Indeed, when we remember the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable testimony is borne out by fact.

I believe this testimony to be equally true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy.

Yet few would dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.
Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension.

That a celibate life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.
Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed graves of inward foulness.

Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain living and clean thinking.
It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a sense of their helpless ignorance.