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?