Why is it that a human document ten thousand years old has the same effect upon us, as a newspaper story of yesterday? Why is it that we love or hate the men and women who live in the songs of Homer? Why do we grieve, or rejoice with those who live in the pages of Plutarch; and feel deeply moved when David and Jonathan are forced apart; when Joseph is sold by his brethren; when the song of Solomon voices the deathless devotion of the country girl for her mountain lover; and when the fanatical Jeptha is about to slay his innocent, beautiful daughter?

It is because human nature has never changed; what our fathers were, we are: what Absolom and David felt, we feel.

When the brilliant, wayward Jewish boy goes astray and meets his untimely fate, we mourn with his broken father as he wails—"O Absolom my son, O my son Absolom!"

That which women have already been, women continue to be. Helen of Troy was not essentially different from Madame de Pompadour; Cleopatra was a more refined Catherine of Russia; Aspasia was the forerunner of Madame Maintenon: Sappho was another "George Sand;" Lilly Langtry was a modern Phryne; and Pauline Bonaparte had all the charm and voluptousness of Nell Gwynne.

One reason why the Old Testament continues to be a modern book is, that it is so full of human nature. Our first instinct, when we became violently enraged is, to kill. In the Old Testament, they do it. Considered as a mere human document, there is more raw slaughter in the Old Testament than any book you ever read, and the details are given with frightfully fascinating realism.

No cloak is thrown around Jacob and Abraham and Lot. Those citizens are painted with all the warts on. In some of them, indeed, the warts fill most of the canvass. That affair of David and the other man's wife: how modern it is! If you will glance over the daily newspaper, you will find that somewhere or other in this world of today, another David has seen the loveliness of Uriah's wife; and the first thing you know this modern David (in a Derby hat and tailor-made clothes) is running away with Bathsheba in an automobile. As to Solomon and his harem—including the Ethiopian woman—the subject is too delicate for polite treatment in a high class publication. I must leave such matters to Mr. William Randolph Hearst, whose Sunday editions and monthly outputs deal in "sex" novels, Gaby Deslys, Lina Cavalieri, Evelyn Thaw, Mrs. Keppel, and scarlet people generally.

The point I desired to make is that God made men and women to mate with one another, and thus reproduce and perpetuate the human species.

There are no bachelor eagles, no spinster swans, no monks among the lions, no nuns among the deer. When we want to make a bachelor out of a horse, we resort to surgery. Most of us know what Mooley, the cow, does in the Spring time, if she is shut up in the pasture with no other company than other Mooley cows.

Without pursuing this line of illustration farther, it is sufficient to say that all animal nature is under the same law. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. Some men repel women: some women abhor men. Some men actually marry, believing that they are fit for it and then discover that they are not. A tragic instance of this was Thomas Carlyle: another was Frederick the Great. Our President James Buchanan was wise enough not to marry; and Charles Sumner was so fatuous as to do so.

But the great law of Nature is, Mate and reproduce! It applies to the flowers, to the plants, to the insects, to the fishes of the sea, and to the fowls of the air. I have often wondered why we become so accustomed to the outrageously informal conduct of hens and roosters, pigeons, ducks, turkeys, &c., that we see it and don't see it: we know it, and don't know it: it happens right under our eyes, and yet we never learn anything from it, or think anything about it.

* * * * * * *

Once again, let me say, men and women in their animal natures are just like other animals. They hunger, they thirst, they are hot, they are cold, they are sick, they are well, they love, they hate, they fight, they yearn for mates, and having found mates, they mate. Allowed liberty, this natural tendency leads to wedlock, and legitimate children. The husband and wife make the Home: the Home is the Gibraltar of organized civilization; and the children are Posterity, in its beginning. Thus marriage, the home, and the children are the conservators of Society.

If a so-called "religion" forces 71,000 American marriageable men and women into hiding places, where they have physical contact with one another but cannot marry, what happens?

You know what happens. Your common sense tells you what happens. Your own natural passions tell you what happens.

Those marriageable men and women—many of them young, handsome, buxom,—are shut off from all the world, by thick walls, barred windows, locked doors. The young buxom men can get to the young buxom women. Either in the day-time or in the night, this physical access can be had, in secret.

The men have been taught that they are gifted with supernatural powers; and that they can forgive each other's sins. The women have been taught that these men cannot sin, and that in serving these men they will be serving God. Besides, if they do sin with the priests, the priests can forgive the sins. This being so, what happens, when the lustful young priest slips into the cloistered convent, goes to the nun's bed-room and solicits her to yield to him, as Mary yielded to the angel?

(See "Why Priests Should Wed." Page 103.)

The cloistered convent is built like a huge dungeon. The encircling walls about it, are thick and high. No one enters in unto the unmarried women excepting the bachelor priests.

The Law does not enter!

The Italian Pope draws his line around the dungeons of darkness and mystery, and the civil authorities dare not go in.

Everybody knows that young women are caged in those hell-holes. Everybody knows that burly, beefy, red-faced, thick-lipped young priests glide in and out.

Everybody knows what he would do, if he had the pick of a score of buxom girls, in a secret place, he being a bachelor and they being without access to any man but himself.

If you were young and had no wife, you know what would happen, if you were alone in a pretty girl's bed-room, and she were educated to yield to you in everything.

Yet, these impudent rascals, the beefy Irish, Italian and German priests, ask you to believe that they never even think of touching those 56,000 American girls that are caged inside those walls:

Nevertheless, you know it is against Nature for these young men not to want to mate with those women. You know that the cloistered convents would not be built like Bastilles, and the world shut out, if there were not something going on in there which they are afraid for the world to see.

You know that where cloistered convents are built and managed like jails, THEY ARE JAILS!

Yet, those impudent rascals, gliding into the women, and coming out from the women, tell you that although the women are taught to obey the priest in all things, the priest never does say or do what every full-sexed man would do and say, under the same circumstances.

The Turks had their harems, and they knew women—likewise, they knew men. The Turks had walls, and bars, and locked gates, and sentinels outside to watch. But the Turks knew how vain are walls, and barred windows, locked gates and vigilant sentinels. Therefore, the Turks always kept eunuchs in the harem itself, eunuchs whose watchful eyes were ever upon those ladies of the harem. And the eunuchs were powerful men, strong and fierce, but unsexed. They had the strength to guard the women, without the desire to enjoy.

But the Roman Pope builds harems in all Christian lands—harems for his priests to whom he denies marriage.

There are no eunuchs to guard these women. The men who go in unto them are men of like passions as ourselves; and there is no eye to watch, no tongue that will tell, after the priest has gone inside.

* * * * * * *

Our common sense condemns this enforced celibacy which pagan popes invented for their own selfish, ambitious purposes. Or rather, the Popes borrowed it from the Turkish Sultans who would not allow their chosen body-guard, the Janissaries, to marry. In course of time, the Janissaries became more powerful than the Sultan, and they had to be exterminated. The Pope's Janissaries are now more powerful than the Pope; and the wretchedness of his position is that he can neither massacre them, nor rob them of their women. Of all the exalted slaves the world ever saw, the Pope is perhaps the most conspicuous example.

The Jesuits rule the priesthood; the Jesuits rule the cardinals; the Jesuits rule the Pope—and the Jesuits have the pick of the most beautiful women throughout the Christian world.

* * * * * * *

On such a system as this—a system which has denied so many millions of men and women the God-given right to live according to Nature, history ought to have much to say. What is the evidence and the verdict of impartial History?

Let us try the case: let us call the witnesses and hear their evidence. If the other side wants to be heard, the court is open. I will give them as much space for the defense as I take for the prosecution. It shall be a perfectly fair investigation. Remember, however, that the unmarried men and the unmarried women have been hiding within the walls of monasteries and convents, ever since Pope Gregory abolished God's ordinance of marriage, and declared, virtually, that the Pope's will, and not that of God Almighty, should govern priests and nuns. Remember that there has been every effort made at concealment: that the dungeons could not tell their awful secrets; that the light of day was jealously shut out. Remember that the nun who willingly submitted to the priest did not wish to expose their mutual guilt. Remember that the nun who was forced, could seldom escape and give the alarm. Remember that the babes born in the cloistered convents were seldom seen of men, and that they could easily be thrown into the hidden vault, where the quick-lime was ready to eat their bones. Remember that it was to the interest of popery to screen the priests, and that the rulers of States were in deadly fear of the wrath of Popes—wrath which sent death to Henry III. of France, William of Orange, and Henry of Navarre. Remember further, that when Popes kept acknowledged paramours and bastards in the Vatican, the priests had nothing to fear on account of their turning the nunneries into brothels. Those nuns whose vows were not broken, were the ugly ones, the old and the ailing. The monks had such complete power over wives through the Confessional, that many women inside the cloister owed their immunity to the women outside.

There was a time, under popery, when no Italian husband was certain that his wife's children were his: hence, for a time paternal affection in Italy almost became extinct. There was a time, under popery, when every Italian wife had an acknowledged lover—her cicisbeo—the priests having paved the way. The husband kept a mistress; the wife, a lover; and the priest enjoyed both wife and mistress, without bearing the expense of either.

(See Sismondi's Hist. des Repub. d'Ital.)

There was a time, under popery, when it was assumed that every Spanish woman had yielded to a priest. And of course a woman who takes one lover will take another; and thus Spain went to moral perdition, with the priests and the nuns in the lead.

The same thing was true of Portugal, and of all Southern Europe. Of Mexico, Central and South America and Cuba, it would be a waste of words to speak.

* * * * * * *

Pope Gregory VII. introduced the unnatural requirement of celibacy—the forbidding of men and women to do what God had equipped them to do, and prompted them, by sexual passions to do—the most powerful passions known to humanity—passions which if not naturally gratified lead to crimes of revolting enormity, to loss of health, to loss of mental balance, to loss of shame, of normal desires, and of reason itself.

(Consult such books as Dr. Sanger's "History of Prostitution;" Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, &c.)

Soon after enforced celibacy was introduced, an honest priest, Honorius of Antrim wrote—

"Look at the convents of the nuns, places of debauchery! These abominable women have not chosen the Virgin, but Phryne and Messalina as their models. They prostrate themselves before the idol of Priapus!"

(Priapus was the male organ of generation, and was formerly to be seen throughout Europe, especially at public fountains.)

King Edgar of England wrote—

"What shall I say of the clergy? We find nothing among them but debauchery, excesses, orgies, and unchastity. Their abodes are propitious for solitude, and yet they dwell there not for pious meditation, but in order to lead lives of debauchery."

Pope Benedict VIII. at the Council of Pavia deplored the awful vices of the unmarried clergy.

Nicholas Clemangis says—

"The monasteries are no longer sanctuaries devoted to the divinity, but places of abomination and debauchery—rendezvous of young libertines. Indeed, to make a girl take the veil is equivalent to forcing her into prostitution."

The monks of the Middle Ages led a life full of orgies, equalling the dissipations of Tiberius at Capri. "The concubines and prostitutes were mistresses of the wealth of the monasteries and convents."

The good Catholic, Anselm of Bisate, wrote—

"The nuns are not more virtuous than the monks. Widows took the veil in order to be free, and not bound to one man."

Instead of being the wife of one man, the nun could be the mistress of several.

(Dr. Angelo Rappaport, p. 36.)

Why was it that IrenÆus and Epiphanius poured out such unprintable descriptions of the immorality of those "heretics" who refused to marry and who professed to be virgins? Did these Fathers of the Christian Church grossly slander those celibate heretics? Were the men and the women who indulged in those sexual excesses, while pretending to be chaste, any better or any worse than the human creatures of today?

Was Cyprian libelling his own brethren and sisters when he described how depraved, how licentious, how sodom-like was the conduct of the so-called "virgins" of his time? Cyprian lived in the third century after Christ, and he was speaking of the same phase of Christianity which provoked the immortal passage in Gibbon. Carrying their brazen hypocrisy to unheard of lengths, the monks and the nuns occupied the same beds, and yet unblushingly vowed that they had passed through this fiery furnace without the smell of fire on their garments!

If I were to quote the Latin in which Cyprian exposes these shameless harlots and libertines, the great and good U. S. Government would perhaps again prosecute me for telling the truth on Roman Catholicism.

Popery is the one thing that you must not tell the truth about, unless you are prepared to withstand boycott, abuse, persecution and threats against your property and life!

(The curious are cited to "Elliott on Romanism," Vol. II., p. 408, and to Cyprian to Pompanius, Book II., p. 181.)

So well understood was it that young men and young women needed each other, sexually, that both in the Latin and in the Greek there was a distinctive name given to these "holy virgins." The "soul marriage" of the ancient church was as much like the affinity doings of the present day, as Solomon's carryings on were like those of the Sultan of Turkey.

To the testimony of Cyprian may be added that of Chrysostom, who bewailed the utter licentiousness of the "virgins."

Since Bishop Udalric in the year 606 wrote of the skulls of the six thousand infants found in draining off some fish ponds at the command of Gregory the Great, the slaughter of the babes has gone steadily on. "When Pope Gregory ascertained that the infants thus killed were born from the concealed fornications of and adulteries of the priests, he recalled his decree, extolling the apostolic command. It is better to marry than to burn." (Elliott II., p. 409.)

Yet, when we are told the same story by Father Chiniquy, Dr. Justin Fulton, ex-priest William Hogan, ex-priest Fresenborg, ex-priest Manuel Ferrando, ex-nun Margaret Shepherd, ex-nun Maria Monk, ex-priest Blanco White, ex-priest Seguin, and by such submissive Catholics as Erasmus, Rabelais, Campanella and scores of other unimpeachable witnesses, we are more inclined to listen to the impudent denials of the lecherous priests than to the evidence of those who escape AND TELL!

The denial made by the unmarried priests is at variance with their looks, is at variance with admitted facts, is at variance with what we ourselves know of the overwhelming strength of our carnal desires: yet the impudent denial is so brazen, so persistent, and so threatening, that we either accept it, or enter the plea of nolle contendere.

The accusation against the pretended virgins involves so many apparently good men and chaste women, that we shrink from remembering the difference between publicity and privacy; we forget that the treacherous inclination is not felt in the church and in the crowd, but that it creeps to the secret couch, under cover of night, when there is silence, freedom from interruption and security from detection.

We forget how this passion takes advantage of night, of undress, and of secret contact of the physical man and woman, to heat their normal blood, no matter how sanctified they may really be in their daily visible life.

"Saint" Bernard of the 10th century exhausts his wrath upon the hideous vices of the monks and nuns "behind the partition." "What abominable lust!" cries this stern old anchorite. He exclaims—

"Would that those who cannot rule their sexuality would fear to give their conduct the name of celibacy. It is better to marry than to burn.... Take away from the church honorable marriage and the undefiled bed, and do you not fill it with concubines, incestuous persons, onanists, male concubines, and with every kind of unclean person?"

(Bernard's Sermons V. 29, cited in Elliott, II., 410.)

Take away honorable marriage from the priests, and what do you get in place of the bed undefiled? Read again that tremendous sentence of Saint Bernard, and then ask yourself, Has human nature changed?

A typical illustration of priestly seduction is the following:

"A lady of the name of Maria Catharine Barni, of Santa Croe, declared on her death-bed, that she had been seduced through the confessional, and that she had during twelve years maintained a continual intercourse with priest Pachiani. He had assured her that by means of the supernatural light which he had received from Jesus and the holy virgin, he was perfectly certain that neither of them was guilty of sin, &c." (Secrets of Female Convents, p. 58, cited by Elliott, Vol. II., p. 448.)

Substantially, that is the way every priest seduces every nun who yields to him.

Almost the very formula is mentioned in Dr. Justin D. Fulton's book which was submitted to Anthony Comstock, the modern Cato, before it was published. And Dr. Fulton asserts that Pope Pius IX. authorized this concubinage of priests with nuns, by a formal Vatican decree of 1866.

Dr. Fulton says—page 97 of "Why Priests Should Wed"—

"In the year 1866, Pope Pius IX. sanctioned the establishment of one of the most appalling institutions of immorality and wickedness ever countenanced under the form and garb of religion."

Briefly, this institution authorized priests and nuns who had been in service long enough to inspire confidence, to live in sexual relations, like man and wife. Dr. Fulton proceeds at length to describe how the priest selects his nun, how he makes his wishes known to her, how he quotes Scripture to overcome her scruples, how the "love room" is adorned with holy emblems and images, how the priest sprinkles holy water over the bed, how he then kneels and prays for a blessing on the union about to take place, and then——!

As I have said a number of times, Dr. Fulton submitted his manuscript to Anthony Comstock. The chaste Cato of New York, advised the omission of many passages; but the whole of this hideous chapter describing how Pope Pius IX. authorized the priests to make use of the nuns, sexually, appears in the book with sufficient clearness to lay it in parallel columns with the abominations of Sodom, Gomorrha, the White Slave Traffic, the Decameron, the Heptameron, and Balzac's Merry Tales of the Abbeys of Touraine.

Dr. Fulton's book was published in 1888. He was never prosecuted for that terrible charge against Pope Pius IX. He was never sued for libelling the priests and nuns. His charges were never officially denied.

Cardinal Gibbons wrote his mendacious book, "The Faith of our Fathers," for the purpose of answering all that had been said against Popery. He mentioned Maria Monk by name, and denounced her true story as false. Yet, although Gibbons published his book sixteen years after Dr. Fulton had hurled his awful charge against Pope Pius IX., the Baltimore priest dared not challenge the statement of Dr. Fulton!

Maria Monk—poor, outraged, persecuted woman, was dead: Dr. Justin D. Fulton, a fearless, powerful man, was alive! Gibbons was brave enough to vilely attack the dead woman: he was too much of a contemptible coward to attack the living man.

The living man was ready with his evidence, and he was a fighter—and the catlike Gibbons knew it.

Says Dr. Fulton—

"At first the female may be a little timid, &c. She may object, &c. But the priest, representing God's angel in this office, gently soothes the mind and quiets the fears of his future spouse by saying to her, He who will come upon thee is not man, but is the holy one of God, and this union is pleasing to him;——."

(At this point Anthony Comstock must have blushed and raised an objection, as the nun was doing, for the remainder of the sentence is stricken out.)

But the text continues—"It will be holy and blessed; therefore I say unto thee, as the angel said unto Mary, Fear not."

After this, the woman, being convinced by the language of heaven's messenger that all is right, gives the priest complete assurance of her willingness to submit by saying, as Mary said to the angel, "Be it done unto me according to thy word."

Then Dr. Fulton so frankly indicates what takes place in that private room, and upon that consecrated bed, that I really am curious to know what it was that made Comstock blush, a few lines above those which thus tell of the soliciting priest, the yielding nun, and the ready bed.

Now, if you will compare one case with another, from the time of the early Fathers down to the present day, you will detect a similarity that is appalling.

The testimony of Edward Gibbon, the skeptical historian, exactly accords with that of Saint Cyprian, Chrysostom, Jerome and Bernard.

The memorable investigation which Duke Leopold of Tuscany caused to be made of the cloistered convents of Italy revealed identically the same cess-pools of vice that came to light in England when Henry VII. uncovered the monasteries.

All the literature of the Renaissance, after men's minds and pens freed themselves from the ignoble fear of popery, bear witness to the same universal everlasting truth—Men and women were made for each other, and no so-called religion can annul the laws of Nature.

* * * * * * *

When a "religion" sets up the claim that it can pardon sins, educate the children to believe it, destroys those who deny it, and fixes a scale of money-payments for the pardon of sins, what sort of fruit is that kind of tree likely to bear?

If penance and payment rids me of sin, my conscience, like an unused muscle, becomes enfeebled, and my proneness to sin is encouraged.

Pope Leo X. was the Vicar of Christ who ordered lists of sin to be drawn up, with the price of the pardon opposite each sin.

(See History of Auricular Confession, by Count C. P. De Lasteyrie, Vol. II., p. 132.)

I will quote only a few of these tariff rates established by this Infallible Pope.

For allowing a ship to sail to convey merchandise to infidels, 100 d.

For the absolution of any one practising usury, 7 d.

For concubinage, 7 d.

For intimacy with a woman in a church, 6 d.

For pardon of him who has violated a virgin, 6 d.

For one who has committed incest, 5 d.

(The d. stands for the coin known as the ducat.)

Can you imagine anything more conducive to immorality, than a "religion," sanctified by the name of Christ, which teaches that its priests can forgive sins, and which publishes a list of market prices for such forgiveness? Do you marvel that Roman Catholic countries are the immoral countries? Do you wonder at the mania for vice and crime among the lower Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese?

When a man could ravish a virgin for six ducats, what girl had any safety except in the fear that libertines might have of her father or her brother, or her sweetheart?

What sort of hell would we have in America if popery gained the upper hand, and the negro bucks were taught that they could buy pardons for violating white women?

God Almighty! It makes one sick to think that even now they are admitting young black men to the priesthood.

What will they do, inside the cloistered convents?

No scream from within can be heard outside. Those dead walls tell no tales. The Law dares not scrutinize the interiors where the negro priests can penetrate; and we have no legal process to wring the dread Secret out of the nun's cell!

The Pope's Empire has been erected inside our Republic; and those who represent our State, and our Law, are afraid of the Italian Pope and the laws of the Italian church!

* * * * * * *

When the Commissioners sent by King Henry VII. visited the monasteries, the guilt of the inmates was so overwhelmingly evident that hardly any attempt at denial was made. The Confession of the Prior and Benedictines of St. Andrew's in Northampton is yet of record, and it is a fair example. They confessed that they "had lived in idleness, gluttony, and sensuality, for which the Pit of Hell was ready to swallow them up."

(Burnett, Book III., p. 227.)

Among the false "relics" that were found and which had long been used to swindle ignorant believers out of their money, were a Wing of the Angel that had brought to England the Spear which pierced Christ's side; some of the coals that had roasted the Most Blessed Saint Anthony; numerous pieces of "the true Cross;" a small bottle filled with Christ's blood; a Crucifix which would sometimes bow its head, sometimes roll its eyes and sometimes move its lips.

(All this fraudulent rubbish was seized, taken to London, and publicly destroyed.)

Bishop Burnett says—

"But for the lewdness of the confessors of the Nunneries, and the great corruption of that state, whole houses being found almost all with child."

That was in the year 1535, in England! In the year 1910, when the nunneries were suddenly broken up in Spain, exactly the same state of affairs was discovered! Some of the nuns came out leading their children: some were so far advanced in pregnancy that their condition was evident to all—and as to how many little bones were left in the underground vaults, God alone knows.

Bishop Burnett continues—

"The dissoluteness of Abbots, and the other monks, and the friars, not only with whores, but married women, and their unnatural lusts and other brutal practices, these are not fit to be spoken of, much less enlarged on, in a work of this nature." ...

The full report was destroyed by the fanatical papist Bishop Bonner, at the beginning of the reign of Bloody Mary. (See "English Reformation.") But Bishop Burnett saw extracts from it "concerning 144 Houses, that contains abominations in it, equal to any that were in Sodom!"

Put this original evidence side by side with the confession already quoted: put with it the testimony gathered by Duke Leopold of Tuscany: add what Blanco White and Erasmus say; add what S. J. Mahoney and Manuel Ferrando say: buttress this mass of evidence with what the Fathers of the Church said, what all the escaped nuns and priests have alleged, and compare this mountain of proof with what you know about human nature—and how can you harbor a doubt that nunneries and monasteries are today what they always have been? They are houses of hidden iniquity, and nameless crimes—AND YOU KNOW IT!

That marvellous man of letters, Erasmus, who wrote for the Reformation, but who left Luther and others to fight for it, says this in his "Colloquies."—

"I hold up to censure those who entice lads and girls into monasteries against their parents' wills, abusing their simplicity or superstition, and persuading them that there is no chance of salvation but in the cloister. If the world were not full of such anglers; if countless minds had not been most miserably buried alive in such places, then I have been wrong in my conclusions. But if ever I am forced to speak out what I feel upon this subject, I will paint the portrait of these kidnappers, and so represent the magnitude of the evil, that every one shall confess I have not been wrong."

(Quoted in Day's "Monastic Institutions," p. 239.)

The infamous Liguori—a Roman Catholic "Saint"—calmly assumes that many inmates of the convents are captives, just as Erasmus had said they were, and he lays down the law to these helpless, kidnapped captives with all the malevolence of a grinning devil.

"Now that you are professed in a convent, and that it is impossible for you to leave it," &c. (Monastic Institutions, p. 294.)

Liguori threatens the captive, telling the poor creature that if she abandons herself to sadness and regret, she will be made to suffer a hell here, and another hereafter.

In other words, Smile, prisoner, smile! or we will make the convent a hell to you!

So says Saint Liguori, whose instructions to the priests, telling them what filthy questions they must ask the Catholic women, are so "obscene" that I was prosecuted by the Catholic Knights of Columbus for having quoted some of them. If I had quoted all that Liguori wrote in coaching the priests, and teaching them virtually how to disrobe women of their modesty as a prelude to their ruin, I suppose the Government would have ordered out the troops and had me shot.

Several times, Erasmus has been mentioned as one of the most terrific accusers of the papal system, its frauds, impostures, greed, ferocity, its fake miracles, its pagan adoration of images and relics, and its rotten immorality. Perhaps it is due to the reader that I cite him to "The Life and Letters of Erasmus," by the historian James A. Froude, published in this country by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, in 1895.

From this comparatively recent work, the student can most readily obtain a general idea of Popery, as described by one who was a devout Catholic, but not a blind, servile papist. Erasmus was practically an orphan boy, of somewhat uncertain parentage, whose life mystery and romance inspired Charles Read to write the greatest of all novels, "The Cloister and the Hearth."

Mr. Froude tells the painful story of the forcing of Erasmus into monastic vows; and then follows him as he develops into the most learned and brilliant scholar of Europe.

Never a robust man, always more or less an invalid, Erasmus remained inside the Roman pale, but abhorred the inherent vices of the system, denounced those vices with a pen of fire, endured the terrors and agonies of persecution within his church, was bitterly abused by the vile priesthood whose putrid lives he uncovered, was menaced by the dread Inquisition, and really suffered more keenly the penalties than Luther did, for telling the truth on popery.

Luther, a bull-necked, fearless Man, broke out, and fought popery from the outside. Erasmus, like many of his predecessors, tried to reform it from within, and he discovered at last that he might as well have been trying to reform hell.

The enraged monks and monkesses did not murder Erasmus, as they had murdered Savonarola, Huss, Jerome, &c.; but it was because the Pope had his hands full of other matters, and the time was not favorable for burning the most illustrious scholar of Christendom.

What did Erasmus say and write and publish against the vast parasitical growth of paganism, fraud and imposture that had overgrown Christianity under the pope?

Read his "Praise of Folly," which has been translated into English and can be had through any book-dealer.

When you read it, remember that Erasmus was never answered, save by abuse and threats.

In his letters to the Prothonotary of the Pope, letters written for the Pope to read, and which the Pope did read, Erasmus arraigns the unmarried clergy of Rome, her monks and her nuns, her monasteries and her convents, in the same terms that are used by the Preamble to the Act of the British Parliament which stated that reasons for the dissolution of these Romish hell-holes.

The accusations fathered by Erasmus and laid before the Pope, agree in every essential particular with the revelations of Blanco White, of S. J. Mahoney, William Hogan, Joseph McCabe, Bishop Manuel Ferrando, Margaret Shepherd, Maria Monk, and every other witness who has had the courage to uncover these papal dens of infamy, torture, vice and crime.

I have not the space to quote at any length from the Letters of Erasmus: get the book and read it for yourself.

But weigh this passage—

"Men are threatened or tempted into vows of celibacy. They can have license to go with harlots, but they must not marry wives.

They may keep concubines and remain priests. If they take wives, they are thrown to the flames.

Parents who design their children for a celibate priesthood should emasculate them in their infancy, instead of forcing them, reluctant or ignorant, into a furnace of licentiousness."

What was this furnace of licentiousness? The cloistered convent, or the monastery.

In his notes to the New Testament, a Greek translation of which Erasmus made, he said, after alluding to St. Paul's injunction about the "one wife," that the priests could commit homicide, parricide, incest, piracy, sodomy and sacrilege: "these can be got over, but marriage is fatal."

He adds that of all the enormous herds of priests, "very few of them are chaste."

In his letter to Lambert Grunnius, (in the year 1514) Erasmus gives an awful picture of monastic slavery in houses "which are worse than brothels."

But once a young man is entrapped, there is no escape. "They may repent, but the superiors will not let them go, lest they should betray the orgies which they have witnessed."

Then Erasmus tells of instances where men were buried alive inside the monasteries to prevent their escape. "Dead men tell no tales!"

Remember, reader! Erasmus was writing to the Pope's own Prothonotary, in order that the "Holy Fathers" might of a surety know what was going on inside the monastic houses! And in reply, the Prothonotary, Lambert Grunnius, writes to Erasmus—

"I read your letter aloud to the Pope, from end to end: several cardinals and other great persons were present. The Holy Father was charmed with your style!"

And the Holy Father waxes wroth at some personal grievances of Erasmus, and granted him relief from monkish diabolism; but what was done to correct the frightful conditions which Erasmus had brought to the Pope's personal attention?

Nothing! Absolutely nothing. It was the same way when the exposures were made in Spain, when they were made in Tuscany, when they were made in England, when they were made in the Philippines! The answer of Rome is ever the same: Nothing can be done.

The Pope knows what enforced male celibacy does, when screened from the civil law behind thick walls, and given unlimited license among young women, who cannot resist, and who cannot tell!

And you know that the Pope does know—for he also is a male like me and you.

Again, Erasmus asks what would Saint Augustine say now, if he were to see these convents and monasteries become "public brothels."

In those standard works, "The History of Prostitution" and "Human Sexuality," you will learn the fearful fact that the utter lewdness of nuns and of wives who had been debauched by the priests, became so universal that the trade of the professional harlot was almost entirely taken away from her. Why should loose men pay, when there were so many places of gratuitous entertainment?

(Lest you heed the deceptive talk which endeavors to convince you that the old tree is now bearing different fruit, read Hogan's "Popish Nunneries," McCabe's "Ten Years in a Monastery," McCarthy's up-to-date "Priests and People in Ireland;" and the astounding, undenied statements of Bishop Manuel Ferrando, in "The Converted Catholic" magazine of New York City.)

In Delisser's powerful book, "Pope, or President?" there is a masterly summing up against "Romanism as revealed by its own writers."

Among other witnesses, he cites the evidence of Mahoney, the priest who was examined by a Committee of the House of Commons.

"A very nefarious use was made of convents," testified this honest Irishman. His disclosures corroborated what another honest Irish priest, Hogan, said several centuries later.

"A woman ... is seduced into a convent to live in sin with the bishop and other confessors. It is not human to place a priest where he is allowed to fall, and suppose him innocent. Reader, commit your daughter to the soldier or hussar who can marry her, rather than to a Romish priest." ("Pope, or President," p. 59.)

In fact, Delisser's chapter on "Convent Exposed" is one of the most frightful that I ever read—doubly frightful because the Romanist writers therein quoted assume it to be their right to mistreat women, just as they please!

It is only in such a chapter, composed of citations from orthodox Roman Catholics, that you can obtain anything like a true conception of the priest's point of view.

They have the right to kidnap children: they have a right to restrain prisoners; they have a right to compel obedience: they have a right to shut out the State and its law: they have a right to punish the refractory, to flog the unruly girl, to starve her into submission, to degrade her with disgusting services, to use her person for their lusts!

That is the priest's point of view!

Study the horrible "theology" of Dens and Liguori: read what popes have said in denial of a layman's right to criticise a priest; read what Rev. Blanco White said of the systematic depravity of Romanism.

Cardinal Newman had to acknowledge that Blanco White was a man or irreproachable character, "a man you can trust." "I have the fullest confidence in his word," &c.

And what does this ex-Catholic, for whom Cardinal Newman vouched, have to say about convents?

"I cannot," says he, "find tints sufficiently dark to portray the miseries which I have witnessed in convents. Crime, in spite of the spiked walls and prison gates is there. The gates of the holy prison are forever closed upon the inmates: force and shame await them wherever they might fly."

Then the ex-priest tells the tragic story of his two sisters, virtually tortured to death in the Spanish convent, he being a witness to their misery and powerless to relieve it. The system held them all!

He continues—

"Of all the victims of the church of Rome, the nuns deserve the greatest sympathy."

White's book was published in 1826. Like "Pope, or President," published in 1859, it is now out of print. Only at long intervals may you see a copy advertised in the catalogues of Old-book stores. Some agency has been most active in destroying anti-Catholic books, and keeping them out of our Public Libraries.

Consider this sentence in Hume's "History of England," Vol. II., p. 592.

"Monstrous disorders are therefore said to have been found in many of the religious houses, whole convents of women abandoned to lewdness; signs of abortions procured, OF INFANTS MURDERED, of unnatural lusts between persons of the same sex."

Did poor Margaret Shepherd, or Maria Monk make any accusations that were worse than these which we find in a standard history of England?

In Aubrey's "Rise and Growth of the English People," the indictment against the convents and the monasteries is equally severe. See Vol. I., p. 80 and 81.

In Lecky's "History of European Morals," we have exactly the same arraignment of this unnatural and polluting system.

In Bower's "History of the Popes," in Hallam's "Constitutional History of England," and in every trustworthy account of the system of enforced celibacy we have the same horrible, but natural, description of the lives led by those full-sexed members of both sexes, who cannot mate legally and decently, but who are given access to each other under cover of night, behind the curtain of thick walls, and with the assurance that, so long as no scandal leaks out, no notice will be taken of what is done inside the "holy" brothel.

The very language in which the virgin girl is made to pledge herself as "the spouse of Christ," is so abominably obscene and suggestive that it is bound to plant impure curiosity in her mind—and, with a girl, impure curiosity is the lure to the fall. Not especially wishing to be again indicted for quoting the Pope's nasty language, I will forbear. Even in the Latin, it is so vile, lewd, lascivious, filthy, and nasty, that I marvel how any white woman, under any circumstances, can allow a beast of a man to use that language to her, and not slap his face.

The language is quoted in "Pope, or President," pages 86 and 360. The "Nun Sanctified," of "Saint" Alphonsus Liguori, and the Theology of Peter Dens will give the reader a fairly correct idea of what sort of a slave the priests make of a woman, after she has been ensnared into taking the black veil.

In the famous investigation of the convents of Tuscany, in 1775, one of the nuns gave testimony which, is singularly piquant and unique. Besides, it remained uncontradicted. The name of the witness was Sister Flavia Peraccini. After telling of many escapades she had witnessed inside the convents, and of many merry times the priests and the nuns had with one another, Sister Flavia Peraccini deposed—

"A monk said to me that if a nun's veil were placed on one pole, and a monk's cowl on another, so great is the sympathy between the veil and the cowl they would come together, and unite." ("Unite" is the modest word: "copulate," is meant.)

"I say," continues the Sister, "I say, and repeat it, that whatever the Superiors know, they do not know the least portion of the great evils that pass between the monks and the nuns."

The foregoing is a mere trifle compared to the whole amount of the undisputed testimony taken by Duke Leopold of Tuscany in 1775. Have men and women changed? Is human nature the same?

It was for all people and all ages that the inspired writer wrote—

"Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife; and let every woman have her own husband." (I. Cor. 7:12.)

The most powerful argument and authority against the Roman papacy on this question is that of Jesus Christ.

Virtually, he said that a man must make himself a eunuch—if not born so—before he could live like a eunuch!

If the word of Christ is not conclusive and binding, where shall we seek the truth?

The trouble with papists is, they are educated outside of the Bible and common sense; and they seldom free their minds from the priestly domination established in childhood.

(THE END.)