Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health.  I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice.  But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable.  Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries.  Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally he had lived a pure life, “although,” he adds, with an easy shrug of his shoulders, “it is very possible that the libertine has the best of it!” Another renegade priest, also eminent in literature, bears exactly the same testimony.  Indeed, when we remember the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable testimony is borne out by fact.  I believe this testimony to be equally true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy.  Yet few would dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.

Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension.  That a celibate life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.  Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed graves of inward foulness.  Surely Lowell is right when he says, “I hold unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body.”  To live the unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain living and clean thinking.

It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity of the evil—­often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of women like a shadow—­a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a sense of their helpless ignorance.  I have even met with Christian women who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we could not insure the purity of the home!  So low had the moral consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined bodies and souls of the children of the poor.  Truly the dark places of the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!