The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-01-06 00:00:00

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PRIESTS, WOMEN, AND FAMILIES

We gave some extracts last week from the valuable
work of M. Michelet, under this title, with a brief des-
on of its general scope and object, which we may

here repeat to be that of exposing and overthrowing the
baleful influence which the priesthood of the Church of

Rome, in foreign countries, are in the habit of exercising
over the female portion of their flocks. We now proceed
lichelet, the mode in

to trace, with M

,ich the c

isional is made the instrument by which such unhol

influence is attained and wielded. The following intro

ductory picture is dr

master hand

" Do you see that solemn 1
gold and purple of his pontif

ure, adorned

th all the

ng, with

the thought, the prayer of a multitude of 10,000 men,
the triumphal steps in the choir of St. Denis ? Do you
see him still, above all that kneeling mass, hovering as
high as the vaulted roofs, his head reaching the capitals,
and lost among the winged heads of the angels, whence
he hurls his thunder? Well, it is the same man, this
terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for he'
and now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into that d'
chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of
noon ! Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensa-
tions ! (Why does the heart palpitate so strongly here !)
How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late. The
great rose window over the portal glitters with the setting
sun. But it is. quite another thing in the choir; dark
shadows envelope it, and beyond its obscurity. One
thing astounds and almost frightens us, however far we
may be, which is the mysterious old painted glass at the
farthest end of the church, on which the designs is no
longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade like an
illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel
is not less dark on that account; you can no longer dis-
cern the ornamants and delicate moulding entwined in the
vaulted roof ; the shadow deepening blends and confounds
the outlines. But, as if the chapel were not yet dark
enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess
of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that
trembling woman, so close to each other, are tvhispering
together about the love of 'God."
And who is the party—what have been the previous
training and course of discipline by which he, who is

he after-

thus placed as an interpreter between weak woman and
her maker, is enabled to bear himself scathless through
the ordeal to which be is submitted. Condemned to en-
forced celibacy, he has nevertheless been familiarized to
to the contemplation of every conceivable species of
human frailty and vice, Besides the printed books of

standard authority which reveal such an awful amount of
grossness, their copy books used during the two conclud-
ing years of their preparation for the confessional con-

tain, M. Michelet tells us, questions upon crimes

practices of unimaginable atrocity, unknown in the
worst ages of barbarism, and probably not perpetrated at
all, "except by the brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva,
or by the exiled, lawless, and godless band which Wallen-
stein drew after him—a wandering mass of iniquity,
which would have:been abhorred by ancient Sodom."

" We know not," continues our author, " bow to
qualify this culpable routine. These books, composed
for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same
that you give to your pupil in our own civilized age.
And this young priest, who, according to your instruc-
tions, believes the world is still that dreadful world. who
with all this villainous science,
nd his imagination full of monstrous cas?s, you, imPru-

enters the conf

dent men !

with a child who h