They are rocks which tear and rend the unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no true antidote exists." In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr.George Russell, in an address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has hitherto led so many astray." Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health.

I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice.

But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable.

Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries.

Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St.Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds, with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in literature, bears exactly the same testimony.