In the month of December 1839, I was received into the Seminary, and entered on a period of mournful and painful conflict. The confidence I had hitherto reposed in our spiritual teachers was soon expelled from my breast by a nearer survey of their mode of life, and replaced by the deepest horror and loathing, which seized me when I became aware how shamefully they abused religion, for the purpose of degrading and subjecting the people to their will; when I saw by what a fearful veil of hypocrisy deceitful Rome surrounds us from our cradles to our graves; when I saw how the holiest ordinances are insultingly misused, to crush the dignity of human nature. The disgraceful fetters galled me, which, till now, I had not felt, and I perceived what many of my fellow sufferers endured, and all the more severely, the less they dared avow the causes of their suffering. For the policy of Rome knows how to entwine in bonds from which there is no escape, all Christians who profess its creed, and more skilfully than Moses, who once drew water from the barren rock, can conjure money from the impoverished people; but their principal care and most consummate skill are constantly directed towards their servants, that is to say, to the inferior clergy and their education. The inferior clergy are so securely bound in spiritual and external fetters, that for the greater number it is almost impossible to escape. The peculiar and appropriate armoury for these degrading bonds is the College or Seminary for priests. It is there that the youth, who wishes to devote himself to the teaching of the people, has the brand of slavery stamped deep and painfully upon him; it is there that he is condemned to holy idleness; it is there that his spirit is fettered, and bowed to blind obedience by superstitious dread and sacred statutes; it is there that he is inoculated in heart and soul with hypocrisy and selfish egotism; it is there that man is degraded to the condition of a slave, and becomes a passive tool. The pain, the torment of this sacrifice is fearful, and nature instinctively revolts when she is robbed of her holiest rights, of the most valued gifts of the Creator. And yet the slave is silent, and all the more so, as the grave is deeper where his freedom and his dignity lie buried. It is but seldom that a despairing cry escapes from his inmost soul, and dies away in utterance, amid the empty sounds of simulated prayer.

I cannot think, without a trembling in my every nerve, on all the ignominy which was heaped upon us, and on the disgraceful treatment which we must endure; and I could wish the pen I write with were a blazing torch, to illuminate the deep abyss wherein hearts are stifled, and spirits overwhelmed amid hymns of praise! I need, however, only to depict in quiet, softer colours, what I have seen and felt, to rouse with certainty the wrathful horror, and the deepest sympathy of the greater part of my fellow citizens, who may still be unacquainted with the fearful strategy of the Church of Rome.