"We think, without enumerating the too well-known inconveniences of their present state, that if the priest is to advise the family, it is good for him to know what a family is; that as a married man (or a widower, which would be still better,) of a mature age and experience, one who has loved and suffered, and whom domestic affections have enlightened upon the mysteries of moral life, which are not to be learned by guessing, he would possess at the same time more affection, and more wisdom.
"Why torment a blind man by speaking to him of colours? He answers vaguely; occasionally he may guess pretty nearly; but how can it be helped? he cannot see.
"And do not think that the feelings of the heart can be guessed at more easily. A man without wife or child might study the mysterious working of a family in books and the world for ten thousand years without ever knowing one word about them. Look at these men: it is neither time, opportunity nor facility, that they lack to acquire knowledge; they pass their lives with women who tell them more than they tell their husbands; they know, and yet they are ignorant; they know all a woman's acts and thoughts, but they are ignorant precisely of what is the best and most intimate part of her character, and the very essence of her being. They hardly understand her as a lover, (of God or man,) still less as a wife, and not at all as a mother. Nothing is more painful than to see them sitting down awkwardly by the side of a woman to caress her child; their manner towards it is that of flatterers or courtiers—anything but that of a father.
"What I pity the most in the man condemned to celibacy, is not only the privation of the sweetest joys of the heart, but that a thousand objects of the natural and moral world are, and ever will be, a dead letter to him. Many have thought, by living apart, to dedicate their lives to science; but the reverse is the case. In such a morose and crippled life, science is never fathomed; it may be varied, and superficially immense; but it escapes—for it will not reside there. Celibacy gives a restless activity to researches, intrigues, and business—a sort of huntsman's eagerness—a sharpness in the subtilties of school-divinity and disputation: this is at least the effect it had in its prime. If it makes the senses keen and liable to temptation, certainly it does not soften the heart. Our terrorists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were monks. Monastic prisons were always the most cruel. A life systematically negative—a life without its functions—developes in man instincts that are hostile to life; he who suffers is willing to make others suffer. The harmonious and fertile parts of our nature, which on the one hand incline to goodness, and on the other to genius and high invention, can hardly ever withstand this partial suicide.
"I have never been insensible either to the humiliation of the church, or to the sufferings of the priest. I have them all present, both before my imagination and in my heart. I have followed this unfortunate man in the career of privations, and in the miserable life into which he is dragged by the hand of a hypocritical authority. And in his loneliness, on his cold and melancholy hearth, where he sometimes weeps at night, let him remember that a man has often wept with him, and that I am that man."
We partly know the object and origin of the middle age institution of celibacy among the clergy. It was intended to check the tendency to secularize benefices. It was adapted to the condition of a church militant. It might do good, or at least it could do little harm, where aged and self-mortified men were the occupants of the office. But a youthful priesthood, established in all the comforts or the luxuries of a state endowment, moving and officiating in a sphere where leisure and refinement give an impulse to the heart and fancy, and yet condemned to a renunciation of all the charities of family union, of all the affections of a lover, a husband, a father—how unnatural a position is this, how detrimental to usefulness, how dangerous to virtue! Supposing, even, that the vow is kept in its spirit, and perhaps its violation is not the greatest imaginable mischief, what must be the effect of such solitary seclusion on ordinary minds! What power shall protect the mass of the profession on an envious sourness of heart at the sight of that happiness in others, which in a moment, it may be of rashness, they have relinquished for themselves. "Croire qu'un voeu, quelques prières, une robe noire sur le dos, vont vous delivrer de la chair, et vous faire un pur esprit, n'est-ce pas chose puerile?" We hope and are sure it is not often so; but can we say that sometimes the dark and deserted spirit of the priest may not look on the happiness of families with an approach to the feelings of the Evil One, when gazing at our First Parents in their state of innocence?—
"Sight hateful! sight tormenting! thus these two
Emparadised in one another's arms—While I—"