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her innocence interests you, her confidence captivates you. You must either stifle your feelings and suffer in silence, or nourish them and probably fall into crime. It seems, indeed, that Satan himself is tied to you under the form of a celibate, and that he has only assumed this figure because your functions place you more the oftener in the presence of the forbidden sex.

Have I exaggerated your perils? No; my friends, you know I have approached but the brink of a precipice upon which I wish no longer to fix your thoughts; but I recall it to your memory, and ask you, if celibacy is not the bitter drop of your life?

But at least, after having fled the solitude of thought and the temptations of the Church, you will be able to find friends and peace in the world. But no; here are still women whom you cannot approach without danger, or shun without sacrifice of feeling-men, the current of whose ideas or affairs have nothing in common with yours. In a family, in a circle in the street, you feel yourself a stranger. From respect to you silence is preserved, you remark that your presence restrains, and that they wait for your departure to be at ease. If, on the contrary, every one acts and speaks freely, it appears to you that they intend a slight or throw disrespect upon you. As little do your dress, your practices, and all that belongs to you meet with sympathies in the world! This you have remarked yourself, this, without doubt, you have often been made to suffer. What would it be, then, if you could suspect all the antipathy and hatred that in your absence a world, too little known by you, shows for your caste! The world does you wrong, I would fain believe; but, nevertheless, know this, it hates you, and hates you without knowing you personally, for the sole reason that you are a priest. Look around you while I am speaking to you, and you will see a bitter crowd throwing stones at you from all parts, in the form of engravings, of books, of dramas, of discourses. Do not deceive yourselves, there would not be so many writers to attack you, if there were not many readers ready to applaud them. If this general hatred were without desert I would say to you, Endure it, and march on as did your Master, Jesus Christ. But, no; you are aware that if you have not, yet others have drawn it on themselves, and were you still more holy, what difference would they see between you and your colleagues? their cause ruins yours; their past conduct ruins your future prospect, and the darts of the people, already thrown at your guilty brothers, strike you, though innocent, and destroy before-hand your noblest efforts.

Behold your relations with the world; let us see those with your colleagues. Observe, I do not calumniate you. I suppose that you desire to do good, you seek to promote the morality of your parish, you succour the poor, you renounce practices odious to the people, you give less place to minute ceremonies and more to the precepts of the Gospel. Let me suppose that you have in part succeeded. What have you gained? Each of your colleagues you have made jealous. In your devotion they see only a culpable ambition, or at most an importunate merit which serves as a barrier to themselves. Neglect your duties, and you have true denunciators; fulfil your tasks, and * What immediately follows in the original is omitted.-ED. P. M.

you have calumnious slanderers. If you wish for promotion, be a spy on your equals, flatter your superiors, make yourselves accomplices in the weaknesses of one and the other. Be a spy on your neighbouring curate, who is watching you in his turn. Disguise from him your thoughts, as he conceals his from you: discover his faults, as he seeks to discover yours: and to succeed the better, receive with a smile the kiss of the traitor who delivers you in the dark to the hand which is to drag you before the Sanhedrim. The thirty pieces of silver which are kept for his reward is the humble post which you occupy, or that which you expect.

To the envy of your equals is joined the pride and the tyranny of your superiors. The man who till this day was trampled on by you, now redresses himself when placed above you. Your obsequious servant of yesterday is your master of to-day-and what a master! as disdainful as Jesus was humble; as imperious as Jesus was mild; making you purchase, by long years of blind submission, a recompense twenty times earned, forbidding you even to move without permission, making himself the indispensable mediator for the favours of the Holy See, and claiming still a larger part in the fruits of your poor church. All that would be little if you had not still to fear injustice and caprice. You have long hoped for another preferment-a new comer more servile obtains it. You would then raise your voice against this; but silence is imposed on you under pain of suspension. They desire, above all things, that you should learn obedience. They try upon you to what point the ozier will bend without breaking; bow down, bow down still, till your head touches your feet; above all, raise not a timid look, do not suffer a sigh to escape, or they will accuse you of revolt, and throw you in a parish a little more obscure;—and are you a man? and is this bishop your fellow-man? ah, poor friend, one might well doubt it.

Thus tempted, crushed, harassed by your people, your colleagues, and your masters, can you at least cast yourself on your own resources, and live happy in your conscience? No, here new torments await you. Every day fatiguing, minute, puerile duties devolving upon you, you are incessantly tempted to elude the performance of them. You cannot entirely, not even in secret; and though these laws of the Church have nothing in common with the law of God, their violation wounds your conscience, so that you are unhappy in performing them, and unhappy in neglecting them. You grieve to see a serious man wasting his life in vain practices, mumbling Latin words at the altar, prostrating his body in the streets and in the church, using his moral energies in the observance of fasts and macerations. You feel an inward revolting against such absurdities; but, however, not being able to break with these, without separating yourself from the Church, you observe them without conviction of their utility. Each duty accomplished pains your dignity, and each duty neglected wounds your conscience. Thus it is with you a struggle in which, whether conqueror or vanquished, you are always sure of pain.

And what a martyrdom must it be for you to appear what you are not! To recommend a practice that you wish to suppress, to give a pardon that you know it is not in your power to give, to preach to

others a saint whom you do not supplicate for yourself,-to encourage the earnest in their superstitions in order to avoid wounding them, to conceal your thoughts under false or equivocal expressions to elude a question, to do in public what you would not do in secret, to act a deceptive part for the sake of example, to lie to yourself to edify others, and thus, that you may not scandalize men-consent to mock your God!

And how much more difficult is it to maintain appearances before the incredulous! You find in your parish a well-informed man, affluent, and in a position to aid you in doing good; but you feel that this man has not confidence in you, it seems that he is afraid of your profession. Dare you tell him that you despise these vain ceremonies which cause him to smile? No, for he would despise you himself for your inconsistency. Will you keep up with him the appearance that you do with the rest of your flock? But he will accuse you of hypocrisy, and will withdraw himself far from you. It only remains for you to follow the example of so many priests whose language changes according to circumstances and men, and to say to this unbeliever that your religion is good for the people; but philosophy would lead him to act from higher motives. Shameful flexibility, the success of which would only make your deception a still greater imposture !

Yes, a life of forms, of appearances-in a word, a life which is a tissue of hypocrisy-is one of the most insupportable in the world, and yet it is that which you must nevertheless keep up. Ah, tell me, are you not already weighed down, and will you not soon cry for mercy? Will you not resume your dignity as a thinking man, your rights as a free citizen, your privileges as a Christian responsible before God? Yes, I love to believe it, and this is why I address you, hoping to aid you in shaking off the yoke that presses so heavily upon you.

First of all, dear friends, do not think that in exhorting you to free yourself from the yoke of man, I wish to press you to shake off that of God. No, but I would wish you to distinguish between the two, to reject the one so severe and heavy, and take the other so easy and light. Strange! that God, from whose severity you fly, is far more easy to satisfy than men who seek but their own interests. Yes, God demands of you neither celibacy, fastings, nor abstinences; that which He requires from you is, that you repent and believe sincerely in Jesus Christ, knowing well that this repentance and this faith will result in a new heart and a new life. I know that the false salvation of Rome-uncertain, purchased in minute portions each day at the price of some penances-has nothing in it that is calculated to remove your fears. But when you know that true salvation is a gift of God, and not the fruit of your works; that this salvation is secured to you from this day and for ever without condition, without penance, without masses, without purgatory, but by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ alone accepted by you through faith, O will you not then be filled with joy? will you hesitate any longer to change your life, to break through all obstacles that man can offer, and attach yourself to God?

But, alas! Rome has so warped your ideas of salvation, and so calumniated the doctrines contrary to her own, that I greatly fear you will not comprehend me further on this point, and that you will listen

with suspicion to what I have yet to say. Nevertheless, I shall proceed; it is enough for me to know that I defend the cause of my God, and that I speak for your good, this gives me courage to speak.

I entreat you first of all, not to listen to me as to a man who comes to expose a theological system, but as to a friend speaking to a friend, telling you that he is acting for your welfare. Take to yourselves, personally for yourselves, the promises of God, and see if they are not well adapted to meet the wants of your heart.

Whatever may be the number and the importance of the works and of ceremonies performed by you, you confess that your conscience is not tranquil before God, and that even to this hour, you cannot contemplate death without terror. What then will you do? Say more masses? submit yourselves to new fastings? or do more works? but that which failed in tranquillizing you yesterday, will not better afford peace to-morrow. Whether you have more or less confidence in all your performances, I know that your conscience still rises up and troubles you. No, you have never had, and you will never have peace in your bosoms by such means. Once more then, what must be done? Simply this, to throw yourself with all your sins, without fear and without hesitation, into the arms of Jesus, who died to blot them out. The method is so simple, that I fear even by its simplicity it will escape your notice; but I cannot and I will not make it more complicated to gain greater credit for it in your eyes. What you have to do, I repeat it, and I would repeat it again and again, is to throw yourselves with all your sins, without fear and without hesitation, into the arms of Jesus who died to efface them. But this is too small a thing to tell you to do. Yes, dear friends, it is so small that it is nothing, but it is precisely because it is so small on your part, that it is all on the part of God. Do not wish to enlarge your work to lessen his; you will never be more of a Christian in spirit, than when you are humbly expecting nothing from yourselves and all from God. All is there, and for the third time I repeat it to you, in order to constrain your spirit to stop there. You have nothing to do, only to throw yourself with all your sins, without fear and without hesitation, into the arms of Jesus who died to blot them out.

But, perhaps, you think you know already that Jesus is a Saviour. Yes, you know it in theory; but observe that in practice your whole conduct contradicts this truth. It is upon yourself, on your works, that you rely to reach heaven, so that lifted up on this mountain of moving sand, you every moment feel your feet slipping. Jesus is not to you the unshaken rock of salvation, the rock that the tempest of sin cannot overturn nor shake. If Jesus had been in your estimation a true Saviour, an entire Saviour, an eternal Saviour, you need have no fear either of death or hell. What do I say, No more fear? You would be triumphing in joy, and would cry out with Paul, "For I am persuaded that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, can separate me from the love of God, through Jesus Christ."

Your salvation, your salvation secured, certain, eternal, this is the thought which ought to give you immediate joy, and to sanctify your life. Believe this, not because I tell you, but because the Gospel is

full of it; believe this, and you will have no trouble in detaching yourself from a Church which teaches you precisely the contrary.

But I feel that it is not in these few words that I can make known to you the truth as it is in Jesus. Besides I would rather that you should hear it from the mouth of God himself; this is why I earnestly entreat you to go direct to the Bible, and study it, and particularly in the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ.

At present, before having read the Bible, you desire to abandon the priesthood, but you know not on which side to turn. Certainly, had you a true confidence in God, you would "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, knowing that all other things would be added unto you. But whilst waiting for this confidence, and even in order to obtain it, see what you have to do.

In whatever part of France you may be, there are doubtless, not far from you, men who make the Bible their all, those men whom the world calls Protestant and who believe themselves to be Christians. Choose among them him who appears the most respectable. Address yourself to one of these zealous active pastors, of whom, perhaps, you may have heard; satisfy yourself of his discretion; open to him your heart; make known to him your thoughts, if not by word of mouth, at least by correspondence; listen to what he has to say, ask him for some books, examine them, and be certain that with faith and prayer you will find truth, and courage to follow it.

Do you fear to take a confidant too near to your superiors? write to one in a foreign country, Switzerland, Prussia, or England; address yourself to London, to Paris, to Geneva, to the Bible, Missionary, or Evangelical Societies. If the abode, the names, the addresses, are wanted by you, ask for them at the booksellers, whose names are on these pages, and be assured that you will meet with men happy in` having to reply to your questions.

I know that there are not a few priests wearied like yourself with the charge that they have inconsiderately undertaken. Look out then for those around you who deserve your confidence, taking care to guard against the spies of the Bishop. Consult with one of these discreet colleagues, bind yourselves together by mutual engagements, and give the right hand of fellowship, that you may walk together with more security.

These are not counsels given at random. I only enumerate the means that others have already used. I have more than one brother in Christ, formerly a Romish priest; and I know not one who regrets his freedom. At this present time one preaches the Gospel as a pastor, another instructs children, this one is become the father of a family, with the sanction of the laws of his country; for he has only, in order to take this step, to find a magistrate authorized by the civil code, without disquieting himself about the ecclesiastical canons; the other is gone to seek in a foreign country the legitimacy of a marriage that a timid magistrate refused to perform in France. You know, as well as I do, there is not a word in the laws of our country, which makes valid the vows formed before the Church. Proceed then, without fear, for you have before you the code of our legislators, and the Word of our God.

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