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.)