1896, decided that the excommunication could not be thus evaded, as it would virtually neutralise the bull. A decree of 9 November, 1898, specified certain cases in which the delinquent was excused from personal application to the Papal Penitentiary for absolution, but when, in 1899, a bishop in a foreign land asked whether this applied to one of his priests who had confessed to absolving an accomplice, but who declared that his duties and his poverty precluded him from appearing before the Penitentiary, the answer was in the negative.1 Evidently in the struggle with human nature the Church is not wholly successful. Perhaps its success might be greater if it exerted its powers unreservedly, but such is its dread of scandal that rather than incur the risk of publicity it prefers to shield the criminal. If the punishment cannot be secret, there must be no punishment and no admission of priestly weakness. He How powerfully and how unscrupulously its influence is exerted to this end may be judged from a few examples. In 1817, at Availles, in France, the sacristan complained to the mayor that his daughter was received every night by the curé, to the scandal of the people. The mayor thus invited entered the priest's house suddenly one night, and found the girl in déshabille, hidden in a corner. drew up an official statement of the facts and forwarded it to the authorities, and the response to this was his summary dismissal from office on the ground of having violated the domicile of the curé and increased the scandal. A case which attracted much attention at the time was that of Antoine Mingrat, who as priest of Saint-Aupe, near Grenoble, created scandal by his amours, when, in place of being punished, he was transferred to Saint-Quentin. 1 Cousulente ecclesiastico, I. 78; IV. 296. 2 Bouvet, De la Confession et du Célibat des Prêtres, p. 516 (Paris, 1845). Here he was attracted by a young married woman named Marie Gérin. An unsuccessful attempt upon her virtue rendered it necessary to despatch her. He choked her to death in the parsonage, and dragged the body three-quarters of a league to the Isère, where he cut off the legs and threw the fragments into the river. Suspicion pointing to him, he was about to be arrested, when he escaped across the frontier and found refuge in Savoy. Protected by a mysterious influence, he was never surrendered, although he was condemned to death in absentia by the court of Grenoble, 9 December, 1822, and the only result was the persecution of the family of his victim, who had dared to complain.' Similarly, in 1877, the Abbé Debra, condemned at Liége in default, for no fewer than thirty-two offences, was, after proper seclusion in a convent, given a parish in Luxembourg by the Bishop of Namur. In the case of the Abbé Mallet, which occurred in 1861, the Church was unable to save the culprit from punishment, but did what it could to conceal his crimes from the faithful. As a canon of Cambray, he seduced three young Jewish girls and procured their confinement in convents under pretext of labouring for their conversion. One of his victims lost her reason in consequence of her sufferings, and the court of Douay condemned him to six years at hard labour-a sentence which was announced by an orthodox journal thus: "M. le chanoine Mallet de Cambrai, accusé de détournement de mineurs pour cause de prosélytisme religieux, a été condamné à six ans de reclusion"—where the skilful use of the masculine "mineurs" and the characterisation of his offence as religious proselytism elevate the worst of criminals into a martyr for the faith. It is quite within the bounds of 3 1 L'impunité de Mingrat, ou la police de Charles X., Paris, 1830. 2 Wahu, op. cit. p. 423. 3 Sauvestre, op. cit. p. 144. It is by this policy that the Church renders itself responsible for the evil committed by its members. No human organisation is probability that, as such a martyr, he may since the expiration of his sentence have been enjoying, in some cure of souls, the opportunity of repeating his missionary experiments. It is evident from these various causes that the criminal records can give only the barest suggestion as to the extent of crimes thus committed in secret by a class shielded by influences so powerful. The records of the ministère de la justice, moreover, are not in France open to the public, and the only mode of obtaining even an approximate idea of the number of prosecutions in these cases is to gather them from the journals in which they chance to appear as items of news. An attempt to effect this has been made by Dr. Wahu, and though from the nature of the case necessarily imperfect, it affords some interesting and suggestive statistics. His list extends from the beginning of 1861 to April 1879, and is thus tabulated : without its share of the weak or vicious, and there is no lack of scandals in the Protestant denominations; but in these there is a wholesome jealousy which usually seeks at once to cast out and punish the offender. Thus when, in July 1867, the Rev. Mr. Wendt, at an orphan institution near Philadelphia, was discovered to be tampering with the virtue of the children under his charge, those who were most nearly connected with the management of the asylum were the first to take steps for his prosecution, and, as soon as the necessary legal proceedings could be had, he was undergoing a sentence of fifteen years' solitary confinement without a voice being raised in palliation of his crime. In all 110 cases, of which nearly one-half were brethren connected with educational institutions. The earlier years of this list must be necessarily imperfect, and, indeed, M. Charles Sauvestre has given details of nine cases occurring in schools in 1861,1 all which have escaped Dr. Wahu, but, even making allowance for the impossibility of hunting up all the fugitive records of the past, the increase during recent years is not to be regarded as indicating an increase of immorality. It rather proves how powerful were the forees protecting the Church and repressing publicity under the Second Empire. The absence of cases in 1870-1 is probably attributable to the preoccupations of the Franco-Prussian War and its consequent troubles. While the presidency of M. Thiers, in 1872, yielded 10 cases, the reactionary government of Marshal MacMahon showed but 12 cases in four years. After the fall of MacMahon the number rapidly increases, the first four months of 1879 affording no fewer than 19 cases. Whether since then this rate of progression has been maintained I have no means of knowing, but it is to be hoped that the breaking up of the unauthorised orders and the increased vigilance of the authorities, aided by an aroused public sentiment, have led to a decrease in the dismal record. One deplorable feature of many of these cases is the large number of victims frequently represented in a single prosecution, and that the perpetrator had often been afforded the opportunity of continuing his crimes in successive situations. Thus, in the affair of the Abbé Debra, at Liége, in 1877, there were 32 offences charged against him; and, of those occurring in the single year 1878, Frère Marien was condemned for no fewer than 299, Frère Mélisse, at Saint-Brice, for 50, Frère Climène at Candé, Mazé, and Martigné-Ferchaud, for 25, and Frère Adulphe at Guipry, Saint-Meloir-des 1 Op. cit. pp. 138-44. Ondes, and Pleurtuit, for 67. It would be a libel on human nature to assert that this catalogue of sin does not represent more than an average of wickedness, and the responsibility for the existence of so shocking a condition of morality must, at least in part, be attributed to the rule of celibacy. Irrespective of questions of morality, the rule of celibacy in modern society is harmful to the State in proportion as it contributes to the aggrandisement of those who enforce it. A sacerdotal caste, divested of the natural ties of family and of the world, with interests in many respects antagonistic to the communities in which its members reside, with aims which, from the nature of the case, must be for the temporal advancement of its class, is apt to prove a dangerous element in the body politic, and the true interests of religion as well as of humanity are almost as likely to receive injury as benefit at its hands, especially when it is armed with the measureless power of confession and absolution, and is held in strict subjection to a hierarchy. Such a caste would seem to be the inevitable consequence of compulsory celibacy in an ecclesiastical organisation such as that of the Catholic Church, and the hierarchy based upon it can scarce fail to become the enemy of human advancement, so long as the priest continues to share the imperfections of our common nature. How little the aims of that hierarchy have changed with the lapse of ages may be seen in the pretensions which it still advances, as of old, to subject the temporal sovereignty of princes and peoples to the absolute domination of the spiritual power. The temper f Innocent III. and Boniface VIII. is still the leading inence in its policy, and the opportunity alone is wanting it to revive in the twentieth century the all-pervading anny which it exercised in the thirteenth. Even the |