment interfering in
Piedmont, defending one class of citizens against the government; and
in the House of Representatives of the United States, a Christian, Mr.
Chandler, in his speech, Jan., 1865), denies the right! Governments may
and do prohibit good works, and the Pope interferes. They also commit
evil, and the Pope interferes; and good Christians (Catholics) _prefer
the Pope's authority to that of the State_. The godless (non-Catholic )
colleges of Ireland, the troubles of Piedmont, all bear witness against
the unchristian opinion." The Paris _Univers_ says: "A heretic examined
and convicted by the Church, used to be delivered over to the secular
authority to be punished with death. Nothing has appeared to us more
necessary. More than 100,000 persons perished in consequence of the
heresy of Wickliffe, and a still greater number for that of John Huss;
and it would be impossible to count the bloodshed caused by Luther, _and
it is not yet over_." De Pratt, formerly an Abbe of the Pope, says: "The
Pope is chief of 150,000,000 of followers. Catholicism cannot have
less than 500,000 ministers. The Pope Commands more subjects than any
sovereign--more than many sovereigns together. These have subjects only
on their own territory, _the Pope commands subjects on the territory of
all sovereigns_" (Flag of the Union.) But the testimony is voluminous,
and I forbear further quotations on this point.

To understand, then, the past history of the Catholic Church, is of
paramount importance to every freeman. What is it? It is the development
of her nature. It is the unfolding of her treason to the world. It
is uncovering the cruelty and despotism concealed under her religious
profession. It is the revelation of her animosity to the rights of
men, to the progress of society, and to the exercise of reason and
conscience. It shows her to be a secret political organization,
skilfully constructed for the acquisition of supreme political power,
and hypocritically disguised under the semblance of religion. If in
her infancy she did not always avow her ambitious designs, she always
secretly cherished them; and, if in her adversity she has moderated her
tone, she has not her natural thirst for secular power. As she grew in
strength, she grew in arrogance and despotism; and when, by a system of
artful intrigues and bold usurpations, she had created a colossal power
that overawed the united monarchies of Christendom, she unsheathed the
double sword, the symbol of ecclesiastical and political power, and
asserted her right, as Vicar of Christ, to rule with or in preference
to Princes, invaded the rights and liberties of independent nations,
crowned and uncrowned monarchs, destroyed freedom everywhere,
anathematized, shackled, tortured and burnt all who opposed her
monarchical pretensions. Her triumphal processions have been the most
magnificent when her hands were the bloodiest, and her _Te Deum_ was
chaunted with the most fervor when the smoke of her stakes ascended in
the thickest volumes, and the gore shed by the double sword streamed in
the broadest and deepest currents.

When Time, the avenger, hurled her from her despotic throne, she
supplicated, because she could not command, and moderated her
pretensions, because she dare not assert them. But if she presumes not
now to tear the crown from the head of the mighty, who would annihilate
her for her audacious attempt; if she does not now absolve subjects from
allegiance to their governments, whose artillery, to avenge the insult
would be marshalled against her; if she does not now attempt to burn at
the stake those who reject her absurdities, and who would burn her for
an attempt--the reason of the extraordinary change in her infallible
holiness is palpable. It is not because she has discarded the doctrines
consecrated by so many bulls, battles and treaties, but because she
cannot carry them out without peril to her existence. But let Brownson,
whom Pope Pius IX., in a letter dated April 29, 1854, blessed with an
apostolic benediction for services rendered, solve this point. He
says: "_The Church, who possesses an admirable gift of discretion_, has
prudently judged that she would not declare all things explicitly from
the beginning, but at a given time, and in suitable circumstances,
would bring into light something which was hitherto in concealment, and
_covered with a certain obscurity_." (Review, January, 1854).




CHAPTER II. THE POLITICAL MACHINERY OF THE PAPAL POWER

That the Holy Catholic Church is artfully constituted to subjugate
all secular and ecclesiastical power under its authority, and that its
object is not to advance the interests of moral goodness, but to acquire
temporal dominion, must be admitted by every one that fully comprehends
the principles upon which its religious Orders are organized. These
Orders were founded by Catholic saints and Bishops. They have been
confirmed by Popes and Councils. And though they have been suppressed,
on account of their corrupt tendency and political intrigues, in kingdom
after kingdom, yet in pontifical bulls they have been defended as being
the most useful and pious class of the Catholic community. They may
therefore be regarded as having been authoratively acknowledged to be
constituted in harmony with the principles and designs of the Catholic
Church. In fact they form the body of its organization, as the Pope does
its head, and the Councils do its members.

In investigating the intrinsic nature of these orders, we are naturally
led back to that period of their history which allowed them an
unembarrassed development. As they are sanctioned by a church which
claims the attribute of infallibility, whatever changes the advance of
civilization has effected in them, must be regarded as a mere prudent
accommodation to existing circumstances, to be tolerated no longer than
they are imperative. If in 1900 the Catholic Church gain the supremacy
in the United States which she hopes to gain, she will restore the
despotism and superstition which characterized her domination during the
dark ages. Pope Gregory XVI. in his Encyclical Epistle of 1832, says:
"Ever bearing in mind, the universal church suffers from every novelty,
as well as the admonition of Pope St. Agatho, that from what has been
regularly defined nothing can be taken away--no innovation introduced
there, no addition made, but that it must be preserved untouched as to
words and meaning."

The religious Orders consist of anchorites, monks, nuns and knights. The
anchorites in general lived separately, but sometimes in communities.
The nuns lived in perpetual solitude, as also did the monks, with the
exception of such as devoted themselves to the administration of the
public affairs of the church. The knights were soldiers of the cross,
instituted to defend and propagate the Romish faith by the force of
arms. The orders differed from one another chiefly in the style of their
dress, in degrees of rigidness of discipline, and in the assumption
of additional vows. They all assumed the vow of absolute poverty, of
perpetual celibacy, and of unconditional obedience to the rules of their
Order, and to the commands of their superior. Each member was subject
to the absolute authority of his superior, who resided in the monastery;
each superior to the absolute authority of his general, who resided at
Rome, and each general to the absolute authority of the Pope, who was
the head and the chief engineer of the whole machine. By means of this
machinery the monarchical power of the Pope has been, and is still,
although the machinery in some places is somewhat damaged, exerted in
every kingdom, in every republic, in every city, and over every Catholic
mind in Christendom.

When a novice assumed the monastic vows, he became the absolute
property, or chattel, of the institution which he entered, as
irreversibly as if he had signed, sealed, and delivered a deed conveying
to it his soul and body. By this act of piety he yielded up his personal
freedom, and became ironed with the shackles of an eternal slavery.
A culprit might hope for liberty when his time would expire, but the
recluse could only expect disenthralment by death. If disappointed
in finding the holiness which he fancied to hallow the place, or if,
relieved of the misanthropic gloom, the isolating superstition, or the
delusive representations which had induced him to enter the monastic
walls, he should escape, he was pursued, and if captured remanded back
by the civil authorities to the cold solitude of his prison house. Not
only have these cruel deeds been perpetrated in the dark ages, but
in this age of civilization--not only in despotic Europe, but in free
America. True, the civil authority in. Protestant countries has
not interfered, but Catholic ingenuity has discovered means equally
efficacious. How many escaped nuns have unaccountably disappeared from
society? What infamous means have Catholic priests adopted to fill their
nunneries? A young girl in Baltimore, who had just passed her sixteenth
year, was carried to a nunnery, and although her mother and relatives
invoked the interposition of the civil authorities, yet they were
unable to reclaim her, because she had arrived at age. Who that has any
conception of the numerous applications of distracted mothers at the
police station-houses of some of our large cities, for their children,
who have mysteriously disappeared; or that has read the account recently
published in the New York papers, (of the recovery of the body of a
young female who had been drowned, when in one day eight mothers called
at the dead-house to see if the corpse was not that of a daughter whom
each had missed), can avoid believing that if the nunneries were open to
public inspection, some of these mysteries might be resolved?

After the ceremonies were concluded which sepulchred the novice forever
in his monastic cloister, his thoughts, feelings, and desires were
henceforth to be regulated, not by the operations of the brain, but by
the rules of his Order. The most secret recesses of his mind were to
be opened to the inspection of his confessor. For the intrusion of a
natural thought he was liable to the infliction of the severest penalty;
and the voice of the superior was the only reason, the only conscience,
the only instinct he was at liberty to obey. Subjected to a systematic
course of rigid discipline adapted to paralyze reason, suppress
conscience and stifle instinct, he became a passionless, soulless,
mechanical automaton, as well formed to bless, pray and preach, as to
curse, forge and murder, and equally ready to do either at the mandate
of his superior.

When the superstition of the masses, the ignorance of princes, the
ambition of politicians, and the intrigues of the priesthood had favored
or cultivated the growth of Catholicism until it was matured into a
colossal monarchy, it was discovered that while its centre was in Rome,
its branches extended to every section of Christendom. Its monasteries
conveniently and strategetically located in different parts of the
world, its confessors penetrating the secret designs and wishes of
statesmen and princes, its spiritual advisers scrutinizing the conduct
of opulent and distinguished personagas, its spies, under the license
of Papal indulgences, professing all opinions, and entering all
associations and societies, and its agents in constant communication
with their superiors, their superiors with their generals, and their
generals with the Pope, and all acting in concert in every part of
Christendom toward the accomplishment of one grand design; the See of
Rome became the receptacle of accurate accounts of the condition, events
and characters of the various sections of the globe, and was capable of
improving every occurrence to its best advantage, and of commanding in
its support the power of every locality. As nothing was too great to
transcend its aspirations, so nothing was too minute to escape its
scrutiny. Monarchs, legislators, judges, jurists, statesmen, generals,
bankers, merchants, actors, schools, colleges, men, women, children--all
were objects which its spiritual machinery sought to control. Invisible,
but omniscient, the Pope was seen nowhere, while his power was felt
everywhere. He touched the secret springs of his machinery and the world
was roused to arms or silenced to submission; kings were astounded with
applauding subjects, or sat powerless on their thrones; armies rushed to
battle or grounded their arms; statesmen were blasted, none could tell
for what crime; miscreants were ennobled, none could tell for what
virtue; men's business or domestic affairs were disarranged, none could
tell for what cause. So sudden, secret and terrible were the revolutions
wrought in the fate of individuals and nations, that they seemed
like the vengeful interposition of Providence, and the mystery which
concealed the hidden cause led the ignorant and stupefied world to
interpret them, under the instruction of a crafty priesthood, as the
manifestations of divine wrath. When we calmly consider the disposition
of the Catholic organization, it seems that all the inventions of
ancient tyranny were condensed in it with improved malignancy. The
ambition of Caesar, which hurried him on to the destruction of the
liberties of his country, while he imagined the cold hand of his
departed mother clasped his heart; the jealousy of Commodus, who never
spared what he could suspect; the cruelty of Mithridates, who fed
on poison to escape the secret revenge of his injured subjects; the
inhumanity of Caligula, who wished the world had but one neck, that he
might cut off its disobedient head at one blow, are, indeed, terrible
examples of despotism, but they were limited to one nation, and left
reason and conscience unshackled. But in the Papal organization we find
a scrutiny which penetrated all secrets, a despotism that ironed reason
and conscience, an ambition that grasped heaven and earth, a malignity
that blasted for time and eternity--a policy in which all the elements
of bigotry, terror, malice, duplicity and obduracy were incorporated in
their most frightful proportion. Before this conception we might
well shudder, for its irons are secretly manacling our own limbs.
Its triumphs, written in the blood of the millions it has butchered,
commemorated by the monuments of ecclesiastical rubbish which it has
erected, seen in the gloom of superstition it has cast upon the world,
utter a solemn admonition to the freemen of America. Think not that the
present attainment in civilization is proof against this all-blasting
tree, whose sap is poison and whose fruit is death. Think of Egyptian,
Asiatic, Grecian civilization, and tremble lest their fate become
your own. Let not confidence beget an apathy that may close the eye of
vigilance, or enervate the powers of resistance. Listen to Pope Pius IX.
when he declares that "the Catholic religion, with its rights, ought to
be exclusively dominant, in such sort that every other worship shall
be banished and interdicted." Listen to Father Hecker, who says: "The
Catholic Church now numbers one-third of the American population, and
if its membership increase for the next thirty years, as it has for the
thirty years past, in 1900 Rome will have a majority, and be bound to
take the country and keep it." Read the statistics and learn the fearful
probability of the fulfillment of Hecker's prophesy. Then dream no more
that your liberties are safe.



CHAPTER III. THE MONASTIC VOW OF PERPETUAL SOLITUDE

The religious Orders were the fundamental principle of the growth of
the Papal monarchy. These orders assumed certain vows, the nature and
tendency of which we will proceed to investigate in the spirit of candid
inquiry. The first vow to which we will invite attention, is the vow of
perpetual solitude and seclusion. Although at the first introduction
of these monastic orders into the church, this vow, and those which
we shall hereafter examine, were not formally assumed, yet they were
invariably observed; and in the year 529, under the auspices of St.
Benedict, the express assumption of them became an indispensable
condition of membership. Until the tenth century, the hermits and the
Benedictine monks and nuns were the only Catholic Orders that existed;
the former generally, and the latter entirely, lived in solitary
seclusion.

The devout misanthropy of the hermits induced them to select for their
habitations the most gloomy, cheerless, and inhospitable regions
they could hunt up. Piously scorning the salubrious and magnificent
localities, so prodigally furnished by nature, they constructed their
huts at the bottom of dismal pits, among the cliffs of rugged rocks, in
barren deserts, and in solitary wildernesses. Some lived under trees,
others under shelving rocks, some on the top of poles, and others in the
deserted caverns of wild beasts. Some buried themselves in the gloomy
depth of trackless forests, isolated from human contiguity, and
assimilated in aspect and habits to the brute creation. Their bodies
divested of decent apparel, and covered with a profusion of hair, and
their aspect horrid and revolting beyond description, the hermits sought
to acquire the reputation of saints by attaining the nearest possible
approximation to wild beasts. Another class of these eccentric devotees
constructed a number of contiguous dungeons, and formed themselves into
a sort of monastic community. In these vaults they imprisoned themselves
for life, the door being locked, and sometimes walled up, a small
window only was allowed, through which to receive aliment and give
pious advice. In these dungeons they manacled their limbs with ponderous
chains, encircled their necks with massive collars, and clothed their
legs with heavy greaves. In the depth of winter they would immerse
themselves in icy water, and sing psalms. To make themselves revolting;
to imitate the habits of wild animals, until they became more horrible,
because more unnatural; to subject themselves to voluntary torture,
severe and bloody flagellations, were deemed the highest acts of piety.
Whatever conspired to comfort they considered profane; whatever was
pleasurable they avoided as sinful; and whatever was absurd, filthy, and
disgusting, they imagined allied them to gods and angels. St. Anthony,
who was so holy that he never washed himself, nor wore any apparel
except a shirt, was canonized by the Catholic Church for his
extraordinary attainment in sanctification. The approbation which the
church so readily conferred on oddity and singularity might at the
first appear surprising, but when we recollect the immense pecuniary and
political advantage she derived from them, we will no longer doubt her
motive, nor avaricious sagacity. A singular custom suggested by this
ludicrous institution may be worthy of a passing notice. The abbots of
the monasteries, in order to dispose of a brother abbot, whose celebrity
surpassed their own, or whose circumventive genius they feared, or
who had excited their suspicion, jealousy or revenge, would congregate
together, and declare that the fated brother had arrived at a degree of
sanctification that better qualified him for the hermit's cell than
for an abbotship of a monastery, and that to protect him from the
contamination of the world, and to enable him to perfect his holiness,
it was necessary to wall him up in eternal seclusion. In accordance with
this pious regard for their brother's sanctity, they adepted summary
measures for its forcible execution.

Silence, gloom and solitude, according most congenially with the designs
of the monastic institutions, they were generally located in sterile
wastes, dense and trackless forests, and other localities adapted to
excite the sensation of loneliness, dreariness and desolation; but when
secular considerations suggested they occupied picturesque and luxuriant
localities, commanding the sublimest prospects of Nature. These
edifices, which often rivalled gorgeous palaces, were nothing but
religious penitentiaries, in which the inmates endured all the
privations, and were shackled with all the irons with which criminals
are punished in ordinary penal institutions; and though they were
ostensibly constructed for religious purposes, they were really designed
for the infliction of punishment, in accordance with the ecclesiastical
code. With regard to this code Guizot says: "The Catholic Church did not
draw up a code like ours, which took account only of those crimes that
are at the same time offensive to morals and dangerous to Society,
and punishing them only because they bore this two-fold character; but
prepared a catalogue of all those actions, criminal more particularly
in a moral point of view, and punished all under the name of sins."
(Gen. Hist. Civil., Lee. x., p. 118). In what light these religious
penitentiaries have been regarded by their inmates their eternal
seclusion has prevented them from publicly divulging, but the few who
have broken their enthralment, and the "heretics" who have been confined
in them, have described them as the most intolerable of dungeons. In
fact the modern penitentiary system has originated from them. Guizot
thinks this is one of the great blessings which Catholicism has bestowed
on society--(see Gen. Hist. Civil., Lect. vi., p. 135).

The vow of perpetual seclusion comprises a renunciation of the pleasures
and business of life, an abnegation of the claims of consanguinity,
friendship and society; and an abjuration of all filial, parental and
natural affection. This vow is in contravention of the obligations
imposed on man by Nature, to improve society by contributing to the
advancement of its financial, social, political and scientific welfare.
It precludes the exercise, and consequent development, of the varied
powers of the human organism. It surrenders the personal refinement and
moral strength which may be acquired by social intercourse, and conflict
with opposing habits and principles. It ignores the imperative duty of
understanding and judiciously relieving human want and misery, and
of aiding the execution of efficient schemes of public utility and
philanthropy. It is not only in violation of the obligations of
humanity, and the noblest principles of human enjoyment, but it debars
the recluse from correcting any error into which he may have been
betrayed by false representations, or an overheated fancy; or, of
modifying his condition according to the change which experience and
reflection may have effected in his opinion and feelings. Yet, although
such are the absurd nature and injurious consequences of the vow of
perpetual seclusion, it is proposed by the church of Rome, as the surest
means of obtaining the sanctification of the soul and the crown of
eternal happiness. If to bury our talents, to wall ourselves up in a
dungeon; to sit for years upon a pole; to scorn the society of human
beings; to reject the comforts of civilized life; to retrograde into
barbarism; to assume the habits, and acquire the aspect of wild animals;
to imprison ourselves where we can never respond to the demands of
consanguinity, society, friendship and patriotism: where we can never
contribute to the knowledge, wealth or prosperity of the country of
our nativity--if this is religion, then Catholicism has the honor of
confirming the most revolting condensation of these monstrosities that
has ever disgusted the spirit of civilization. But if religion really
consists in fair dealing, in noble deeds, in moral integrity amid moral
turpitude, in individual purity amid general corruption, in unwavering
virtue among the strongest incentives to guilt, then the organization
that sanctions vows subversive of these attainments cannot be admitted,
consistently with the most indulgent liberality, to be of a religious
character.

Thus far in our judgment, we have presumed that the novices, in assuming
their vow, were actuated by the laudable desire of obtaining the highest
degree of moral purity. This worthy ambition was doubtless the governing
motive of a proportion of them. Either from the instigations of moral
insanity, or from the vagaries of a distempered fancy, or from
the misrepresentation of artful and designing priests, or from the
despondency which misfortune is apt to engender in weak, or too
sensitive minds, or from a misconception of the natural tendency of
solitude, men and women have at times been led to assume the vows, and
submit to the penance prescribed by the religious orders. But there were
other motives equally, and perhaps more generally, active. Ludicrous
as were their holy isolation and penance, still the sanctity which the
monks imitated, and the tortures which they self-imposed, were rewarded
by a credulous and superstitious world with profound homage and
admiration. By undergoing sufferings which appeared intolerable to human
fortitude, they acquired the reputation of being sustained by divine
agency; and, as their popularity increased in proportion to their
wretchedness, they labored to extend their fame by adding to their
misery. Their sufferings and fortitude alike incomprehensible to human
reason, an awe-struck fancy betrayed the public into the delusion that
what it beheld was the results of superhuman sanctity; of a sublime
elevation above ordinary humanity; and of the interposition of divine
power. These misconceptions, artfully cultivated by the priesthood,
extended the fame of the self-tormentors beyond the celebrity of heroes,
poets and philosophers. Kings and queens visited them with superstitious
reverence; statesmen consulted them on abstruse questions of
governmental policy; peace and war were made at their mandates; and
pilgrims from remote regions bowed at their feet and begged their
blessing. Thus favored by the profound homage of all classes of
Christendom, they were enabled with more facility than any other
profession to become opulent bishops, royal cardinals, or monarchical
popes. Such being their eligibility to the honors and emoluments of the
spiritual dignities of the church, vanity was quick to perceive that
the anchorite's hut and the monk's cloister were the surest paths to
universal adulation; religion, that they were the most respectable
methods of becoming honored in life, and worshipped after death;
avarice, that they were the most available means of obtaining lucrative
positions; and ambition, that thay were the shortest roads to dignity
and power. With these attractive facts glaring on the eye of sacred
aspirants, it requires but little knowledge of human nature to conceive
with what avidity the ambitious would crowd into the most repulsive
cloisters; with what eagerness they would adopt the revolting habits and
ludicrous privations of the recluse; and with what ingenuity they would
indurate and torture the body, in order to win the applause of the
world, and the privilege of selecting its most advantageous positions.
Accordingly, monastery after monastery arose with sudden and astonishing
rapidity, and their cells became supplied--not with aspirants after
holiness and heaven--but with aspirants after secular and ecclesiastical
dignities, and the indolence, luxury, and licentiousness which they
afforded.

The pious flattery that was lavished on voluntary suffering, and the
distinguished rewards which recompensed it, strongly tempted the feeble
conscience of monks and hermits, to task their ingenuity in inventing
contrivances for magnifying the apparent and diminishing the real
sufferings of their self-imposed torture. By the aid of an improved
invention an artful hypocrite could procure a greater reputation for
sanctity than a contrite penitent, and become more eligible to the
worldly honors and emoluments of the church. St. Simeon Stylltes,
who sat upon a pole for thirty years, convinced Christendom, by his
wonderful absurdity, that he was miraculously supported; while living
he enjoyed its profoundest respect, and when dead was canonized by
the Catholic Church. But an observer by describing the numerous
gesticulations of this sainted mountebank, disclosed the secret of his
artifice. By means of a system of gymnastics, he kept up a vigorous
circulation of blood through his frame, and thus acquired a health and
longevity which would have been incompatible with a state of inactivity.
But it appears that he was tormented with an ulcer on the thigh,
inflicted by the devil, who had tempted him to imitate Elijah in flying
to heaven, but who maliciously smote him upon his raising his foot
to make the ascension. His mystical gesticulations not healing, but
probably inflaming the wound, may have shortened the natural term of
his miserable existence. As he had gradually arisen from a pole of seven
feet high to one of fifty feet high, if had not been for his vanity
and his evil company he might have gained a still higher position;
but whether by this means he would ever have reached heaven may be
questioned by astronomy and heresy: but there is no doubt he acquired by
his folly and artifice the beatification of the Catholic Church.

The apathy with which the self-tormenters endured their excruciating
penance and the severe rigors of the seasons, was chiefly the effect of
artificial callousness, induced by an ingenious discipline, calculated
to destroy the susceptibility of the nervous system to the influence of
external agents. A similar course of training has always been practiced
by the religious orders of the Hindoos and the Mohametans, who, like
those of the Catholic Church, endure self-imposed torture which seems
to surpass human fortitude, and acquire by this species of ambition
unbounded popularity. Even the uncleanness of the holy brotherhood was
an artifice. It formed a protecting incrustation on the surface of the
skin, which, by covering the the papillae, the sentient, organs, or
destroying their capacity for sensation, enable the hermits to
endure without apparent emotion the cold winters and bleak winds of
inhospitable forests. This secret is known and practised by some African
tribes, upon whom washing is consequently inflicted as a penalty
for crimes. To the eye of superstition, clouded with ignorance, and
fascinated by the _ignes fatui_ of sacred fiction, the calmness of the
monks and hermits under torments and exposures which seemed insufferable
to humanity, appeared a palpable demonstration of miraculous
interposition, and consecrated them in its estimation. Their acts,
however, were as much tricks as are the mysterious capers of a conjurer.
As the more artful and callous could endure the severity of penitential
acts with greater indifference than the candid and sensitive they
acquired a higher reputation for holiness, advanced to the enjoyment of
more distinguished honors, and finally became canonized as paragons of
virtue and objects of adoration.

Such are the nature and consequences of the vow of perpetual seclusion.
Such is a portion of the "doctrinal definition already made by the
general councils and former pontiffs," which, according to Bishop
Kendrick, "are landmarks which no man can remove." (Primacy, p. 356).
Such are some of the Catholic dogmas, which, "in regard to every subject
whatever," according to Brownson "have been always the same from the
beginning, remain always unchangeably the same, and will always continue
in every part of the world immutable." (Review, January, 1850). Such
is in part "what the church has done, what she has tacitly or expressly
approved in the past," and according to the same authority "is exactly
what she will tacitly or expressly approve in the future, if the same
circumstances occur." (Review, January, 1854). "The same circumstances"
is the universal church, which Jesuit Hecker, in his recent speech
in Chicago, thinks the United States needs, and which the people
(Catholics) will at no distant day proclaim.




CHAPTER IV. THE MONASTIC VOW OF PERPETUAL SILENCE

A vow of perpetual silence was assumed by several religious orders; but
it was observed with different degrees of austerity. Some monks passed
their whole lives in profound silence; others spoke on certain days of
the week; and others at particular hours of specified days. The modern
penitentiary regulations respecting the conversation of prisoners seem
to have been derived from the singular customs of the dumb brotherhood.

The members of the mute orders, perpetually concealing their features
with their cowls, and their thoughts by their silence, appear to have
concluded that secrecy was the substance of religion. He who could
conceal the best, and preserve silence the longest, obtained among the
devout the useful credit of possessing the most grace. The effusion of
the Holy Ghost, which, by a prodigal distribution of tongues, and their
clashing jargon, had set the primitive ecclesiastical council in an
uproar, and which, by its powerfully stimulating qualities had turned
so many cities upside down, had a very different effect on the silent
orders of the Catholic Church. While to the former it communicated
intuitive knowledge of all languages, to the latter it interdicted as
profane the use of any. To pass an entire life without uttering a word,
was considered by the dumb friars, as an unquestionable evidence of
their having received the unutterable fulness of the Holy Ghost.
Whether the primitive church and the Catholic orders were blest with the
influence of the same Holy Ghost, or whether the divine spirit politely
accommodates the nature of his unction to the demands of particular
ecclesiastical exigencies, seems to require some proof, before it can
be rationally admitted that profound silence and distracting discord are
effects of the same cause.

But the question of truth and error is of a less intricate nature. Truth
is candid, open and fearless; error is hidden, intolerant and cowardly.
The one challenges investigation; the other denounces it; the one opens
its breast to the scrutinizing gaze of the world; the other conceals its
features from the most intimate associate. If such is the fearlessness
of truth, and such the cowardice of error, the secrecy of the silent
orders commends them less to the confidence which candor inspires, than
to the suspicion which secrecy begets.

Secrecy is most generally adopted to cover objectionable designs; and,
the profounder the former is, the more objectionable are the latter. I
speak not of the secret signs by which benevolent societies recognize
their members, but of those associations which, while they are
professedly designed for religious purposes, conceal their principles
and projects from public view. Although in some other respects secrecy
may sometimes be suggested by discretion, yet it is often suggested
by guilt. All that offend against the natural sentiments of propriety,
shrink from the public gaze. Robbery, murder, and every other infraction
of civil ordinations seek to shroud their intentions and machinations
in the greatest secrecy. The traitor and the highwayman, afar from
the searching scrutiny of the inquisitive, retire to solitary forests,
inaccessible retreats, and dismal caverns, to hold their conclaves
and plot schemes of blood and depredation. Evasion, prevarication and
disguise are the inseparable concomitants of guilt. So secret is
crime that its perpetration can generally only be established by
circumstantial evidence. Secrecy is, therefore, naturally calculated
to excite suspicion; it seldom means good; it generally means evil;
sometimes robbery, frequently murder, often treason, always some plot so
antagonistical to reason and the welfare of society that its projectors
are conscious that publicity would endanger, and perhaps defeat its
execution.

The shocking crimes which the pious monasteries concealed have
frequently been divulged by those who have escaped from their cloisters,
but what unutterable deeds the taciturnity of the mute monks sanctioned
may not be so clearly proved as naturally imagined. That it was
exceedingly profitable will appear evident upon a moment's reflection.
These dumb friars were confessors, and as they never uttered a word,
they acquired the confidence of the most desperate criminals. The
Jesuits, who could not disclose the startling secrets of their order
without alarming the fears of temporal princes, confessed to none but to
the silent monks. All the devout who contemplated the commission of
the crimes of murder, sedition, or treason, preferred to unbosom their
designs to the taciturn fraternity, and receive through their agency
the absolution and indulgence of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. But the
connivance of the church at criminal deeds could be commanded only by
the power of gold; and the amount requisite for expiation was always in
proportion to the atrociousness of the crime. Now, as the commission of
the highest misdemeanors most imminently endangered the life and liberty
of the perpetrators; it is as easy to see the munificent pecuniary
advantages which perpetual silence obtained for the monks, as it is to
see that the most flagitious criminals would prefer disclosing their
intentions to the most silent lips.

It may here be remarked, by way of explanation, that confessors are not
bound, as is generally supposed, to inviolate secrecy. The secrets of
the confessional may be communicated from one priest to another; and,
when a confessor desires to make public use of any information which has
been confessed to him, he adopts the artifice of requesting the informer
to communicate the matter to him out of the confessional.

The dumb friars, not less artful than secret, elaborated a system of
sacred gesticulations, by which they managed to express their wants and
desires with as much force as they could have done with their tongues.
Although grimace and gesticulation were more clumsy and less varied in
their signs than is vocal articulation, yet by this means the dumb monks
contrived, as occasion suggested, to describe, command, supplicate,
scorn, imprecate, curse or bless. This odd device was well adapted to
the non-committal policy of the religious orders, as it enabled them to
affirm, deny, impugn, slander; to threaten any dignity, anathematize
any power, and commit any crime of which language is capable, without
incurring responsibility, violating any legal enactment, rendering
themselves amenable to any tribunal, or answerable for the breach of any
code of honor.

The adoption of this ingenious device to avoid compliance with unnatural
obligations, affords an instance of the singular duplicity into which
the subtilty of pious craft may betray human nature. The misfortune of
being born a mute is justly classed among the most deplorable calamities
that can afflict a human being. The natural privations of such a person
elicit in his favor the condoling sympathies of all considerate persons.
Yet in order to accomplish secret purposes of ambition or cupidity, the
dumb monks resigned the most important advantages with which Nature had
enriched them, and gratuitously assumed all the disadvantages that the
greatest calamity could have imposed. If there was nothing reprehensible
in the taciturn fraternity but this curious departure from the natural
use of the human faculties, it alone would be sufficient to subject them
to the suspicion of the candid, and the aversion of the prudent.

The tongue, it must be confessed, is sometimes an unruly member, but it
is also the noblest blessing of the human organism. It is among the
most prominent characteristics that distinguish the human from the
brute creation. It is mostly by the means of the judicious employment of
speech that the ignorant are instructed, the afflicted consoled, and the
cause of truth and freedom defended. It is by it that error is detected,
vice intimidated, and superstition and despotism are exposed. The
interchange of opinion, the animating power of debate, the searching
inquisition of truth, the spontaneous sallies of wit, the exhilarating
effusions of humor, the burst of eloquence, the lore of philosophy, art,
science, all the natural overflowing of the soul, find in the varied
and expressive functions of speech their most available avenues for the
outlet of their respective treasures. Speech is a reflective blessing;
it blesses him who exercises it, and him upon whom it is exercised. None
can use with propriety their vocal powers without improving them; none
can instruct without being instructed; none can advocate truth without
being enlightened by its beams. It is a means which all possess
of imparting consolation; which enriches the more prodigally it is
dispensed; which the poorest may bestow on the richest; which is always
the cheapest, often the most valuable, and sometimes the only one
that can avail. When speech is free and un-trammeled by the fetters of
intolerance, it is the most efficacious mode of improving the moral and
intellectual tone of society. It is more powerful than legal enactments,
and has been more successful than dungeons, racks, and all the
prescriptions of tyranny combined. Laws may interdict and gibbets
terrify, but neither can convince the understanding, nor purify the
sources of action. But freedom of speech enters the soul, converses with
the intellect, sifts opinions, and moulds the nature of man into order
and justice. She enters the halls of legislation and erects right into
law. She enters the court and gives equity to judicial proceedings. She
enters a community and breaks the iron of slavery, bestows equality
on all, and enthrones in power public opinion. She enters a nation of
slaves and makes them a nation of sovereigns. She is the great redeemer
of the moral world. Her touch has healed its disorders; her voice has
calmed its storms; her spirit has reanimated its dead. Such being her
mission, none but impostors need fear her scrutiny; none but bigots need
dread her vengeance; none but tyrants need tremble at her approach.

Yet, notwithstanding the immense advantages the power of speech confers
on its possessors, the silent monks have resigned all right to its use
and sought an equality with dumb brutes. Whatever motives of religion
may have mingled with the consummation of this atrocious folly, it
atones not for the good it has prohibited the monks from doing, nor the
luxurious pleasure it has obliged them to forego. If it is consistent
with the secret designs of any religious order to iron the faculties
of speech in eternal silence, it is not consistent with the designs
of Nature, the dictate of reason, nor the progress of man. If it
is consistent with the obligations of any religious organization to
prohibit the exercise of those powers by which error is checked,
truth promoted, virtue fortified, and the world enlightened, it is not
consistent with the obligations of man, the purest instincts of his
being, and the noblest virtues of his nature. If it is consistent with
the principles of any version of religion to view with dumb indifference
the errors it might correct, or the sorrows it might heal, it is not
consistent with the instinctive prompting of knowledge or of natural
sympathy. And if such designs, obligations and principles are consistent
with the faith and practice of the Catholic Church, she is a curse to
the world, at variance with the general interests of society, opposed
to the most sacred rights of man, an enemy to human knowledge, to human
progress, and to human sympathy. A slavery so abject, an absurdity so
gross, and a despotism so monstrous, as that which she sanctions, should
consign her reverence to contempt, and her holiness to the scorn and
ridicule of all enlightened nations and ages.




CHAPTER V. THE MONASTIC VOW OF SILENT CONTEMPLATION

FIRST. Meditation not the Source of Knowledge.

Similar in nature to the vow of seclusion and silence, and equally
incompatible with a fulfilment of the obligations of reason and
humanity, was the vow of silent contemplation assumed by many of the
religious orders. Meditation, abstractly considered, is neither a virtue
nor a vice. It derives its merit or demerit from the objects on which
it dwells, and the manner in which it employs its faculties. The mind
receiving its impression from external objects, and their vividness
and profundity being in proportion to the constancy with which they
are contemplated, we as naturally become enlightened by what is true,
expanded by what is liberal, and animated by what is pleasing, as we
are misguided by what is erroneous, contracted by what is illiberal,
and depressed by what is gloomy. Amid objects of reality, amid scenes of
grandeur, where the subjects are the most numerous and varied, and where
the faculties are awakened to their severest and most rigid scrutiny,
is the great college in which the understanding is invigorated and
improved; in which the fancy is ennobled and chastened; in which the
mind acquires those maxims of wisdom, and that ascendency over impulse
and illusion which enable it to act in conformity with the principles of
happiness and of the human organism.

The process of meditation is the act of comparing facts, deducing
conclusions, analyzing compounds, and tracing the chain of cause
and effect. Knowledge is the material with which it works; and, in
proportion to its accuracy and extent, will be the value and greatness
of our elaborations.

But the processes of meditation are not adapted to the acquisition of
knowledge. None are so absurd as to expect to obtain a knowledge of
grammar, arithmetic, history, astronomy, or of the laws and properties
of matter, by the mere exercise of the contemplative powers. To retire
into solitude, and endeavor by the guess-work of meditation to acquire
even a knowledge of the alphabet, would be as ridiculous as to attempt
to make our feet perform the office of our hands. Not less absurd would
it be, were we to immure ourselves in the gloom and silence of perpetual
confinement, avoiding the objects of Nature and an intercourse with
society, with the expectation that by such means, though we possessed
the penetration of a Locke, the intellect of a Gibbon, or the
versatility of a Voltaire, to acquire anything but profound ignorance;
or any ideas but what were unnatural, distorted and misshapen.

To obtain knowledge we must exercise the perceptive faculties. The
senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching are the only
avenues by which knowledge can reach the mind. He whose observation has
been the most comprehensive, and whose investigations have been the most
thorough and accurate, is enabled to exercise the contemplative powers
with the greatest pleasure and advantage. The distinct and graphic
imagery of men, scenes, events, objects and their properties, with which
he has stored his mind, will give correctness to his ideas, variety
to his mental operations, comprehensiveness to his intellectual view,
clearness to his judgment, and truth to his conclusions. Possessing the
elements of correctness, he will also possess the elements of happiness
and success. He is enabled to open the volume of Nature, and read,
in her pages of rocks and stars, sublimer periods than the pen of
superstition ever recorded. He stands perpetually in the vestibule
of truth, opening on the fields of immensity, strewed with objects of
reality, before the blaze of whose overpowering grandeur the throne and
empire of fancy dwindle into insignificance. He is enabled to imbibe the
fervor, inhale the inspiration, and enjoy the ecstatic delights which
scientific truth alone can confer, and which in intensity and purity so
far transcend the fanatic's wildest excitement. He is inducted into the
secret by which science has achieved all her victories, and by which
she has erected in such solid grace and grandeur those literary and
philosophical structures which stand like imperishable columns amid the
ruin of temples and kingdoms.

But the acquisition of these exalted attainments embraces the exercise
of all the intellectual power on appropriate objects. The mental, like
the corporeal powers, are various; they are differently organized and
adapted to deal with objects of different natures; and, all require to
be exercised judiciously, in order to be kept in a healthy tone. If
any member of the body is disused, it will be deprived of its natural
energy; if any faculty of the mind is disused, it will lose its natural
strength. It is only when each faculty of mind and body is properly
exercised that the health and vigor of the whole organism can be
maintained. The physiological cause of the enervating effects of
indolence, and the invigorating consequences of exercise, are found in
those laws of the human organism, whereby the blood is increased in
a member by exercise, and decreased by inertia, and a proportionable
degree of strength imparted by one and, subtracted by the other. Now,
the faculties employed in the process of meditation, comprehend but
a small number of the mental powers; and if they are exclusively
exercised, a superabundant volume of blood will be distributed to them,
and they will absorb the aliment necessary for the subsistence of the
others. The establishment of this inequality in the distribution of the
blood will derange the harmonious condition of the cerebral organs;
some will be overcharged, and either inflamed or constipated, and others
impoverished or enervated. One class of the mental powers thus becoming
over-excited, another class enfeebled, and a third paralyzed, the ideas
which the mind, in this condition, is capable of elaborating, must
necessarily be partial, defective, disjointed and grotesque; resembling
those nightmares that flit in our sleep, or those monsters which are
born without limbs, and marked with deformity and distortion. But when
all the moral faculties are properly employed, they will all receive
their appropriate nourishment and maintain their natural vigor. In
consequence of a harmony, equality, unity and reciprocity of mental
action, thus induced, all the powers will be preserved in healthy
action--the perceptives in furnishing the mind with knowledge, memory
in storing it up, order in classifying it, analogy in comparing it,
judgment in deducing conclusions from it, taste in selecting what is
most appropriate, fancy in adorning it; and all proceeding as naturally
as the vital organ elaborates and vitalizes the blood, and the
reproductive system transforms it into animal fluids and solids.

But the partial exercise of the mental faculties, embraced in the act
of meditation, not only disproportionately develops the cerebral organs;
but deranges those which it labors to keep in incessant activity. A
period of rest after labor is indispensable to the maintenance of the
health and vigor of the cerebral organs. Exercise increases the flow of
blood to their parts; repose, by inducing the process of recuperation,
not only restores their vigor but increases their healthy volume. The
invigorating effect of sleep is derived from the profound slumber into
which all the faculties are calmed, except those whose functions are
destined to recuperate and vitalize the entire system. To labor to keep
the meditative faculties in constant action is to interrupt the process
of recuperation; and, consequently, to prevent them from becoming
vitalized. The man who attempts to lift a weight beyond the capacity of
his muscular vigor, may never afterward be enabled to raise the tenth
part of what was within his former ability; and Sir Isaac Newton, whose
powers of contemplation seemed almost superhuman, after he had enervated
his facilities by impelling them to constant and excessive exercise,
has furnished the world with an illustration of the imbecility it
engendered, by his works on the prophecies.

But the principle of self-preservation inherent in the human mind,
rebels against the destruction of its faculties. Habitually to exercise
the contemplative faculties on one class of objects is a superhuman
task. In spite of resistance the blood will pursue its natural course
to the different organs of the brain, and by virtue of this fact, in
conjunction with the natural condition of the system, instinct will
prompt, thought intrude, emotion arise, appetite crave, passion yearn,
distraction ensue; and under the external semblance of sanctity, a
moral volcano will burn and heave. We may, by means of the theological
subterfuge that the involuntary actions of the cerebral functions
are the suggestion of impure and malignant fiends, apologize to our
conscience for the intrusion of profane and worldly thoughts, but this
device will not exorcise them. We shall find that in the effort to
become automata, we are men; and that in the attempt to exercise one
class of faculties and to concentrate: them perpetually on one class of
objects, we have grappled with a giant, over whom, if we triumph it will
be in our death-struggle.

It is impossible to think and feel by rule. Neither particular trains of
thought, nor particular kinds of emotion are at the command of the will.
Belief or unbelief, the sensations of contrition, of devotion, of hope,
or any other sentiment or feeling can no moro be created by an act of
volition, than can storms and earthquakes.. There is a secret power
acting on the nervous system, over which the will has no control.

The state of the atmosphere, the sanity of the system, the unconscious
power of imbibed principles, the recollections of the past, the
circumstances of the present, and the prospects of the future, all like
unseen spirits stir the soul's depths with ideas and passions, always
involuntary, and sometimes as abruptly as an electrical flash. To
attempt to subject the laws by which ideas and emotions are created to
the power of the will, so that they may be conjured and shaped by its
mandates, is to war, not only against the constitution of the human
mind, but against the powers and elements of Nature.


SECOND. The Natural Effects of the Monastic Vow of Silent Contemplation.

Let us consider the character and products of the mind which the
monastic vow of silent contemplation is calculated to create.

When liberal education has disciplined the intellectual powers, and
study has enriched the mind with the facts and principles of science and
literature, a philosopher may find in solitude an influence congenial
to his high pursuits; and with his scientific instruments enlarging his
field of vision, he may discover new secrets in the realms of Nature,
and come forth from retirement a more useful member and a brighter
ornament of society. But if with distinguished abilities, and the
valuable results of an erudite industry, he should maintain perpetual
silence, and continue for life in a secluded abode, he would be of no
benefit to mankind, and neither win nor deserve the homage which they
accord to scientific benefactors.

But the monks were very far from being philosophers. They were
in general exceedingly illiterate. Some of their orders actually
interdicted as profane any attempt to cultivate the intellectual powers,
or to acquire either scientific or literary information. Filled with
abject and obscene pilgrims, with slaves who knew of nothing but manual
labor, with mechanics whose scanty wages had precluded the possibility
of a rudimental education, with soldiers who had no knowledge but that
of war, and who had fled before the victorious barbarian into obscurity
for safety, it could not be expected that the monasteries with such
material, imprisoned in solitude, deprived of social communion,
enervated in mental capacity, and restricted in the exercise of their
intellectual powers, could ever give birth to philosophers, or to
anything but mental imbecility and moral monstrosities.

It has been alleged in favor of monastic institutions that they have
originated and were sustained from a pious intention of affording the
devout an asylum, where, secluded from the distractions of life, and
occupied in silent contemplation on death and judgment, they might fit
themselves for the society of God and angels. That such a motive has at
times mingled with the causes which have induced individuals to assume
the monastic vow, is undoubtedly true; but had it been in every instance
the only incentive it would not have made the act less irrational,
unnatural and pernicious. Such a plea, in fact, would only prove that
monastic piety was identical with Pagan piety. Long before the origin of
Christianity, religious orders existed in India, which sought by means
of the destruction of all corporeality and intellectual activity, an
incorporation with the nature of God, and the realization of a state of
perfect happiness.

But an act may be absurd and pernicious, while its motive is pure; and
it is always absurd when its objects are imaginary, and pernicious when
they are in violation of the dictate of reason. The monastic vows and
regulations were ill calculated to make men either happy, enlightened,
or useful. Encaverned in solitude, the monks could not become
extensively acquainted with the objects of Nature; preserving perpetual
silence, they could not materially enlarge each others' information;
exercising but one class of the mental organs, they could not form the
numerous order of conceptions perfected only by the review of all the
faculties. Isolated from human contiguity, walled up in a dungeon, or
incarcerated in a monastic cell, the mind overtasked with labor, broken
down by fatigue, prostrated yet urged to action, one class of the
faculties paralyzed, another inflamed to frenzy, and all concentrated in
silent contemplation on terrible and incomprehensible subjects, partial
or complete insanity would ensue; incongruity would become tasteful,
exaggerations natural, impossibilities credible, shadows realities, and
visions, fiends, and angels take possession of the mind. The productions
of such a mind, being a transcript of its impressions, would present
nothing as real or symmetrical; but everything as disfigured,
indistinct, shadowy, inharmoniously blended, or superlatively gigantic.
Misshapen dwarfs, huge giants, beings that were neither men, nor beasts,
nor birds, nor fishes, nor angels, nor demons, but an incongruous
mixture of them all, would be its natural offspring. Men with birds'
wings, beasts with human heads, women with fishes' scales, and animals
variously compounded of the limbs, claws, and beaks, all in violation
of the natural order of Nature, and incompatible with the laws of life,
would spring in horrible profusion from the distorted imagination of the
monks.

All ideas of proportion, adaptation and utility would be transgressed in
their creations. They might regale credulity with an account of cities
fifteen hundred miles high, with asses reproving prophets, with snakes
conversing with women, with immaterial beings fluttering on ponderable
pinions, and with angels whose heads reached the stars, but whose
forms were so hugely disproportioned, that while one foot rested on an
insignificant portion of the isle of Patmos, the other would rest on
a like portion of the Mediterranean sea. The scenery, caught from the
gloom of forests, caves or cloisters, would naturally wear an infernal
aspect, where there would be shape, but no symmetry; color but no
contrast nor harmony; where immaterial beings would be represented as
tormented with the flames and suffocating effects of liquid brimstone;
where they would shriek and groan without vocal organs, war and wound
with material swords, and where corporeality and incorporeality would
be compounded in every variety and degree of inconsistency. If in the
intervals of the monk's gloomy ravings he should attempt a more cheerful
picture, the scene which he would probably portray might glitter
with gold and gems where they would be of no service; but it would be
pervaded by an awfulness which would be depressing, and by a splendor
which would be terrifying. The music might be loud enough to shake
Nature to its foundation, but it would naturally be monotonous, perhaps
consisting of one tone and one song, eternally sung by beings without
throats, assisted by the trumpets and harps invented by mortals; and
had pianos, fiddles and accordians been early enough invented, they too,
would probably have chimed In the grand chorus. Beside the music of the
operatic troupe, the other recreations would probably be so incompatible
with the principles of human enjoyment, and make the monk's very heaven
so awfully repulsive, that common sense would prudently shrink from
partaking of its glory. Thus the conceptions of virtue and of vice,
of perfect happiness and of perfect misery, of metaphysical and of
theological dogmas, formed by the distempered brains of hermits and
monks, while they might be awfully effulgent or in-supportably horrible,
would be conflicting in their parts, inconsistent with pure ideas
of men, of phantoms, or of things; and such a strange commingling of
incongruities as might remind reflections of the huts and palaces of
Christian Rome, which are constructed of the tombs, alters, temples and
palaces of Pagan Rome.

What reason would naturally deduce from the character of the monastic
vows and rules, is amply confirmed by the facts of history. Housed with
silent, ignorant and gloomy companions, the monks contemplated not the
realities of truth, but the fictions of a distempered fancy; and while
they scorned the first as profane, they trembled before the second as a
dread reality. Conceiving the deity as a monarch, they thought of him as
a tyrant; and believing their nature depraved, they punished themselves
as criminals. As they imagined freedom of thought sinful, they
acquired the temper of a slave; and as they were incapable of reasoning
themselves, they accepted as truth whatever their ecclesiastical tyrants
dictated. Impressed with the fancy that demons had taken possession of
their bodies, they attempted to dislodge them by making their abode as
uncomfortable as possible.

After having manacled their limbs with the heaviest chains, and
lacerated their bodies in the most horrible manner, they were surprised
at finding that they had not yet destroyed their constitutional
principles and appetites; and regarding themselves still as objects of
divine wrath, they trembled as if a fiery and bottomless pit yawned at
their feet. While they labored by monastic rules and exercises to fit
themselves for the society of God and angels, they rendered themselves
unfit for the society of human beings. The perceptive powers uninformed,
and inflamed by disease, furnishing nothing but extravagant and
perverted ideas, and the fancy combining them only into monstrous
and hideous shapes, the mind became perpetually filled with the most
horrible images. The superabundant volume of blood consequent on
overwrought excitement, distending the blood vessels of the visual and
auditory organs, and causing them unnaturally to press against these
organs, gave a vivid distinctness to the impressions, and so brought
out the mental perspective as to give the complexion and distinctness
of reality. In consequence of the condition of mind thus induced, the
sights and sounds conceived by fancy were recognized as real by the
perceptive organs. The senses thus recognizing visions as realities, the
life of the recluse was doomed to become an incessant struggle, not
only with real disease, but with imaginary demons. Less refined in their
mythology than the Pagans, who regarded the earth, air and water as
peopled with genii, naiads and fairies, they conceived them inhabited by
malignant fiends.

The monks often fancied that they saw the misshapen forms of demons, and
heard their diabolical whispers. Too illiterate or obtuse to account for
natural phenomena, they supposed that they had a hand in regulating the
operations of Nature; and, too unacquainted with the habits of the brute
creation to understand their mechanical capacity, they regarded the
contrivances of animals as the undoubted fruit of a nocturnal adventure
of the infernal inhabitants. They often conceived that they saw His
Satanic Majesty, with all his distinguishing appendages, such as his
cloven foot, his sooty aspect, his peculiar horns, and sulphurous odor.
Although his visitations were most formidable in the shape of a woman,
yet they frequently had the uncommon fortitude of sustaining long
conversations with him.

The more pious a monk was, the more frequently he was honored with the
company of demons. This fact is not surprising, for it is certain that
the more successfully he warred against nature and himself, the more
diseased would become his brain, the more extravagant his conceptions,
the more discordant his imagination, the more susceptible his senses
to false impressions, the more frequent and terrible would apparitions
appear, and the better he would be suited for the company of fiends and
spirits. If in the vigorous and wholesome bustle of life, the visual
organs may recognize images which have no real existence, the auditory,
sounds which are imaginary, and the olfactory, odors which are the mere
products of fancy, how much more vividly would analogous deceptions be
likely to occur in the minds of monks and anchorites, whose condition
was replete with causes calculated to create, them. Such was the
melancholy condition of those monks, who, aspiring after superhuman
sanctification, had with sincerity of purpose assumed the monastic
obligation; But there were others who, more ambitious of fame than of
internal purity, had assumed the same obligations. Professedly despising
pleasure and fortune, but secretly laboring to acquire their possession,
they manufactured with more facility diabolical apparitions, than those
which spontaneously sprang from the overwrought brain of the sincere.

Sanctification having become the passport to worldly honors, and its
degree orthodoxly estimated by the degrees of personal familiarity
with the Devil, the aspiring were too frail to resist the temptation of
increasing their celebrity by multiplying the number of satanic visits;
and as they could draw on an inexhaustible mine of conscienceless
inventions, and deliberately adorn them with the terrific and
interesting incidents of romance, they far outstripped the reputation
of the sincere, and with greater facility obtained the emoluments
of ecclesiastical sinecures. The sense of touch not being equally
susceptible of false impressions with the other senses, while the
sincere might see demons and hear their voices, they could not so well
recognize them by means of contact. But the hypocritical, untrammeled
by this limitation, would create by their inventive faculties any number
of personal encounters and terrific battles with the armies of the
infernal regions.

Although the monks sometimes relate how completely they vanquished the
Devil by their eloquence and the ingenuity of their arguments, yet they
oftener tell how valorously they triumphed over him after a desperate
struggle with his superhuman strength; and not seldom, how alone and
single-handed they encountered him in command of a battalion of fiends,
inflicting on the spiritual bodies of the demons such deep gashes, and
cutting up their impalpable substances in such a horrible manner that,
wounded, bleeding and demoralized, they retreated in wild disorder. As
the monkish cell, like the human brain, could accommodate any number of
devils, it was as convenient a hall of audience in which to receive His
Satanic Majesty, as it was an area for the scientific manoeuvering
of his legions. The crown of sanctification being awarded to the most
unscrupulous inventor of pious fictions, a hypocrite was encouraged
to labor to outrival the fame of an antagonist by the boldness of his
assertions, the extravagance of his fables, and the incredibleness of
his fabrications. Under such circumstances we are not astonished to find
that some claimed to have obtained a perfection in holiness that enabled
them to see the Devil anywhere, and to look upon hell at any time.

Even at the period of the Reformation, the popular belief recognized
the Devil and his imps as often visible. Martin Luther, while engaged in
translating the Bible, conceived that he saw the Devil enter his study,
for the purpose of embarrassing him in the execution of his useful
design. Annoyed at this unceremonious and impertinent intrusion, he
threw at His Satanic Majesty an inkstand, which, passing through the
dusky form and striking the wall beyond, left a stain which is visible
to this day.


THIRD. The Ignorance and Corruption induced by the Monastic Vow of
Silent Contemplation.

The profound homage won by the monks from ignorance and superstition,
gave such credit to their extravagant productions, that history has
sometimes been led into the error of recording them as real events;
and the craft or credulity of the church in incorporating them in her
devotional books has so deepened and perpetuated reverence for them,
that, even at the present day, they continue still to govern in a
measure the superstition, and to contaminate the creed and ritual of
reformed churches.

It has been alleged, with apparent plausibility, in favor of monastic
institutions, that they were during the middle ages the protectors of
learning. But, unfortunately, this noble virtue can be justly claimed
for only a few of them; and for that few in but a limited sense. Some of
the inmates being unfit for more remunerative employment were subjected
to the drudgery of copying manuscript; sometimes the task was imposed on
others as a penance. The aged and infirm of the Benedictine monks were
thus employed; and, as the multiplication of manuscripts is the most
efficient mode of preserving what is written on the perishable material
of paper and parchment, these monks have contributed to the preservation
of learning. But inveterate prejudice, obstinate bigotry, gross
ignorance, and abject servitude were ill qualified to render correct
versions, while they were well adapted to the perpetration of fraud and
corruption. Transcribing manuscripts, not to produce accurate copies,
but to consume time or do penance, and governed by the misleading
principles of their order, it is not as likely that the monks would
furnish authentic and reliable transcripts, as that they would mar them
with errors, embellish them with fancies, and interpolate them with
forgeries and wilful corruptions.

While such was the literary honesty of the religious orders, and such
likely to be the character of their manuscripts, the ignorance and
superstition of the age favored rather than obstructed the perpetration
of any pious fraud they might contemplate. A few facts will illustrate
the incredible ignorance of the Catholic clergy during the dark ages.
A Jew, converted to Christianity but not to truth, having persuaded the
Emperor Maximilian that the Hebrew works, the Old Testament excepted,
were all of pernicious tendency, the latter, at the horrible
revelation, ordered them to to be burnt. The learned Reuchlen
earnestly remonstrated against the imperial decree, and succeeded in
having its execution postponed until the matter of the allegation could
be critically examined. A controversy of ten years ensued. So grossly
ignorant were the clergy that not one of them with whom Reuchlen debated
had ever seen a Greek Testament, and as for the Hebrew Bible, they
denounced its alphabetical characters as the diabolical invention of
some profane sorcerer. So obstinate was their opposition to Hebrew
literature that they declared their readiness to support their cause
at the point of the sword. Neither the Pope nor the cardinals having
sufficient learning to decide on the merits of the question, the
former was induced to appoint as umpire the archbishop of Spires, whose
decision happily rescued oriental literature from the flames of the
stake. Pope Sylvester II., whose literary attainments were superior
to those of the clergy of his age, was regarded as a magician who held
unhallowed converse with infernal demons. St. Augustin, who was ignorant
of the Greek tongue, and whose learning was sufficiently superficial to
prepare him for canonization, pronounced the doctrine of the antipodes
a blasphemous heresy; and Pope Zachariah degraded a friar for indorsing
it, and excommunicated all Catholics who should believe it. The
patriarch Cyrille declared that neither he, nor the Vandal clergy, nor
the African clergy understood the Latin language. St. Hilary asserts
from his personal knowledge that but few of the prelates in the ten
provinces of Asia preserved the knowledge of the true god. (_Hilar,
de Synodis_. c. 63, p. 1186). It might reasonably be supposed that
the ecclesiastical councils, composed of the most influential
bishops, priests and abbots, would comprehend among their members many
distinguished scholars, yet according to the authority of Pope Gregory
II., the councils at his time were composed of men, not only ignorant of
letters, but of the scriptures. According to the testimony of Sabinus,
bishop of Heraclea, the Nicene bishops were "a set of illiterate, simple
creatures that understood nothing," and Cassian charges the Egyptian
monks of having ignorantly preached Epicurean Paganism as the gospel
of Christ. Among the crowd of slaves, soldiers, lords and priests that
thronged the convents, the sign of the cross, the sign of ignorance, was
a general mode of executing contracts, as all could make it, though few
could write their names.

That the literary progress of the church has not kept pace with the
progress of the world, will be attested by a few extracts from a work
written by William Hogan, formerly a Catholic priest of Philadelphia,
comprising an essay entitled, "A Synopsis of Popery, as it was and as it
is," and another entitled, "Auricular Confession and Popish Nunneries,"
published at Hartford, by Silas Andrew and Son, in 1850--a work that
may be profitably consulted by parents who educate their daughters at
nunnery schools, and by gentlemen who contemplate forming matrimonial
alliances with ladies who have been accomplished at such institutions.
Speaking of the ecclesiastical canons the author says: "These canons
are inaccessible to the majority of the American people, even of
theologians, and with the purport or meaning of them none but those who
have been educated Catholic priests have much or any acquaintance. He
who argues with Catholic priests must have had his education with them,
he must be of them and from among them. He must know from experience
that they will stop at no falsehood where the good of the church is
concerned; he must know that they will scruple at no forgery when
they desire to establish any point of doctrine, fundamentally or not
fundamentally, which is not taught by the church; he must be aware
that it is a standing rule with the Popish priests, in all their
controversies with Protestants, to admit nothing and deny everything,
and that if still driven into difficulty they will have recourse to
the archives of the church, where they keep piles of decretals, canons,
receipts, bulls, excommunications and interdicts, ready for all such
emergencies, some of them dated from 300 to 1000 years before they were
written or thought of, showing more clearly than perhaps anything else
the extreme ignorance of mankind between the third and ninth century,
when these forgeries were palmed on the world." (Synopsis, p. 9, 10).
Again, he observes: "The majority of Catholics in this country know
nothing of the religion which they profess, and for which they are
willing to fight, contend, and shed the blood of their fellow beings. I
am not even hazarding an assertion when I say there is not one of them
that has read the gospel through, or that knows any more about the
religion he professes than he does about the Koran of Mohammed. He is
told by the priest that Christ established a church on earth; that it
is infallible, and that he must submit implicitly to what its popes,
priests and bishops teach, under pain of 'damnation.' This is all the
great mass of Catholics know of religion; this is all they are required
to learn; and hence it is that these people are unacquainted with
the pretensions of the Pope, the intrigues of the Jesuits, and the
imposition practised on them by their bishops and priests." (_Synopsis_,
p. 29). Speaking of the theological education of the priests, he says:
"During the four years I spent in the college of Maynooth, they (the
scriptures) formed no portion of the education of the students. It is my
firm conviction, that out of the large number of students there for
the ministry, there was not one who read the gospels through, nor even
portions of them, except such as are found in detached passages, in
works of controversy between Catholics and Protestants. Until I went
to college I scarcely ever heard of a Bible. I know not of one in any
parish of Munster, except it may be a Latin one, which each priest may
or may not have, as he pleases. But I studied closely the holy fathers
of the church; so did most of the students. We were taught to rely upon
them as our sole guide in morals, and the only correct interpreters
of the Bible. A right of private judgment was entirely denied us, and
represented as the source of multifarious errors. The Bible, in fact,
we had no veneration for. It was, in truth, but a dead letter in the
college; it was a sealed book to us, though there were not an equal
number of students who were obliged to study more closely the sayings,
the sophistry, the metaphysics and mystic doctrines of those raving
dreamers called holy fathers; many of whom, if now living would be
deemed mad, and dealt with accordingly." (Auric. Confess., vol. 1, p.
79, 80).

But to return to the consideration of the monks. The pen of
transcribers, so generally ignorant, and so grossly superstitious,
could not render authentic manuscripts even when actuated by the best
intention; and when we recollect that the task which required the
exercise of an enlightened and vigorous intellect was devolved on the
most diseased and infirm of the religious orders, the impossibility
of its effectual performance will appear without a doubt. As
ignorance could not transcribe masterly, so superstition would pervert
intentionally. Conscience paralyzed by bigotry, and the love of truth
supplanted by a careful regard to the interests of the church, the
copyists would esteem it a Christian duty to omit such parts of a
manuscript as militated against the truth of their religion; to corrupt
such parts as might by perversion be made to administer to its support;
and to interpolate such parts with occurrences and apparent incidental
allusions to events, the omission of which was fatal to its credibility;
and thus by a system of typographical frauds, deliberate falsehoods and
artful perversions, contrive to make it appear that all Jewish and Pagan
literature concurred in establishing Catholicism.

The classics, unlike the canonical scriptures, have been subjected to
the purifying process of rigid criticism, and the monkish corruptions
which once perverted the meaning, are in a great measure eradicated
from modern editions. Had the New Testament been subjected to a similar
ordeal, such for instance as the learned Strauss, in his Life of Christ,
instituted, Infidels might have fewer objections to the gospels, and the
credit of these sacred books be far better sustained than it has been by
voluminous commentaries, declamatory sermons and conflicting polemical
works, defending the grossest frauds and the boldest interpolations.

The bigotry or fear of the church, which induced it to corrupt the works
of ancient authors, led it also to wage an exterminating war against
those profane productions which it could not satisfactorily answer.
For this purpose the secular power was invoked, and laws were framed
prescribing the severest penalty for those who should read or possess
a Pagan production. The persecution against philosophers and their
libraries was carried on with such pious insanity that besides its
causing piles of manuscripts to be destroyed, men of letters burned
their elegant libraries, lest some volume contained in them should
jeopardize their lives. Young Chrysostom, happening once to find a
proscribed volume, gave himself up for lost. St. Jerome, in order to
deter his readers from perusing any of the heathen authors, declared he
had been scourged by an angel for reading the productions of Virgil.
The Orthodox Theodosius, in the destruction of the Alexandrian library,
consigned to the flames the literary treasures of antiquity. The bare
thought of the existence of works which baffled the talent and learning
of the church to refute, irritated the sensitive piety of the monks
beyond endurance. They pursued the masterly productions of Celsus and
Porphery with an unscrupulousness which seemed to indicate that the
annihilation of them was indispensable to the existence of Christianity.
After malice had ferreted every crevice where a proscribed volume
could be secreted, and vengance had not left a vestige of any of them
remaining, except what was quoted or perverted in the works of Christian
apologists, the Church boasted that God had not left a work of hostile
literature in existence. With not less blasphemy and bigotry has the
same absurdity been echoed by dishonest, ignorant theologians of
all ages. So wide and unsparing was the monkish war against classic
literature, that it has left no work in existence belonging to the
period of Christ; and hence where knowledge is the most needed the
historian finds the least; and where the facts might be expected to be
the most abundant and of the clearest description, the wildest and most
ridiculous fancies are presented. The necessity for this destruction
proves the power of the works destroyed, and the alarm and weakness of
the faith that destroyed them.

Beside the destructive hostility of the monks to the formidable literary
obstacles which embarrassed the vindication of their theological
subtleties, their zeal led them to perpetrate the grossest forgeries in
order to manufacture historical data in their favor. Prominent among
the numerous instances of this disregard to truth, are the following
passages conceded by all scholars to be entire fabrications. The passage
in the works of Phlegon, in which he is made to speak of a total eclipse
of the sun and a simultaneous earthquake; a passage in Macrobius, which
represents the author as incidentally referring to the death of a son of
his as having occurred in consequence of a jealous order issued by Herod
for the massacre of all children under two years old; the Epistle of
Lentulus, prefect of Judaea at the time of Christ, who is represented
as describing the person and character of Christ, in a governmental
despatch, which according to prefectorial custom was encumbent on him,
in transmitting to Rome a report of all important events occurring
within the limits of his jurisdiction; the legend of the Veronica
handkerchief in which it is related how Abgarus, king of Edessa, sent
ambassadors to Christ to solicit the favor of his portrait, and how
wiping his face with a handkerchief, and thereby impressing his features
on it, politely accommodated the legation; the Epistle of Pontius Pilate
to the Emperor Tiberius, in which he is made to relate the alleged
circumstances of the death and resurrection of Christ; the fabulous
inscriptions on two fabulous columns, said to be situated near Tangiers,
relating to a robber called Joshua, son of Nun; and all the passages
found in Josephus in reference to Christ.

Origen, who wrote in the second century, complains that his own works
had been altered; and the practice of this base species of dishonesty
seems to have fearfully increased with the growth of the Church.
The monk Jerome, in the fourth century, finding the versions of the
scriptures which were received by the churches as authentic exceedingly
conflicting, undertook to abate the scandal it caused, by compiling a
Bible with genuine text. The product of this laborious exertion was,
however, so unsatisfactory to the theological tastes of the churches,
or to the results of their critical examinations, that but few of them
adopted it. Although Jerome's labors were but imperfectly appreciated
during his life, yet, as he had materially approximated toward
furnishing a catholic desideratum, the Vulgate, which is a modification
of his Bible, was declared by the Council of Trent, in 1546, to be
"authentic in all lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, and
no one shall presume to reject it under any pretense whatever." But in
attempting to execute this decree startling fact became evident that the
copies of the Vulgate, in consequence of the liberty which translators
had taken with the text, essentially differed from one another; that
each church believed in a different Bible; that it was impossible to
determine which divine book was the least corrupted; and that as the
Council, inspired by the Holy Ghost, had forgotten to designate which
copy of the Vulgate was the genuine one, it only increased the confusion
it had attempted to remedy. If disbelief in the Bible is infidelity, the
greater number of the churches were actually in a situation which made
them unconscious infidel conclaves. To relieve them from this perilous
predicament, the Pope appointed a learned committee to prepare a
Bible which should have genuine text. But the Bible elaborated by this
committee, not according with the Pope's theological fancies or secret
designs, was rejected. Pope Pius IV. next tried his hand at perfecting
and correcting the scriptural text; but the task exceeding his learning
and ingenuity, his efforts were alike unproductive of satisfactory
results. He was followed by Pope Pius V., who also labored in vain.
In 1590 Pope Sixtus V. made a Bible which his judgment or prejudice
pronounced to be authentic. Determined that Christendom should be
reduced to the alternative of accepting his version, or having none, he
anathematized all who should alter its text or reject his authority. But
Pope Clement VIII., not having the fear of his infallible predecessor's
anathema before his eyes, made another Bible, and promulgated it from
his throne as genuine and authoritative, amid a heavy storm of Vatican
thunder, in which he consigned to the care of the Devil and his angels
all who should presume to correct the work of his infallible hands. A
year had, however, scarcely elapsed when he was obliged to correct its
glaring inconsistencies himself; incurring the vengeance of his own
anathemas. Notwithstanding an incessant tinkering for ages by the ablest
theologians, to mend the numerous flaws in the Catholic word of God,
every well-informed Romanist admits, that while all the previously
received versions of the Vulgate are too grossly corrupted to be
defended, the one in present use is far from being perfect. Cardinal
Bellarmine, who was deeply versed in Biblical erudition, and who in life
had obtained such an eminent degree of popularity for sanctity, that
when he died a guard had to be placed over his corpse, to prevent the
devout from robbing it of its garments--who wished to preserve or vend
them as relics--declares that the most that can be said in favor of the
received version is, that it is the best that has been made.

The authorized English version of the holy scriptures, known as James'
Bible, is the product of forty-seven celebrated Biblical scholars,
after three years' labor. The manuscripts from which they made their
translations being exceedingly corrupted and discordant, the renderings
consequently were so conflicting and irreconcilable on any principle
of philological or exegetical criticism, that in order to effect any
agreement, and prevent the production of as many Bibles as there were
translators, they put the question concerning a disagreement to vote,
and decided which was the correct rendering by the authority of a
majority of suffrages. But this logic was not appreciated by Dr. Smith
and Bishop Belson, to whose joint scrutiny the Bible thus manufactured
was afterwards submitted, and they accordingly subjected it to a further
process of purification.

While philological criticism, and investigations concerning the
genuineness of the sacred text, have wrung from Catholics the reluctant
concession that the Vulgate needs a revision, they have equally extorted
from Protestants the unwilling admission that their version is corrupted
with undoubted forgeries. The doxology at the conclusion of the Lord's
prayer, the story of the pool of Bethsaida, the story of the rich man
and Lazarus, and the story of the adulteress, are universally conceded
by scholars to be wilful fabrications. The most distinguished among
Biblical scholars go further. Bretschneider, the friend and confident
of Joseph II. of Austria, rejects the Gospel of St. John. Dr. Lardner
rejects the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of St. James, the Second
Epistle of St. Peter, the Second Epistle of St. John, the Epistle of St.
Jude, and the book of Revelations. Dr. Evanson rejects the Gospel of St.
Matthew, the Gospel of St. Mark, the Gospel of St. Luke, the Epistle to
the Ephesians, the Epistle to the Colossians, the Epistle to the Romans,
the First Epistle of St. Peter and the First Epistle of St. John.

The Greek Testament comprehends 181,253 words, yet such is the number
of mistakes, perversions, forgeries and interpolations in the existing
manuscripts, that in comparing the documents together 130,000 various
readings are detected; showing that the manuscripts from which the New
Testament is translated, are not correct in one word out of six. These
discrepancies, affecting the mere spelling of a word in some instances,
and, in others, the sense of a passage, are of all degrees of
importance.

In Tischendorf's New Testament, published by Tauchnitz, at Leipzig,
in English, and for sale by the New York booksellers, we find the
following: "But the Greek text of the apostolic writings, since its
origin in the first century, has suffered many a mischance at the hands
of those who have used and studied it.... The authorized version, like
Luther's, was made from a Greek text which Erasmus in 1516, and Robert
Stephens in 1550, had formed from manuscripts of later date than the
tenth century.... Since the sixteenth century Greek manuscripts have
been discovered, of far greater antiquity than those of Erasmus and
Stephens; as well as others in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Gothic, into
which languages the sacred text was translated, between the second and
fourth centuries.....Scholars are much divided in opinion as to the
readings which most exactly convey the word of God." (_Introduction_, p.
1, 2).

When mistakes in a manuscript arise, from the ignorance or incompetency
of the copyist, they invalidate its authority; when they arise from his
carelessness, they are proofs that he entertained no reverence for it;
and when they occur from a deliberate intention on his part to corrupt
and to interpolate it, they are demonstrations that he did not believe
in its divine inspiration. That the religious orders did not believe in
the divine inspiration of the holy scriptures, is as undeniable as it
is that they deliberately and intentionally marred all the Biblical
manuscripts that passed through their hands. The conviction is equally
irresistible that those who sanction the corruptions of the sacred text
by using them as authority, and those who defend them in defiance of the
irrefragable proof of their spurious character, forfeit all claim to a
reputation of common honesty.

There is another class of forgeries perpetrated for the good of the
Church, to which I will briefly advert. Of this description is
the Decretal Epistle of Constantine the Elder, addressed to Pope
Sylvester--the foundation of the Pope's claim to temporal sovereignty;
and also the Creed of Athanasius, forged two hundred years after his
death, and which Gennadius, Patriarch of Constantinople, upon first
reading, pronounced to be the work of a drunken man. All ranks of the
Church seemed to have become infatuated with an ambition to be forgers.
Pope Stephen II. forged a letter, and attributed its authorship to the
spirit of St. Peter. In this document, according to Gibbon, "The apostle
assures his adopted sons, the King, the clergy, and the nobles of
France, that dead in the flesh, he is still active in the spirit; that
they now hear and must obey the voice of the founder and guardian of the
Roman Church; that the virgins, the saints, and all the host of heaven,
unanimously urge the request, and will confess the obligation; that
riches, victory and paradise will crown their pious enterprise, and
that eternal damnation will be the penalty if they suffer his tomb,
his temple, and his people to fall into the hands of the perfidious
Saracens." (_Dec_. vol. v., chap, xlix., p. 26.) The evidences of similar
frauds are numerous. All the letters and decretals of Clementine are
spurious. But few of the numerous works ascribed to Pope Gregory the
Great are genuine. The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians
is egregeously corrupted and interpolated; his second Epistle to the
Corinthians, is so much mutilated that but a fragment of it remains; his
autobiography, in which he is made to take a journey with St. Peter; and
all his apostolic canons, are entire fabrications. The Apocalypse was
rejected as spurious at the Council of Laodicea, by the seven churches
to which it was addressed, and the sentence was almost universally
confirmed by the churches of Christendom. Sirmund shows that the Nicene
canons have been corrupted, altered, abridged, and forged to accommodate
them to the designs of the church. (_Tom_. iv., p. 1-234). To establish
a historical basis for some pious imposition, the the letters of
bishops, decrees of councils, and bulls of Popes have been forged,
distorted, marred, interpolated or destroyed. Volume after volume has
been written and falsely attributed to the pen of some distinguished
author, in order to obtain respect and authority for an absurd
ecclesiastical claim or arbitrary usurpation. Without moral principle,
and intent only on supporting the ambitious pretensions of the Pope, the
religious orders, at the suggestion of interest, scrupled not to
destroy the finest models of literary taste, and to perpetrate the most
audacious forgeries. What could not militate against the credit of their
dogmas, or obstruct the consummation of their designs, or what might,
by an artful adulteration be made accessory to them, they might piously
spare; but whatever was in its nature too inflexibly inimical to the
success of them, they labored to annihilate. The unavoidable deduction
from the existence of the monkish forgeries is, that every doctrine
for which they have been fabricated to prove, is false; and that every
doctrine and event for which they have been manufactured to disprove, is
true. The mutilation and destruction of ancient authors by the religious
orders is a positive admission that such works were fatal to their
claims; the attempt to manufacture artificial proof by corrupting and
interpolating them, is an acknowledgment that the successful vindication
of their creed and pretensions required proof which did not exist;
and the cargoes of their forgeries, each instance of which being a
demonstration of these assertions, and consequently an undeniable
objection to the validity of the authority upon which they rest their
claims, show the vast amount of labor the monks have undergone to
disprove their own doctrines, and destroy their own credibility.

In the revival of learning, inaugurated by profane genius, the monastic
orders, which possessed the treasures of classic literature, took, in
general, no active part. The literary fires which smouldered in their
institutions cast but a sickly glare upon the darkness within, and the
feeble rays could not be expected to penetrate the massive walls of
these huge castles of ignorance. Resembling more a taper placed under
a bushel than a light set upon a hill, they left the surrounding region
enveloped in midnight gloom. The manuscripts transcribed or perverted by
the monks were stowed away as useless rubbish. At length the holy charm
which, for ages, had bound the church in stupid ignorance, was happily
dissolved. Pope Nicholas V., catching a spark of the fire which burned
in the breast of his lay associates, such as Cosmo Medici, his own, too,
became ignited. Unconscious or regardless of the liberalizing tendency
of classical literature, he became enthusiastic in its cause, and
inaugurated a pursuit which has exposed the forgeries and legends of the
Catholic Church to scorn and contempt. Whatever were his private views,
his public example and assertions indicate that he had arrived at a
firm conviction that the papal chair would not soon again be filled
with another friend to the classics. Diligently improving the auspicious
moment, he collected the dusky and mouldering manuscripts from the
monasteries, while his coadjutors sent vessels to gather them from
abroad. By the united labors of the Pope and his opulent laymen,
respectable libraries were formed, and the world was enlightened by
recovered versions of Xenophon, Diodorus, Polybius, Thuycidides and
other eminent authors.

The apprehensions of Nicholas, suggested probably by his knowledge of
the nature and past conduct of the church, were too well founded not
to be confirmed by subsequent history. The Pagan authors of Greece and
Rome, speaking in the clear tones of reason and philosophy, could not
subserve the purposes of ecclesiastical fraud and intolerance. The dark
conspiracy to deceive and enslave mankind, and the systematized measures
to keep the world in ignorance, which constitutes a permanent feature of
Catholic polity, could derive no aid from a liberal diffusion of Pagan
erudition. Hence Leo X., who is ranked among the most generous of the
pontifical patrons of the classics, prohibited the translation of them
into the vernacular language.

But it may be alleged as an exception to the usual hatred manifested
by the church to the cause of education, that the Pope did, at times,
establish colleges and universities. This fact is undeniably true. Pope
Six-tus IV. established several universities; but he required from each,
for a charter, 10,000 ducats; and for each collegiate title and
office, from 10,000 to 20,000 ducats, Pope Innocent III. also founded
a university; but it was on condition that he received 50,000 scudi for
its charter. He also very generously created twenty-six secretaryships,
and a host of other offices, to assist the labors of education, but he
sold appointments to them at very exorbitant prices. Pope Alexander VI.
also founded a university, but it was in consideration of a magnificent
bonus; and he even further displayed his magnanimity by nominating
eighty writers of popish briefs, and selling the appointments at 850
scudi each. But after all what was the object of these institutions?
Was it to advance the capacities of individual man? Was it to enlighten
society at large? Not at all. Guisot says: "For the development of the
clergy, for the instruction of the priesthood, she [the church] was
actively alive; to promote these she had her schools, her colleges,
and all other institutions which the deplorable state of society would
permit. These schools and colleges, it is true, were all theological,
and destined for the clergy; and, though from the intimacy between the
civil and religious orders they could not but have some influence on the
rest of the world, it was very slow and indirect." (_Gen. Hist. Civ_.,
Sect, vi., p. 132). Guizot might have added with truth, that even for
her own clergy the church never tolerated an educational institution
without receiving an exorbitant pecuniary consideration, nor appointed a
professor, or any other officer, without receiving pay for it.

Dens, in his "_Systematic Theology_" reasons thus: "Because forgers of
money, and other disturbers of the State, are justly punished with
death, therefore also are heretics, who are forgers of the faith, and,
as experience shows, greatly disturb the State." ( Dens, 2, 88, 89 ). If
this logic is sound, it is difficult to perceive how Popes, cardinals,
monks and priests can avoid conceding justice the right of putting
_them_ to death, as by the universal testimony of history and the
acknowledgment of the ablest Catholic authors, they have been forgers of
the faith; and, as they have been greater forgers than Protestants, they
may, according to their own logic, be more justly put to death. But this
we should be sorry to witness.

The efforts of the church to manufacture evidence in support of
gratuitous assumptions, which so clearly disproves what it asserts
at every step; sinks its character and authority into such utter
insignificance; and in proportion to the warmth of its zeal adds weight
to the contempt it has earned, might be considered unworthy the notice
of sober reason, and left to the crushing jeer of its own ludicrousness.
Yet when its polluting finger presumes to touch the sacred page of
history; when it would annihilate all historical authority by base
interpolations, and load the shelves of libraries with its spurious
trash, it has invaded a province sacred to the rights of the world;
a province in which truth, reason, and human progress have a deep
interest, and which must be protected against the intrusion of malignant
feet.

From the monastic vows and regulations, we might be agreeably surprised
if the literary productions of those who were governed by them were
anything but models of absurdity and puerility. It would naturally be
suspected that the ideas of the monks would be shaded by the gloom of
their melancholy abode, contracted by the influence of their solitary
confinement, and rendered misshapen by the habit of conversing
exclusively with their own meditations; and that their literary
productions would be rife with all the inventions to which bigotry and
superstition could prompt, and with all the craft and unscrupulousness
that could serve the purposes of unpolished and unnatural fraternities,
isolated from society, absolved from the ties and obligations of
humanity, and exclusively devoted to the defense and aggrandizement
of an organization which aimed at monopolizing all secular rights,
immunities and privileges, in order to command the dominion and luxuries
of the world. This reasonable presumption we shall find too well
confirmed for the credit of human nature, in those legends and
theological disquisitions which have often puzzled the credulous, but
much oftener curled the lips of the more enlightened into a smile of
philosophical contempt. Palpably fictitious, rarely possessing the merit
of ingenuity, and, in general, absolutely puerile, yet have the monkish
legends been consecrated as divine in the Catholic Mass-book, enforced
upon the acceptance of the obstinate by the terrors of the Inquisition,
and sometimes mistaken by history for actual events.

This ludicrous mass consists in part of magnified and distorted
events of true history, and in part of personages and details entirely
spurious. It is elaborately ornamented, or degraded with circumstancial
accounts of miracles which were never performed, with reports of debates
which never took place, and with details of battles which were never
fought. Faithful only in transcribing their own vitiated taste and
unscrupulous conscience; and decorating their narratives with coarse
scenes of blood and bigotry, of death and horror, of hell and demons,
they have furnished a record of absurdities, of a depth of hypocrisy,
of an audacity in fabrication, and of a total depravity in principle
unparalleled in the history of deception and imposition. Had they, like
Sir Thomas Moore, in his description of Eutopia, or no place, described
a people which were no people, a city which was invisible, and a river
which was waterless, they could scarcely have been less imaginary,
though it must be conceded that they are less entertaining and
instructive.

Passing over the polemical rubbish, the absurd topics of discussion and
the ludicrous logic of the monastic orders, which would be too tedious
for a reader of the nineteenth century, we will briefly allude to some
of their amusing legends, which have been consecrated as sacred history
in the devotional books of the church. The actual sufferings and deaths
of the primitive Christians, they have grotesquely magnified, and
invented fanciful modes of torture, which never could have entered the
more cultivated brain of a Roman emperor.

According to the story of these visionists, when a Pagan female embraced
Christianity, she was often compelled to decide whether she valued her
virtue higher than she did her religion; and, when the inflexibility of
her faith imperiled her innocence, a divine power always interposed, and
miraculously rescued her from a dangerous predicament. The male converts
were subjected to similar modes of ingenious torture, A young saint, in
the passion of his first love, according to their authority, was once
chained naked to a bed of flowers, and in this hapless and exposed
condition, wontonly assaulted by a beautiful courtezan; but he saved his
chastity by biting off his tongue, St. Cecilia made a vow of perpetual
virginity, but her father disregarding the unnatural obligation,
betrothed her to a prince. In spite of all remonstrances to the
contrary, the marriage was on the eve of being consummated, when an
angel interposed, and, after satisfactorily adjusting matters between
the nuptial parties, rewarded the groom for the relinquishment of his
bride, and the virgin for the obstinacy of her resolution, by crowning
them both with wreaths of spiritual roses and lilies, culled from
heaven's flower garden. Sometime after the eventful occurences of this
wedding party, Amachius, a Roman prefect, commanded Cecilia to sacrifice
to the gods. Her piety obliging her to disobey the royal injunction,
it was determined that the majesty of the law should be vindicated by
having her boiled three days and three nights in a pot of water. The
coldness of divine grace however sufficiently impregnated her body to
protect it from injury. As her piety had rendered her invulnerable to
the effects of boiling water, the emperor ordered the executioner to try
the virtue of a ponderous axe. Accordingly she was laid upon the block;
the executioner gave her neck three scientific strokes, but perceiving
her head still attached by its integuments, desisted from further
effort convinced that the accomplishment of the task exceeded his
constitutional vigor.

The miraculous feat of this saint in inventing music, a long time after
all nations had acquired some proficiency, at least, in its principles,
has often been the theme of pious historians, orators and poets. St.
George slew a dragon ( a lizard ), which was about to swallow a king's
daughter. St. Dennis walked two miles after his head had been cut off.
St. John of God displayed so much whimsical zeal that he was supposed
to be demented, and was placed in a lunatic asylum. St. Hubert went on
a hunting excursion, and seeing a stag with a cross between its antlers,
became converted by the vision into a bishop. He received a key from St.
Peter, which is still preserved in St. Hubert's monastery, at Ardennes,
and is regarded as an infallible remedy for the hydrophobia.

St. Patrick found a lost boy, whom the hogs had nearly devoured. On
touching the mutilated frame with his holy hand, it recovered the lost
flesh which had been digested by the swine, and stood before the saint
perfectly proportioned in all its parts, and without a wound. This
charitable saint once fed 1,400 persons on one cow, two stags, and two
wild boars. Respecting, however, the rights of property, and perceiving
that to be benevolent at another's expense was a suspicious species of
morality, he so adroitly contrived the management of his miracle that
the cow which had been eaten up by the people, and which belonged to a
poor widow, was seen the next day well and hearty, and as comfortably
grazing in her usual pastures as if nothing had happened. St. Xavier,
while traversing the ocean, lost overboard a crucifix. On landing, a
crab brought it in his claw, and reverently laid it at his feet. The
Devil, assuming the shape of a charming woman, once made indelicate
proposals to him. This piece of impudence so enraged the saint that
he spit into His Satanic Majesty's angelic face. The Devil, being a
gentleman, was so disgusted at this coarse vulgarity, that he ever
afterward shunned Xavier's society. St. Anthony of Padua, after
exhausting the strength of the Catholic arguments in favor of
consubstantiation, in a debate with a heretic, finally converted his
antagonist by an appeal to the understanding of a horse. Holding up the
host before the animal, he addressed it thus: "In virtue and in the name
of thy creator, I command thee, O horse to come, and with humility adore
thy God." The horse, at the request of the saint, instantly left the
corn which it was eating, advanced to the host and fell upon its knees
before it.

St. Andrew being assaulted by the devil with an axe, and by a company of
imps with clubs, called for assistance on St. John, who responded with
a regiment of angels; and capturing the devils, chained them to the
ground. At this exploit St. Andrew laughed. The Emperor Maximus, having
cut St. Apia Tell into ten pieces, the angel Gabriel put him together
again. This contest of disintegration and recomposition was carried on
with much spirit between Maximus and Gabriel. Ten times a day for ten
consecutive days was the saint cut into ten pieces by the malice of the
one, and put together again by the anatomical skill of the other. St.
Martin of Tours, the patron saint of drunkards, whose festival was
formerly celebrated by the devout with banqueting, hilarity and
carousals, once, on a drunken frolic, divided his garments with a poor
soldier. At night, in a dream, he beheld Christ wearing the identical
garment he had given away. His mind became so impressed, probably
deranged, that he turned Catholic. The face of this saint was so
sanctimonious that it once paralyzed the arm of a robber, which was
raised to give him a death blow. He wrought many miracles; could raise
the dead to life. Clovis, after his Gothic victory, made him a rich
donation; and as the hero's war steed was in the saint's stable, he
proposed besides, to redeem it with the generous sum of 100 ducats, but
the pious horse refused to move until the sum was doubled. St. Anthony
saw a centaur in the desert. Finding the corpse of the hermit Paul in
the wilderness, and being too much prostrated through fasting to bury
it, two lions seeing his difficulty, politely offered their assistance;
and after digging a grave and depositing in it the hermit's corpse,
respectfully vanished away. St. Athanasius compliments him on account of
his holy abhorence of clean water, and for not having suffered his feet
to be contaminated with it except in cases of unavoidable necessity.
( _Vet. Ant_, c. 47 ), St. Palladus, seeing a hyena standing near his
cave, addressing it, asked: "What's the matter?" "Holy father," replied
the beast, "the odor of thy sanctity has reached me. I killed a sheep
last night, and want to confess and get absolution." St. Beuno caused
the earth to open and swallow a disappointed lover, who had cut off the
head of his mistress for her having refused to marry him. He then, by
saying mass over the remains of the unfortunate lady, caused her head
and body to reunite, and life to reanimate her frame. St. Nepomuk,
refusing to disclose the secret confessions of a queen, to her husband
who suspected her of infidelity, was doomed to suffer death by drowning.
This saint was canonized by Pope Innocent III., and his tomb is shown to
this day. But unfortunately for the infallibility of His Holiness, it
has been indisputably proved that no such person as St. Nepomuk ever
existed. A priest once travelling along a solitary road, heard a
most harmonious sound proceeding from a beehive. On approaching it he
discovered that the bees were adoring the eucharist, and singing psalms
to its honor. A monk residing at the monastery of Tebenoe was visited by
an angel who dictated to him a liturgy. This divine work is preferred by
the learned Cassion. St. Ambrose, piously inhuman, carefully instilled
into the youthful minds of Theodosius and Gratian the spirit and maxims
of religious persecution. He taught them that the worship of idols was
a crime against God, and that an emperor is guilty of the crime he
neglects to punish. All the intolerant laws and horrible religious
butcheries which disgraced the administrations of these princes, and
their successors, originated in their Catholic education. The same saint
justified the conduct of a bishop who had been convicted by the court of
setting fire to a Jewish Synagogue. (_Tom_, ii. Epistle xl. p. 946). St.
Augustine, whose most conspicuous virtue was an uncompomising hatred of
heretics, warmly commended the inhuman edicts of Honorius against the
Donatists, which proscribed and banished several thousands of their
priests, stripped them of their possessions, deprived their laymen of
the rights of citizens, distracted the land with tumult and blood, and
drove a large number of them to seek relief by invoking martyrdom. The
inhuman saint rejoiced at the despair and madness which shortened the
lives of these unfortunate persons, as it would hereafter lessen their
torments in hell. St. Jerome justly denounced the disgraceful practice
of the clergy in defrauding the natural heirs out of their inheritance,
and vindicated the governmental edicts to obstruct this systematic
plunder. But his brother monks recriminated; charged him with being the
lover of Paula, of profanely bestowing on her the title of mother-in-law
of God, of assigning himself the chief place in her will, of inducing
her to abandon her infant son at Rome, of exercising an undue influence
on her beautiful daughter, and of inducing the mother to consecrate
her to perpetual virginity, so that he might encounter no obstacles in
inheriting her immense possessions, in which was comprehended the
city of Necropolis. To these charges he replied that he was merely
the steward of the poor. With the fortune of Paula he built four
monasteries. He was bitterly opposed to St Chrysostom, who boldly
denounced the corruption and licentiousness of the clergy and imperial
court. Readily and maliciously he coincided with the opinion of
Theophilus, that Chrysostom had delivered his soul to the Devil to be
adulterated; and when zeal in the cause of virtue had brought upon the
head of Chrysostom the wrath of the emperor and the court, and he
was incarcerated in a dungeon, these two lights of the church had the
decency to regret that some punishment more adequate to his guilt was
not inflicted. St. Cyril, of Alexandria, piously lusted after temporal
power, and, as the patriotic Novitians obstructed his designs,
he closed their churches, took forcible possession of their sacred
utensils, plundered the dwelling of Theapentus, their bishop; and
then seizing on the Jewish synagogue, drove the Jews from the city and
pillaged their houses. The governor interposed; but five hundred armed
monks surrounded him and attempted to murder him. Hypatia, a lady
celebrated for her personal charms, unblemished character, and
extraordinary literary acquirements, was, on account of her Novitian
proclivities, assaulted by the holy forces of St. Cyril, dragged from
her carriage, and punctured to death with tiles.

The enumeration of the fables of the monks, and of the atrocious acts of
canonized saints, might be continued until it filled huge volumes; but
well-informed Catholics will be thankful that this notice is so brief.
The Missil, the Glories of Mary and other Catholic compendia, some of
which consist of fifty folio volumes, will satisfy the more curious.
The profound homage paid to the monks for supposed sanctity, and the
inquisitorial terrors which were brought to bear in favor of their
frauds, so blunted public perception to truth that the fictitious events
and personages invented by one age were believed by the succeeding,
until the church became the simple dupe of its own forgeries, and
self-cursed by accepting, as matters of fact, the fables and impositions
with which it had humbugged former ages. Meldegg, Catholic Professor of
the Theological Faculty of Freiburg, affords the following testimony
in favor of what has been stated: "The old breviary," says he, "crammed
full of fictitious or much-colored anecdotes of saints, with passages
of indecorous import, requires a thorough revision.... Some Masses are
founded on stories not sufficiently proved, or palpably ficticious,
as the Mass of the _Lancea Christi_, the _Inventio Orusis, &c_." The
ludicrousness of the monastic vow of silent contemplation is visible
in the misshapen ideas of the monks; its pernicious tendency, in the
frauds, perversions, distortions and interpolation which it has led
them to perpetrate; its bigotry, in the wide destruction of ancient
literature to which it has incited them; its absurdness, in the puerile
and contemptible productions which it has induced them to elaborate; and
its immorality, in that coarseness and vulgarity in their literature, so
offensive to a sense of propriety, and which sometimes makes an allusion
to their works a matter of reluctance.




CHAPTER VI. THE MONASTIC VOW OF POVERTY

The monachal vows which we have considered in the foregoing chapters
were assumed by all the religious orders prior to the thirteenth
century. At that period orders were inaugurated to assist in the
administration of the public affairs of the church. As these orders
assumed obligations incompatible with the observance of silence and
seclusion, the vows imposing them were not enjoined. But the vow of
poverty, which will be the subject of the present chapter, and the vow
of celibacy and obedience, which will hereafter be considered, were
assumed by all the religious orders, both antecedent and subsequent to
the thirteenth century.

The vow of poverty embraced an unqualified abjuration of all right to
acquire or hold individual property, but granted the privilege of owning
property in a corporate capacity. This privilege was, however, variously
restricted by the terms of different monastic charters. The Carmelites
and the Augustines were permitted to hold such an amount of real estate
as would be sufficient for their support; the Dominicans were limited
to the possession of personal property; while the Franciscans were not
allowed to hold either real estate or personal property.

The vow of poverty assumed by the monks was adopted either from the
instigations of an artful policy, to acquire wealth with the reputation
of despising it, or from a conviction that poverty was a blessing and
wealth an evil. If the first hypothesis is correct, the assumption of
the vow was exceedingly reprehensible; if the second, it was absolutely
absurd.

A condition of poverty, abstractly considered, is a matter of neither
praise nor censure. It is sometimes a source of degredation; often
of crime, and always of inconvenience and embarrassment. Its general
tendency is to weaken in man his inborn sense of personal independence;
to debase his mind with notions of fictitious inferiority; to degrade
his social dignity by inducing sycophantic and obsequious habits; and
to lead him to sacrifice his conscious equality to the demands of
artificial rank. The incessant toil imposed by poverty on the energies
of the poor obdurates their nature; and, allowing no interval for
mental culture, permits nothing to interrupt or soften its tendency. The
mortifying difficulties experienced by this class of society to
obtain, by honest labor, a subsistence for themselves and their natural
dependents, have sometimes led them to become depredators upon society,
when their constitutional principles, unwarped by indigence, would have
secured their obedience to law and their labors for the public
good. Graces have been lost in brothels, and talents extinguished on
scaffolds, which, had tolerable means protected against the cravings
of hunger, might have added lustre to the female character, and heroes,
statesmen and scholars to the scroll of fame. Poverty begetting despair,
and despair destroying hope, the incentive to action, the powers of
genius sunk into the torpidity of stupefaction, and the strength of a
lion slumbered in the inactivity of a sloth. The chill which poverty
breathes over the mind is as unfriendly to the unfolding of the
intellectual germs, as the icy atmosphere of winter is to the
fructification of vegetable seed. The poet or philosopher, hoveled in
penury, without books or scientific instruments, with spare meals and
gloomy forebodings, never creates his brightest gem, nor solves his
profoundest problem. However sweetly Burns may sing or Otway melt, or
however importantly other sons of indigence may have contributed to the
augmentation of the volume of science and literature, yet the world has
never heard their sweetest song, nor read their brightest period; for
the groan of penury has marred the harmony of the one, and the tear of
want has dimmed the lustre of the other.

As a condition of poverty is, in the abstract, a subject of neither
praise nor blame, so also is a condition of wealth. Wealth, however, is
the ablest means of advancing individual and social progress, as well as
the sole remedy for the evils of poverty. If it cannot be adduced as
a ground of esteem or of respectability, or as an apology for the
ignorance, stupidity, pomposity, vanity and vulgarity with which it
may adventitiously be associated, yet, as it amplifies the means
of beneficence, and protects the weakness of human nature against
temptation arising from indigence, its honest acquisition is always
consistent with the severest principles of rectitude; and its pursuit
is recommended by the honorable pride of personal responsibility,
the motives of prudence and forecast, and the consideration of every
domestic and social obligation. Without its aid the world would have
remained in a state of primal barbarism; the commercial intercourse of
nations, the first element of civilization and the principal source of
national prosperity, power and greatness, would never have been
known; agricultural, manufacturing, mechanical and mining interests,
unstimulated by the lucrative traffic of supplying a foreign demand
for surplus domestic production, would never have been extensively
developed; the knowledge, the exotic luxuries, and the improvements
in the comforts and conveniences of civilized life derived from
international trade, could never have been obtained; the great bond of
the amity of nations, and the power created by the pecuniary advantages
of exchanging with one-another the products of their different climates,
and which, by dissipating mutual prejudices, suspicion, vanity and
self-conceit, has united them in friendly and beneficial intercourse,
would never have existed; and, as the first altars were erected for
the exposure of merchandise for sale, as the first offerings were the
currency by which goods were purchased, penalties satisfied, salaries
paid, and amity and friendship expressed; and, as the first temples
were market-houses built for the accommodation of the traffic of the
caravans, and to protect the goods against plundering barbarians, who
understood not the conventional rights of property, had it not been for
the fact that in the pursuit of wealth, communities felt the importance
of establishing convenient centres of trade and modes of exchange, the
ceremonies of religion would never have been invented. ( See Heeron's
Historical Researches, translated by Bancroft).

As neither a condition of poverty nor a condition of wealth is a subject
of praise nor censure; but, as the former inflicts on humanity its worst
evils, and the latter confers on it incalculable advantages, a vow of
poverty can have no innate sanctity to commend it, but must have all
constituents that can render it objectionable. When it is further
considered that there is a modifying reciprocity incessantly acting
between the conditions of the different members of the human family,
making the prosperity of one advantageous to all, and the indigence of
one disadvantageous to all, we may find not only a selfish, but also a
patriotic incentive in availing ourselves of any pecuniary right of our
being. No one can be indigent without decreasing the wealth of another,
nor opulent without contributing to the subsistence of others, nor
industrious without adding to the sum of national wealth, nor indolent
without consuming that for which he renders no equivalent. Now, as the
vow of poverty is inconsistent with the virtues and obligations created
by the mutual dependence and reciprocal influence of the condition and
circumstances of mankind on each other; as it fosters all the evils that
demoralize the social state; as it multiplies the number of paupers,
discourages industry, sanctifies pernicious influences, and burdens
society with the support of indolent and useless members, it is at
variance with the interests of man and the prosperity of government.

National wealth is the aggregate of individual wealth. The greater is
the amount of individual wealth in a nation, and the more equally it is
distributed among the inhabitants, the less are the evils of poverty,
the more independent and responsible are the citizens, the more
energetically are the agricultural, mineral, manufacturing, and
commercial interests developed, the more generally and intimately
are the interests of the people interwoven with the fabric of the
government, the greater will be the nation's prosperity, the more
formidable its arms, the more peaceful its internal condition, and the
more durable its prosperity.

A reformatory institution, to be efficacious, must be adapted to the
nature of man and his social condition. Its principles must be his
principles. Its measures must tend to aid his fullest development. To
accomplish this object it must seek to abolish all restrictions on his
rights, to remove whatever vitiates his sense of independence, to incite
his industry by making labor honorable and its rewards certain, and
to annul the immunities, exemptions, privileges and monopolies which
degrade the masses by indigence and invidious distinctions, and corrupt
the few by luxury and fictitious dignity. But the monachal institution,
which sanctions poverty, the most prolific source of crime; which
denounces individual wealth, the great element of civilization, and of
individual and national improvement; which inculcates indolence, the
parasite that feeds on the vitals of society; which discourages
the avocations of industry, the parent of personal independence and
responsibility; and which aims at a monopoly of wealth, itself the
source of political inequality, of despotic government and of popular
servitude--can advance no claim to a magnanimous mission. To esteem it
a virtue to be poor, pleasing to infinite intelligence to renounce the
best means of self-improvement, criminal to protect human integrity
against the assaults originating in a condition of poverty, are ideas of
such an absurd nature that the inference can scarcely be avoided, that
the source whence they originated must have been utterly destitute, not
only of moral principle, but of common sense.

But whenever conduct becomes enigmatical, and principles are avowed
contradictory to human reason, passion and interests, an ordinary
knowledge of the craft of ambition is apt to suggest a suspicion, that
these singular abnegations have not sprung from a sanctity that has
elevated the avowers above human nature, but from the injustice of their
designs and the profundity of their dissimulation. Conscious that
candor would be defeat, they have endeavored to accomplish objects by
pretending to oppose them. The church never being too strongly fortified
in holiness not to practise the advantageous vices of the world, has
invariably been betrayed into the adoption of this crafty policy; but,
always fanatical, she has never been discreet. Not only has she denied
her real designs, but, in order to conceal them, has imposed vows of
such an absurd and inconsistent import, as could not fail to reveal
the hypocrisy and craft that dictated them. The vow of poverty was not
assumed to become indigent, but to become opulent. It was a financial
manoeuvre, designed to facilitate the routine of business; and it proved
a very efficacious means of self-emolument. It won a reputation for the
holy beggars, that humbled imperial dignity at their feet, Theodosius
refused sustenance until a monk who had anathematized him, nullified
it by absolution. The Empress of Maximus, in her own palace, at her own
table, esteemed it a high honor to be permitted to wait as a servant on
St. Martin of Tours. While the assumption of unnatural vows invested the
mendicant monks with the credit and importance of supernatural beings,
and elevated them above the dignity of emperors and empresses, it opened
to their avarice the treasures of the world, and enabled them not only
to fill their coffers with the people's money, but to win their blessing
in the act of defrauding them. Such was the haughty indifference of the
Abbot Pambo, who seemed to imagine, with his church, that he was the
owner of the wealth of the world, that when Malaria, a rich sinner,
presented him a donation of plate for his monastery, and intimated that
its weight was about three hundred pounds, replied: "Offer you this to
me or to God? If to God, who weighs the mountains in a balance, he need
not be informed of the weight of your plate." The real design and value
of the monastic vows was once forcibly expressed by a Benedictine monk,
who remarked: "My vow of poverty has given me one hundred thousand
crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a
sovereign prince." An incident occurred in Paris, in relation to
two ecclesiastical dignitaries which illustrates the cupidity and
unapostolic character of the church. Innocent IX, and St. Thomas Aquinas
having met together in Paris, and a capacious plate, piled with gold,
the proceeds of the sale of indulgences, being brought into the room in
which they were seated, the enraptured Pope exclaimed: "Behold, the days
are past when the church could say, gold and silver have I none." But
the saint truthfully remarked: "The days are also past when the church
could say to the paralytic, arise and walk." Praetaxtatus, a Pagan
philosopher, viewing the princely revenues of the church, declared that
if he could become bishop of Rome, it might even remove his scruples
about believing in Christianity. Assuming the strongest possible
obligations to maintain a perpetual condition of absolute poverty, the
monks yet found it compatible with the principles and teachings of
the church, to convert their religious organizations into a financial
corporation, and to conceal its character and design under a veil
of angelic piety. The wealth which they apparently scorned, they
unscrupulously amassed; the power which they scoffed at as profane, they
attempted to monopolize; to whatever they seemed the most indifferent,
they the most sedulously labored to acquire; and whatever they professed
with their lips they violated in their practice. This consummate
hypocrisy might be condemned by the profane sceptic, but the _means_
crowned the _end_ with too high a degree of success not to be justified
by the piety of the religious orders.

The measures and designs of this false and crafty policy harmonized too
well with the pretensions of the Pope, and furnished his purposes with
too able and ingenious an auxiliary, not to command his fostering care
and protection. Equal in duplicity and rapaciousness, he exempted the
mendicant orders from all secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
privileged them to demand alms without restriction, invested them with
the exclusive power of selling indulgences, and conferred on them the
lucrative prerogative of accepting legacies under the evasive name
of offerings. By this munificent lavishment of spiritual favors, the
mendicant orders soon found themselves transported from an apparent
condition of pauperism to a real condition of princely wealth and power;
enjoying at the same time all the sympathy that indigence could excite,
and all the luxury that money could purchase. Exempted from secular
jurisdiction, they were empowered to plunder, ravish and murder with
impunity; privileged to demand alms of all, they were the masters of
the fortunes of all; endowed with the exclusive power of vending
indulgences, they enjoyed a monopoly of the most lucrative trade that
was ever projected; and, allowed to receive legacies, they were enabled,
after having wheedled the devout out of their treasure while in health,
to take advantage of their dotage, and to stand over their dying pillow,
and dictate the terms of their last testament to the advantage of the
church, and to the disadvantage of natural heirs.

Avarice, like the cormorant, is insatiable; the more it is gorged, the
keener is its appetite; and this rapacious demon having taken complete
possession of the monastic body, every dollar that its craft wrung from
the devout only inflamed its greediness the more. When it had exhausted
the gold of a penitent, its covetous eye became fascinated by his
land; and, what avarice craved, financial sagacity quickly perceived an
available method of obtaining.

The church possessing no inherent moral vitality, sank with the middle
ages into barbarism; her power was then supreme, but insecurity of
life and property prevailed, and under her auspices temporal power
degenerated to a system of rapine and plunder. Had she been divine, she
would then have beamed as a lone star on a tempestuous ocean; but being
earthy, she resembled the other earthy compounds; nor could she well
be distinguished from the barbarians and savages with whom she mingled,
except by her imperfect notions of morality and justice, and her
superior financial skill in speculating on public calamity. The barons,
in the support of their interminable wars, had taxed their subjects to
an extent which produced general dissatisfaction. As the monasteries
enjoyed inviolability and freedom from taxation, they offered the
disaffected a refuge from an oppressive taxation, if they would become
lay monastic members, and convey their worldly goods to the church.
A wish to inhale the supposed holy atmosphere of the monasteries, to
partake of their luxuries, to enjoy the indulgence they accorded to the
commission of sin, to evade an impoverishing taxation, and at the same
time to retain some degree of personal freedom, induced wealthy persons
of both sexes to conclude contracts with the monasteries, by which
they became penniless, wholly dependent for subsistence on them, and
irrevocably subjected to their despotic domination.

Beside this shrewd speculation on public calamity, the excitement and
irruption of the crusades afforded the monks another opportunity for
the exercise of their financial skill. With the instinctive foresight of
cupidity, they had perceived the pecuniary advantages which would accrue
to their order in the course of the holy war about to be inaugurated;
and as they had fanned its first sparks into a general conflagration,
they could hardly have any conscientious scruples in remunerating
themselves, by concluding such sharp and profitable bargains as occasion
presented and vows facilitated. They well knew the commercial art of
bartering that which was worthless for that which was valuable; and
of advancing the market price of an article by a monopoly of it, or
depressing its value by increasing the supply beyond the demand.
In consequence of the public excitement real estate became greatly
depressed in value, and holy war-horses, clubs, lances, battle-axes,
and other sacred instruments of destruction, proportionally advanced
in price. The sagacious providence of the monks having in advance
accumulated vast military stores, very obligingly accommodated the
devout crusader, by exchanging an inconsiderable portion of them for
a very considerable tract of his land. By such operations the church
obtained very extensive domains in exchange for objects of trifling
value, or for very inadequate sums of money. The success of the
sacerdotal financiers becoming notorious, land speculation grew into a
contagious mania. Even kings came into the market to buy up the domains
of their deluded vassels. The competition between monks and monarchs was
as great as it was amusing; but sacerdotal craft was the more successful
negotiator. The oil with which the priests had been anointed at their
ordination was supposed to endow them with the power of bestowing
blessings and curses at will, and the high reputation for sanctity which
they had acquired by vows of absolute poverty, conferred advantages of
trade on them which crowns and sceptres could not command. Kings could
purchase only with money; but the monasteries had an exhaustless bank of
indulgences, of parting blessings, of promised prayers, and of promised
masses for departed souls. This bogus currency may provoke the levity
of the profane, but it was, nevertheless, prized by the saints above
the value of silver or gold, and held by the monasteries at its highest
marketable price. With the command of such unlimited resources, the
monasteries could successfully outbid princes, and purchase without
impoverishment what monarchs could not without bankruptcy.

With an air of piety and benevolence, but with an unscrupulousness that
regarded neither truth nor principle, the monks invented every fiction,
and adopted every possible method of augmenting the stores of their
wealth. Well aware that human piety is more easily inflamed by the
prospect of gold than by the prospect of heaven, they manufactured
extravagant reports of the wealth of Jerusalem; representing it as
a vast storehouse of gems and precious metal. So glowing were these
descriptions that the piety of the crusaders became excited into frenzy,
and their devotion into irrepressible vociferousness; a delightful
anticipation rapt them into heavenly ecstacies; and impatience for the
glorious results of the coming combat appeared to be the only unpleasant
ingredient that marred their happiness. On huts and farms, on palaces
and domains, they looked down with scornful indifference; for they felt
that wealth surpassing the treasures of the Indies, and palaces more
gorgeous than Europe could build, would inevitably reward their pious
adventure. The cool-headed priest, too well informed to partake of
the general delusion, deliberately viewed the enthusiasm, and calmly
calculated by what means it might be sustained and augmented, and how it
could most judiciously be made to administer to the pecuniary advantage
of the church. While the coldness with which the reason and conscience
of priests secretly regarded the general lunacy, was well disguised, the
masses, on the contrary, were all flame and fury, and wrought up to
such a pitch of anxiety to wrest the holy land from the Infidels and
appropriate it to themselves, that they became indifferent to the
treasure and land that they already possessed. In this unhealthy state
of the public mind, it was an easy task for spiritual advisers to
relieve their confiding pupils of their revenues, and ultimately to
become the proprietors of many of their domains.

The method by which this magnificent object was accomplished, was not
only by the treachery of exchanging trumpery for valuables, but also by
inducing the soldiers of the cross to devolve, during their absence,
the care of their land and revenues on the monasteries, and to make them
their heirs-at-law in case of death abroad. As but few of the crusaders
of some of the expeditions ever returned, as many of all of them
perished abroad, we must accord the credit of extraordinary shrewdness
to the calculating cupidity of the monks, who could make the love,
devotion, lunacy and enthusiasm of the devout, their life at home and
death abroad, equally advantageous to the monastic coffers. As
the infatuation, so beneficial to the church, was general; as the
convulsions of the times rendered property of all descriptions
exceedingly insecure; and, as many of the devout, equally frantic
with the crusaders, were restrained, either by infirmity or other
circumstances, from embarking in the holy enterprise, it was not
difficult for the monks, amid the general frenzy, to induce such persons
to become lay members of the monasteries, and to place their domains
under the protection of those powerful institutions; an advantageous
encumbrance which they always assumed with obliging avidity.

With such money-making devices and sharp practices, and many others of
a similar nature, the mendicant orders, united in an avaricious and
arrogant confederacy, enjoying the protection of the Pope, and the
confidence and homage of Christendom, and released from all secular and
ecclesiastical jurisdiction, seemed, while abjuring the possession of
property as a crime, and professing poverty as a virtue, to be rapidly
monopolizing the wealth of the world--the domains of princes, the
traffic of merchants, and the political power of governments. Under such
circumstances monastic opulence, without the intervention of a miracle,
must have prodigiously increased, and their domains augmented to
provinces.

From the fifth century, in every section of Christendom, monastery
after monastery continued to rise, generally constructed with stupendous
proportions, and in sumptuous style; furnished with every species of
luxury, and polluted by every description of vice. St. Bernard, who, by
the assumption of the vow of absolute poverty, renounced a considerable
private inheritance, and who subsequently scorned the proffers of
lucrative dignities, could, nevertheless, by means of his monachal power
and opulence erect ten monasteries, make nobles and Popes tremble at his
authority, and even kings submit to his dictation.

The Jesuits, who enjoyed all the privileges of the mendicant and secular
orders, excelled them both in duplicity and rapaciousnes. Animated by
a crafty and unprincipled zeal for the emolument of their order, they
established mission-houses among savage nations, under the pretext of
civilizing them and saving their souls. But this specious pretext
was but a pious mask, under which was concealed an infamous scheme of
swindling the natives abroad out of property, and wheedling the devout
at home out of liberal donations, and splendid legacies. Their extensive
mission-houses were neither designed for temples of devotion, nor for
converting idolaters; their walls less frequently witnessed the monks
at devotion, than they did at plotting schemes of plunder. Like ancient
temples, and more recent churches, mosques and fairs, they were designed
as centres of trade to facilitate commercial transactions; and, as they
were the grand resort of the people for exchange of commodities, they,
like the former, gave rise to the numerous villages, towns and cities,
whose names they bear. Pagan simplicity has never been a match for
monkish craft; and no sooner had the gold and gems of the natives
inflamed the zeal and sharpened the shrewdness of the monks, than they
were wrung from them by some swindling transaction, Possessing the arts
of civilized society, they were enabled to astonish the natives with
miracles, and successfully to impose on their ignorance and simplicity.
They boasted of having induced multitudes to embrace Christianity; but
as their object was not to convert Pagans from idolatry, but to defraud
them out of their land and gold, they were careful not to offend them
by demanding a renunciation of the practice of idolatry, but contented
themselves with entreating their converts simply to adore Christ and his
mother when worshiping the images of their gods. With this ambiguous,
but insinuating modification of Christianity, they made fortunes out of
the devout at home and savages abroad.

In 1743, this avaricious sacerdotal order established a mission-house
at the island Martinique; and so adroitly did they manage their
Christianizing business operations, that in a short time they
monopolized the trade of that island, and of the surrounding islands.
Their success naturally excited the jealousy of the secular merchants;
and as they were generally regarded as destitute of commercial honor,
and unprincipled in their ambition, a formidable opposition was
easily fomented against them. This opposition, apparently justified by
self-preservation, and the necessity of inaugurating a more liberal and
enlightened commercial policy, impaired to a considerable extent the
interest and popularity of the sacerdotal establishments. At this stage
of their history, a circumstance occured which culminated in their
disgrace. Two valuable cargoes had been consigned to them by their
French correspondents. These cargoes were captured by the English, with
whom the French were at war. In conformity with maritime usage, the
consignors demanded indemnity of the Jesuits. The Jesuits denied the
legality of the demand, and refused to give the satisfaction asked. An
appeal was consequently taken to the King of France, who, deciding
in favor of the consignors, demanded the Jesuits to make the required
restitution. But their presumptuous piety led them to scorn his
authority in the same temper in which they had rejected the prayer of
his mercantile subjects. This insolent and treasonable conduct led
the king to investigate the principles of their order; and finally to
abrogate it in all the states of France, as a political organization
projected for the acquisition of power and riches.

By means of their Christianizing establishments in Paraguay and Uruguay,
the Jesuits ruled the natives with despotic power, and acquired an
immense amount of wealth. In 1750, Spain having by a commercial treaty
ceded to Portugal seven districts of these domains, the monks at the
head of an army of fourteen thousand men, compelled the contracting
nations to annul the treaty; but an attempt being afterwards made to
assassinate the King of Portugal, the government declared the order of
the Jesuits to be a treasonable organization, and confiscated all
their possessions in the dominion. The order of the Catholic Knights,
incorporated for the defense and propagation of the true faith, by the
force of arms, like the monks, rapaciously acquired an incredible amount
of riches while under the solemnest obligation to maintain a perpetual
condition of absolute poverty. These holy organizations were exclusively
military; the sword was the only argument they used. The Knights of
St. John, with the vow of poverty on their lips, but with the sword of
conquest in their hand, amassed such extensive domains, that they
gave their chief an annual salary of one million guilders. The Knights
Templars, while they vowed absolute poverty, acquired by arms, forced
loans, donations, bequests and other means, such a prodigious amount of
wealth that they erected nine thousand vast and princely palaces, each
enriched with extensive territory, and all powerful enough to maintain
immunity from the jurisdiction of the sovereign in whose kingdom they
were located. The Teutonic Knights, while they abjured the rights of
property, and swore never, to allow its possession to tarnish their
sanctity, wrung from Sweden all the territory that extends from the Oder
along its banks to the Gulf of Finland. It is reported by travellers
that the Shaggians, a barbarous tribe of Egypt, when meeting a foe, will
exclaim: "Peace be with you," and thrust a lance in his heart. The
wild mockery of these uncouth savages at avowed principles has been
far exceeded by the conduct and profession of the monachal and military
orders of the Catholic Church, whose vows were meant for imposition, and
whose life was a scene of perjury.

By the aid of magnificent revenues, the various orders of the religious
paupers were enabled successfully to negotiate for the most lucrative
dignities of the church, and enjoyed the fairest prospects of becoming
either bishops, cardinals or popes, and of obtaining the luxurious
indolence, idolatrous reverence, and impious adulation they secured. The
hypocritical devices of the ancient and modern Brahmins, of the Hindoo
and Mohammedan monks, and of the priests and prophets of ancient Pagan
nations have, in Christian countries, where no prejudice pleads in their
favor, and where their origin and claims are candidly investigated, been
justly exposed to the scoffs and contempt of common sense; and it
is possible that under the same circumstances, the monks, priests,
ceremonies and dogmas of Catholicism, which resemble them as nearly as a
type can its prototype, would sink to the same level.

When we calmly reflect on the monastic institution, and observe
the financial principles on which it is organized, the variety and
prodigious traffic which has distinguished its career, the immense
treasure and domains it has acquired by fraud and artifice, it seems
like some gigantic financial corporation, projected for speculating in
land, and for making money by the tricks of trade. When we call to
mind the avarice by which it has been actuated, the duplicity it has
practised, and the impositions of which it has been guilty, it appears
to be a corporation organized to make money, regardless of every maxim
of justice, and every principle of honor. When we consider how basely it
has prostituted its privileges and immunities; becoming superior to law
to violate the principles of rectitude; professing absolute indigence to
demand, like a highwayman, a tribute of every one it chanced to meet, if
not with a pistol in its hand, yet with an anathema at its disposal
more dreaded by the superstitious than thousands of pistols, it looms
up before the imagination as a corporation of outlaws, whose right is
might, whose object is money, and whose profession is to plunder. When
we reflect on its pretention of vending for gold the pardon of sin,
the favor of God, immunity for guilt, and protection against the future
retribution of heaven, it appears like a corporation of fiends which
arrogates the prerogatives of deity, traffic in the hearts and souls of
men, sport with their hopes and fears, and merchandise heaven and hell,
time and eternity. And when we remember that the Roman Catholic Church
has incorporated these infamous religious orders in her constitution,
and has officially pronounced them to be her most useful members, and
has thus sanctioned and made her own, all their duplicity, all their
rapacity, all their swindling operations, all their highway robbery, and
all their profanity, immorality and blasphemy, she seems like some black
and midnight monster, dripping with human gore, an embodiment of every
deformity, an incarnation of every loathsome, hideous and unsightly
demon, and a just representation of the character and principles of the
arch-fiend.




CHAPTER VII. MONASTIC VOW OF CELIBACY

Nature has organized man for the conjugal union. She has endowed him
with powers adapted to its requirements; with passions that aspire after
its pleasures and benefits, and with sensibilities that can be gratified
only by the performance of its obligations. By the reciprocal relations,
and the amiable intercourse which it establishes between the sexes,
it furnishes an attractive means of mutual improvement, refining the
grossness of the sensual propensities, and developing the noblest graces
of the human character. By blending masculine boldness with feminine
delicacy, it takes rudeness from the one, and imparts energy to the
other; and thus contributes, in an eminent degree, to the formation of
that equanimity of character which is the happy medium between extremes,
and of that agreeable association of strength and urbanity which is best
fitted to cope with the difficulties incident to life.

By an alliance of mutual affection and interests for life, it secures
their highest development, and the most complete and undisturbed
enjoyment of their benefits. It identifies the honor and interests of
parents and children, securing affectionate protectors for helpless
infancy, faithful guardians for inexperienced youth, and interested
tutors for fitting the rising generation for the useful and noble
stations of society; and while it thus provides for children, it rewards
the solicitude of parents with a shelter in adversity, a support in
declining age, and a name in posterity.

But while such are the inducements of marriage, yet a regard to personal
interest and happiness might deter a considerate person from assuming
its obligations, when either a suitable companion has not been found, or
pecuniary resources are insufficient to meet the domestic demands in a
satisfactory manner. Pecuniary competency and similarity of taste and
disposition are requisites indispensable to connubial felicity. Without
them marriage would be a source of privation, difficulty and alienation;
and family a painful encumbrance. When, therefore, fortune has withheld
these essentials of conjugal happiness, celibacy, in either sex, is more
honorable than matrimony.

But to stifle the instincts that prompt to this union, and ungraciously
to spurn the incalculable benefits it proffers, unrestrained by any
prudential consideration, is to violate, without motive, the laws of
human happiness, and neglect the fulfilment of the most important
design of the organism of man. An act so unnatural is, perhaps, seldom
contemplated, except under extreme mental depression, or under the
singular delusions of which religious fanaticism is so prolific.
Disappointed love, reverses of fortune, or the hope of becoming
insensible to the wants of humanity by acquiring supernatural
perfection, has sometimes induced the weak and superstitious to assume
the monastic vow of perpetual celibacy. The motive of such conduct has
always originated in emotion; and though emotion is always sincere, it
is always fluctuating. A cloud that obscures the sun and casts a
gloom over earth, soon passes away, leaving the former in its natural
brightness, and the latter in its usual attractiveness. Not less
ephemeral is the mental gloom which adversity or superstition may throw
over the human mind. When the energies of acquisitiveness have been
prostrated by repeated pecuniary misfortunes; when the warmth of
ambition has been chilled by the wounds of reputation; when the currents
of love have been frozen by the cold breath of disappointment; the
desolated heart may feel that its struggle for subsistence is vain, that
its hopes of distinction have perished, and that its ties of love are
broken forever. But these despondent sensations are ephemeral; they are
the results of a temporary repose of passions which are rooted in the
constitution of our nature, and which can be destroyed only with our
being. Though despair may for a time throw a wintry gloom over the mind,
yet hope will again bud and bloom, avarice will again sigh for wealth,
ambition will again thirst for distinction, love will again yearn for
companionship, and every passion resuming its natural energy will again
create the emotions for which it was organized, and compel us to seek
its appropriate gratification in the social, conjugal, or political
relations which subsist in society.

This revulsion is inevitable. It is as certain as the subsidence of a
tempestuous torrent after having exhausted its energy, into its ordinary
peaceful roll. As all emotions are ephemeral, so must be all the vows
and resolutions which they generate. Each day brings with it new and
unexpected events, which abrogate or modify the emotions and resolves
which the circumstances of the preceding day had suggested; nay, more,
the antithetical emotions thus created are always proportionally strong
to those which they supplant. Hence vows assumed by any person under
extraordinary mental excitement, will be repudiated when he is under
extraordinary mental depression; and obligations assumed under either of
these conditions of mind, will be found inconsistent with the ordinary
obligations of life, when that usual current of thought and emotion
shall set in, which always flows in harmony with human reason,
philosophy and happiness, and the regular course of things. If when this
condition shall supervene; if when hope shall succeed to despair,
and reason and reflection to impulse and fanaticism, and when all
the passions and powers of our nature shall resume their natural
operation--if then, we shall have placed ourselves by any mistake,
however innocently committed, in a situation where we cannot respond to
the demands of our nature, we will find that we have doomed ourselves to
perpetual misery.

Nor will any degree of purity or sanctity of motive arrest the evils of
mistaken conduct. Nature is inexorable; she inflicts punishment on the
violators of her laws without regard to the motives by which they have
been actuated. She admits no apology; she knows no forgiveness. Neither
tears nor penitence can mitigate her vengeance; neither pleas of
conscientious motives, nor of ignorance of her ordinations, can soften
the rigor of her justice. Although the desire of perfection is a natural
and noble one, yet she has established laws by which alone it is to
be obtained, and punishes the aggressors of them with deformity and
imbecility. These laws are intelligible, Human perfection clearly
comprehends the perfect development of all the physical, mental and
moral powers of man. Exercise is the only means by which these faculties
can be developed. The system of exercise adapted to the attainment of
this end must embrace a judicious employment of every acuity belonging
to the human organism; allowing none to depreciate by indolence; none to
become enervated by incessant or overstrained exertion; but to maintain
all in that natural and reasonable condition in which, while they are
alternately relieved they are mutually strengthened. By the discipline
of such a system of exercise knowledge will gradually become the
foundation of reason, judgment the guide of fancy, conscience the
controller of the passions, the vital or gains the recuperator of the
physical and mental faculties; a healthy reciprocity and modifying
action will be maintained between all the powers, and that equilibrium
engendered which is peace; that condensation which is energy; and that
perfection which is essential to genius.

The monastic vow of perpetual celibacy is clearly unfavorable to this
general exercise of the powers of human nature. It permits the exercise
of only a limited number of these powers, and thereby obtrudes an
insuperable obstacle to the full development of the human character. It
stimulates those which it cultivates to incessant activity, and thereby
distorts and deforms their organisms by an abnormal development. It
fetters in inactivity the bulk of the human faculties, and thereby
lessens the number and variety of the natural sources of the pleasures
of life. It reduces activity in the vital system, and thereby saps
the fundamental strength of the whole organization, engendering those
physical and moral diseases, which render life joyless, and death often
the only remedy. It prohibits the exercise of those faculties by which
alone the design of the human organism can be accomplished, and permits
but a few of them to be exercised in order to attain the highest degree
of perfection. It would dry up the springs of a river, in order to
increase the volume of its current; it would weaken the foundation of an
edifice, in order to protect it against the shocks of earthquakes. But
whether these ecclesiastical absurdities are more insane than idiotical,
we respectfully submit to the acumen of the Ecumenical Council,
whenever it shall resume its session at Home.

The monastic vow of celibacy, is as weak in its fundamental principles,
as it is absurd in its discipline. It is founded on the ascetic
delusion, that the sensual passions are evils; and that human perfection
and happiness consist in the attainment of a passive state of mind,
untroubled by desire, thought or action. But this is a Brahminical
absurdity, rusted to its core by the abrasion of ages. Even if the
propensities were evils, yet wisdom would teach us that as they are a
result of our organism, they should be regulated; especially if by a
judicious regulation, they can be made to administer to the pleasures
of existence. But they are not evils; on the contrary, they are
unmeasurable benefits. If they are ever tormentors, it is when prudence
has not regulated their gratification, or when abuse has made their
cravings unnatural. If they are ever sources of disease, it is when they
are exercised in violation of the laws of human nature. If they
ever become impotent in the production of pleasure, it is when their
possessors have become gluttons, sots, debauchees, misers, or some
similar compound of human depravity. But when the animal passions are
refined by knowledge, chastened by virtue, directed by reason, governed
by conscience, and exercised with a considerate regard to the integrity
of the other powers, they become sources of pleasure and vigor,
incentives to industry and enterprise, and eminently contribute towards
the advancement of the perfection and happiness of our being.

Another fundamental error of the vow of celibacy, is the delusion
that man may by means of solitude and resolution arrest the natural
promptings of the propensities. The propensities are constituted by
nature essential portions of our being; and accordingly we must carry
them with us into whatever solitude we may retire; and as their emotions
are naturally irrepressible, their powers must be felt under whatever
obligation we may assume. Vows, resolutions and solitude are as
incapable of arresting the progress of the passions, as they are of
stopping the pulsations of the heart. Amid the deepest silence and
solitude they will still yearn for expression, and yearn the more the
deeper is the stillness. Amid the bustle and tumult of the world they
are excited by innumerable different objects; their attention is
divided among a variety of attractions; and each finds its appropriate
gratification constantly offered to its taste. But in solitude there
is every thing to concentrate, and nothing to divide their power;
every thing to inflame, and nothing to appease their appetites; and
consequently, under such circumstances, their powers must be the most
ungovernable, and the torments of their craving the most unsupportable.

The foregoing observations were made on the presumption, that the vow
of perpetual chastity was assumed by the Catholic orders with sincere
intentions of conforming to its requirements; but this was not always
the case. Whatever sincerity or sanctity may have mingled, in some
cases, with the motives that prompted its assumption, neither monks nor
nuns, nor priests, nor bishops, nor popes, have in general furnished a
reasonable amount of evidence in favor of their chastity.

The natural and efficient regulator of the animal passions is marriage.
The conjugal union, judiciously formed, is invaluable to man, but almost
indispensable to woman. Her organization preeminently qualifies her for
its conditions and relations. The sensitiveness peculiar to her nervous
system, obliges her to shrink from the rude battle of public life; her
weakness instructs her in the importance of placing herself under
the guardianship of the more muscular power of man, which is noblest
employed when it best protects the weak; and her characteristic
instincts and capacities lead her to seek her chief employment and
happiness in the modest retirement of domestic life, where she finds
the temple of which she alone is priestess; the idols which excite her
purest devotion; the altars on which she lavishes her choicest gifts;
and where, in administering her sacred profession, in dispensing
instruction to her children, care to her household, and consolation to
the sick and dying, her true dignity and beauty acquires the deepest
enchantment. Whatever the mental and personal charms of a female may be,
the true excellence of her character can never be seen or appreciated,
except in the practice of the amiable virtues which constitute the wife
and the mother. This, woman knows; this she feels; and to obtain this
end the rights of her nature, and the interests of society, concur in
authorizing her to adopt every available means. Yet, notwithstanding
these plain facts, the Catholic Church has the unpardonable presumption
to pronounce a curse on her, if she should prefer a union so essential
to her happiness and usefulness to a state of perpetual virginity. Every
time her common sense teaches her to say that marriage is preferable to
virginity, this religious monster, in the name of the Holy Trinity and
all the saints and angels, answers "Let her be accursed." Every time
her nature prompts her to say, that, to be joined in marriage is more
blessed than to remain in a state of virginity, this monster in horror
at the profane and unorthodox expressions, responds, "Let her be
accursed." Hear it from the lips of the holy mother herself:

"Whosoever shall say, that the church could not institute impediments
annulling marriage, or that in instituting them she has erred, let him
be accursed."

"Whosoever shall say, that the marriage state is preferable to a state
of virginity, or celibacy, or that it is not more blessed to remain in a
state of virginity or celibacy, than to be joined in matrimony, let him
be accursed."

"Whosoever shall affirm, that matrimonial causes do not belong to the
ecclesiastical judges, let him be accursed." ( Canon of the Council of
Trent).

Atrocious as is this decree, it expresses not the full measure of
Catholic arrogance. For while with palpable inconsistency, the church
solemnizes among Catholics the rites which she anathematizes them for
prefer-ing, she declares that all those whose marriage ceremonies have
not been celebrated according to her fantastic requirements, are living
in a state of "shameful concubinage." It would seem that by consummating
the union which she holds men and women accursed for desiring, she
incurs on her own soul the curse she pronounces on others. She requires
no _fee_ for her matrimonial services, but accepts _marriage presents_,
which may perhaps have softened her malignity to this product of
civilization with regard to Catholics; but non-Catholics who do not
conciliate her holy aversion to it by such presents, she pronounces them
profligates, their wives prostitutes, and their children bastards. Hear
this from the lips of Pope Pius IX.

"Marriage cannot be given, unless there be, one and at the same time
a sacrament, consequently that _any other union_ between man and woman
among Christians, made in virtue of what civil law soever, is nothing
else than _a shameful and miserable concubinage_, so often condemned by
the church." (Allocution on the State of Affairs in New Grenada ).

So in the judgment of the present Pope, the non-Catholics in the United
States consist of strumpets and bastards. According to the principles
of the Catholic Church, thus officially enunciated, every person, the
marriage rites of whose parents have not been performed by a Catholic
priest, is an illegitimate offspring divested of all legal right to
inherit property of his parents. If the church shall ever gain in
America the numerical strength for which she is striving, what will be
the consequence to non-Catholics? Will she declare them legitimate, or
respect their property titles? Have not her priests made this land ring
with the assertion, that Infidels and Protestants have no right where
Catholicism is triumphant.

But who is she that has the audacity to proclaim such principles? A
church, which has been dripping with the blood of innocence for ages,
yet is thirsting for more. Who are they that prate about chastity? A
body of the most corrupt, unprincipled, and licentious priests that ever
disgraced the name of religion. The cold dissoluteness of the Catholic
orders is not only undeniable, but it is even frightful. Had history
been silent, and the real conduct of Catholic priests, and the interior
of Catholic nunneries remained a profound secret, yet, an ordinary
knowledge of human nature would have warranted the suspicion that
the priests were not models of chastity, nor the nunneries asylums of
innocence. But history has not been silent; she has spoken distinctly,
and spoken often. A nun escaped from her prison-house, or a priest not
yet steeled by hypocrisy to all the pleadings of virtue, or who was
disgusted beyond endurance at the corruption that festers in the heart
of the Catholic Church, has furnished history with startling records,
and raised the sacred veil, that the superstitious might behold the
horrible compound of duplicity, lust, and murder which secretly pollutes
the interior of the institutions which they reverence. But these fitful
revelations, although appealing to the noblest sympathies of mankind,
have seldom produced an effect equal to the exigency. Like bursts of
unexpected thunder, they have startled for a moment, but soon rumbled
into silence and forgetfulness.

Such is the general infatuation, that people seldom question that around
which the sanctions of religion are thrown, and when they do the doubt
is soon obliterated. They will reverently bow to a priest without
thinking it is possible that under the guise of his chaste and holy
profession, avarice, lust and murder may reign supreme. They will
heedlessly pass a nunnery without thinking how many broken hearts may
there be hopelessly imprisoned; how many gifted and accomplished females
may there be pining in anguish and despair, who, while they sought an
abode of unsullied chastity, found themselves entrapped in a den of
infamy, to be profaned by holy confessors! But reluctantly as charity
would believe these statements, they are substantiated beyond the
possibility of doubt or denial, by the records of Catholic authority of
the highest order.

An insight into the mysteries of Catholicism, and the mode by which
priests conceal from publicity their acts of seduction and adultery,
may be learned from the following extract from Hogan's "Auricular
Confession." "The secular orders," says he? "are composed chiefly
of parish priests and their curates, whose duty it is to hear their
parishioners. The orders of regulars are composed of friars, who are
subdivided into several minor orders, and who have no particular duties
to discharge, unless especially deputed to do so by the bishop, or the
deputy of the diocese into which they may be divided. It is so managed
by the secular priests, that whenever they fail in seducing their
penitents, and are detected by them that one of those friars shall
immediately be at hand to hear the confessions of all such females, and
forgive their sins, on condition that they shall never reveal to moral
being the thoughtless peccadillos of their parish priest, who for the
moment forgot himself, and whose tears of penitence now moisten the
ground on which he walks." (Auric. Confess, vol. ii. p. 168).

The adaptation of the confessional to prepare the way for seduction and
adultery may be comprehended by the following extract from the "Synopsis
of Popery" by the same author. "Do any of these families," asks he,
"know the questions which a priest puts to their families at the
confessional? Do husbands know the questions which priests put to their
wives at the confession?.... Fathers, mothers, guardians and husbands
fancy to yourself the most indelicate, immodest, libidinous questions
which the most immoral and profligate mind can conceive,--fancy those
ideas put into plain language, and that by way of questions and answers,
and you will then have a faint conception of the conversation which
takes place between a priest and your hitheto pure daughter. If after
two or three examinations, in that sacred tribunal, they still continue
virtuous, they are rare examples." (Synopsis, p. 170, 171).

While the Catholic Church imposes on the priests and monks the vow of
celibacy, it accords them the privilege of acting licentiously with
impunity. In the life of Bishop Scipio de Ricci, written by an eminent
Catholic, the practice of the church in allowing bishops and priests
to keep concubines, while it forbids them to marry under pain of
excommunication, is asserted and defended. The Council of Toledo passed
a canon forbidding priests to keep more than one concubine in public.
William Hogan asserts that every priest keeps a concubine, and every
teacher in a school attached to a Catholic nunnery, has been seduced by
her teacher. Chamancis says: "The adultery, obscenity and impiety of the
priests are beyond description." St. Chrysostom thinks the number of them
that will be saved, bears a very small proportion to those who will be
damned. Cardinal Conpaggio asserts that "the priest who marries
commits a more grievous sin than if he kept many concubines." Pope Paul
protected houses of ill-fame, and acquired great riches by selling them
licenses. The Council of Augsburg ordered that all suspected females
should be driven by whips from the dwellings of the clergy, and have
their hair cut off. A monk relates that he once made a contract with the
Devil that if he would cease to fill his mind with lascivious ideas, he
would omit some prayers to the saints whose pictures decorated the walls
of his cloister, but upon communicating the substance of the agreement
to the bishop, he was informed by him, that "rather than abstain from
adoring Christ and mother in their holy images it would be better to
enter every brothel and visit every prostitute in the city." Richard
of England replied to Fulk Nuelly, the legate of Pope Innocent III.,
commissioned to blow the trumpet of another crusade: "You advise me to
dismiss my three daughters, Pride, Avarice and Incontinence. I bequeath
them to the most deserving: my pride to the Knights Templars; my avarice
to the monks of Ciste; and, my incontinence to the prelates." Pope John
XXIII, was deposed by the Council of Constance for having committed
seventy different sorts of crimes, among the number of which was illicit
commerce with three hundred nuns. The Trappists, a monkish order
of highway robbers, were constantly employed in abducting females,
confining them in their monastery, and perpetrating the most atrocious
rapes. At the Council of Canterbury King Edgar declared that the houses
of the clergy were nothing but brothels, Petrarch laments over the fact
that the clergy at the papal court were shamefully licentious. Cardinals
lived openly with their concubines; and it became a question of
etiquette whether a bishop's concubine should not, at the court of His
Holiness, precede other ladies. Llorente, chief secretary of the
Spanish Inquisition in 1789, relates that the inquisitors having granted
permission to the females of a certain locality to denounce their guilty
confessors, the number of priests denounced was so great that thirty
secretaries were employed for sixty days in taking down depositions, and
that the profligacy of the clergy so far exceeded all calculation that
it was concluded to suspend investigation, and to destroy the records of
the proceedings. The extent and depth of clerical depravity can never be
divulged by those who know it, for St. Bernard asserts that "Bishops and
priests commit acts in private which it would be scandalous to express."

From nunneries governed and visited by priests of such a character,
what is the logical inference? Chamancis, an unimpeachable Catholic
authority, answers this question when he says: "To veil a woman in these
convents is synonymous to prostituting her." The seventh General Council
of Nice prohibited the erection of double convents for the accommodation
of both sexes; but the prohibition was not regarded. In Europe every
nunnery has attached to it a foundling asylum; in the United States, a
grave-yard. Llorente relates a curious account of Aquida, an abbess of a
Carmelite nunnery at Liemo. It appears that this female had, on several
occasions, professed to have become pregnant with stones, and to have
retired for the purpose of giving them birth. She had often exhibited
her miraculous progeny to the credulous, and pretended to be enabled, by
their divine nature, to cure diseases with them. Her success in working
miracles by them procured for her the reputation of a saint. But
unfortunate for her eventual canonization, a rumor became current
that instead of having given birth to stones, she had given birth to
children, and strangled them; and that she had obliged the holy nuns
under her supervision to practise the same iniquity. The informant, an
inmate of the nunnery, pointed out the place where the murdered babes
were buried; and subsequent excavation revealed the horrible fact, that
half the tale of blood had not been told.

The following additional facts, related by William Hogan, as having
transpired under his personal cognizance, afford further confirmative
proof of the general character of priests and nuns, and that it
remains as it has always been, in all countries, and at all periods of
civilization:

"The Roman Catholics of Albany," says he, "had, about three years
previous to my coming among them, three Irish priests among them,
occasionally preaching, but always hearing confessions.... As soon as
I got settled in Albany I had, of course, to attend to the duty of
_auricular confession_, and in less than two months found that the
priests, during the time they were there, were the fathers of between
sixty and one hundred children, besides having debauched many who had
left the place previous to their confinement." (Auricular Confession, p.
46).

"A short time previous to my coming to this country, and soon after my
being installed as confessor in the Romish Church, I became intimately
acquainted with a family of great respectability. This family consisted
of a widowed father and two daughters, and never in my life have I met
with more interesting young ladies than the daughters were.... In less
than two months after my first visit to this family, at their peaceful
and respectable breakfast table, I observed the chair which had been
usually occupied by the elder of the two ladies occupied by the younger,
and that of the latter to be vacant. I inquired the cause, and was
informed by the father that he had just accompanied her to the coach,
which had left that morning for Dublin, and that she went on a visit to
the Rev. B. K. It seems that both of the daughters of whom I have spoken
went to the school attached to the nunnery of the city of ------.
The confessor whose duty it was to hear the duty of the pupils of the
institute, was one Rev. B. K., a friar of the Franciscan order, who, as
soon as his plans were properly laid, and circumstances rendered them
ripe for execution, seduced the elder lady; and finding the fact could
no longer be concealed, arranged matters with a Dublin friend.... She
was confined at the house of his friend, and her illicit offspring given
to the managers of the foundling hospital in Dublin.... No sooner
was this elder lady provided for, than this incarnate demon, B. K.,
commenced the seduction of the younger lady. He succeeded, and ruined
her too. But there was no difficulty in providing for them. They both
became nuns..... I saw them in the convent at Mount Benedict. They were
great favorites of Bishop Fenton. They were spoken of by some of
the females of Boston as models of piety." (Auricular Confession, p.
100-106).

"Soon after my arrival in Philadelphia,... a Roman Catholic priest by
the name of O. S. called on me, and showed me letters of recommendation
which he had from Bishop T., of Ireland, and countersigned by the Roman
Catholic bishop of New York, to Bishop England, of South Carolina....
He arrived at Charleston, and was well received by Bishop England. There
lived in the parish to which this reverend confessor was appointed, a
gentleman of respectability and wealth. Bishop England supplied this
new missionary with letters of strong recommendation to this gentleman,
advising him to place his children under his charge, assuring him they
would be brought up in the fear of God and love of religion.... The Rev.
Popish wretch seduced the eldest daughter of his benefactor, and the
father becoming aware of the fact, armed himself with a case of pistols,
and determined to shoot the seducer. But there was in the house a
good Catholic servant [a spy] who advised the seducer to fly. He soon
arrived in Charleston; the right reverend bishop understood his case,
advised him to go to confession, and absolved him from his sins;... sent
him on his way to New York.... His victim after a little time, having
given birth to a fine boy, goes to confession herself, and sends the
child of sin to the Sisters of Charity residing in ------, to be taken
care of as a _nullius filius_. As soon as the child was able to walk a
Roman Catholic lady adopted it as her own. The real mother of the child
soon removed to the city of ------, told the whole transaction to the
Roman Catholic bishop of ------, who knowing that she had a handsome
property, introduced her to a highly respectable Protestant gentleman,
who soon married her. He (the bishop ) soon after introduced the
gentleman to the Sisters of Charity who had provided for the illicit
offspring of the priest, concealing its parentage, and representing it
as having no father living. The gentleman was pleased with the boy, and
the holy Bishop finally prevailed on him and his wife to adopt it as his
own." (Auric. Confess, p. 111-115).

When quite young and just emerging from childhood, I became acquainted
with a Protestant family, residing in the neighborhood of my birthplace.
It consisted of a mother (a widow), and three interesting children, two
sons and one daughter.... In the course of time the sons grew up, and
their guardian in compliance with their wishes, and to gratify their
ambition, procured them commissions in the army.... As soon as the
sons left to join their respective regiments, which were then on the
Continent, the mother and daughter were much alone.... There was then
in the neighborhood only twenty miles from this family, a nunnery of the
order of Jesuits. To this nunnery was attached a school superintended
by the nuns of that order.... The mother yielded, in this case, to the
malign influence of fashion;... sent her beautiful daughter, her earthly
treasure, to the school of these nuns.... Soon after the daughter
was sent to school, I entered the college of Manooth as a theological
student, and in due time was ordained a Catholic priest.

An interval of some years passed.... There was a large party given, at
which among others I happened to be present; and there meeting with my
friends and interchanging the usual courtesies on such occasions, she
sportingly, as I then imagined, asked me whether I would preach her
reception sermon, as she intended becoming a nun

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