has, or will have, her lover. Indeed, to be- [fections, and will always maintain himself in lieve the novelists, love seems only possible them. What she would not venture to conwhen it is adulterous. But, although there fide to her mother, or confess to her husband, is prodigious exaggeration in all this-al-he, a priest, must know it, asks it, hears it, and yet shall not be her lover. How could he inthough there are French homes as happy as deed? is he not tonsured? He hears whisEnglish homes, and French wives as chaste, pered in his ear, by a young woman, her as fond, and as devoted as English wives, faults, passions, desires, weaknesses, receives the exaggeration is the over-statement of a her sighs without feeling agitated, and he is real truth. Adultery does exist in France five-and-twenty! to a frightful extent; and we have just named two powerful causes. The lover is accepted because he fills the aching void' of an unoccupied heart. He is the centre of feelings which have no other centre. He takes the place of husband and children. When he is not chosen to fill that place the priest is chosen.

"To confess a woman! imagine what that is. At the end of the church a species of closet or sentry-box is erected against the wall, where this priest, wise and pious as I have known some, but yet a man, and young (they are almost all so), awaits in the evening, after vespers, his young penitent, whom he loves, and who knows it; love cannot be concealed from the beloved person. You will stop me there: his character of priest, his edvow which holds good, that every village ucation, his vow.. I reply that there is no curé just come from the seminary, healthy, robust, and vigorous, doubtless loves one of his parishioners. It cannot be otherwise, and if you contest this, I will say more still, and that is, that he loves them all, those at least of his own age; but he prefers one, who appears to him, if not more beautiful than the others, more modest and wiser, and whom he would marry; he would make her a virtuous pious wife if it were not for the pope. He sees her daily, meets her at church, or elsewhere, and sitting opposite her in the winter evenings, he imbibes, imprudent man! the poison of her eyes.

The priest, as confessor, possesses the secret of a woman's soul; he knows every half-formed hope, every dim desire, every thwarted feeling. The priest, as spiritual director, animates that woman with his own ideas, moves her with his own will, fashions her according to his own fancy. And this priest is doomed to celibacy. He is a man, but is bound to pluck from his heart the feelings of a man. If he is without faith, he makes desperate use of his power over those confiding in him. If he is sincerely devout, he has to struggle with his passions, and there is a perilous chance of his being defeated in that struggle. And even should he come off victorious, still the mischief "Now I ask you, when he hears that one done is incalculable and irreparable. The coming the next day, and approaching the woman's virtue has been preserved but by and can say, 'It is she;' what is passing in confessional, when he recognises her footsteps an accident, by a power extraneous to her- the mind of the poor confessor? Honesty, self. She was wax in her spiritual direc- duty, wise resolutions, are here of little use, tor's hands; she has ceased to be a person, without peculiarly heavenly grace. I will and is become a thing. suppose him a saint; unable to fly, he appaThere is something diabolical in the in-rently groans, sighs, recommends himself to stitution of celibacy accompanying confes-God; but if he is only a man, he shudders, sion. Paul Louis Courrier has painted a fearful picture of the priest's position as an unmarried confessor; and as Courrier's works are far less read than they deserve to be, we make no scruple of transferring his powerful sentences to our pages.

"What a life, what a condition is that of our priests! Love is forbidd en them, marriage especially; women are given up to them. They may not have one of their own, and yet live familiarly with all, nay, in the confidential, intimate privity of their hidden actions, of all their thoughts. An innocent girl first hears the priest under her mother's wing; he then calls her to him, speaks alone with her, and is the first to talk of sin to her before she can have known it. When instructed she marries; when married, he still confesses and governs her. He has preceded the husband in her af

desires, and already unwillingly, without knowing it, perhaps, he hopes. She arrives, kneels down at his knees, before him whose heart leaps and palpitates. You are young, monsieur, or you have been so; between ourselves, what do you think of such a situation? Alone most of the time, and having these walls, these vaulted roofs as sole witness, they talk: of what? alas! of all that is not innocent. They talk, or rather murmur, in a low voice, and their lips approach each other, and their breaths mingle. This lasts for an hour or more, and is often renewed.

"Do not think I invent. This scene takes place such as I describe it, and through all France; is renewed daily by forty thousand young priests with as many young girls whom they love, because they are men; whom they confess in this manner, entirely tête-à-tête, and visit, because they are priests, and whom they do not marry because the pope is opposed to it."

Paul Louis might have added another ar- many men are there who could withstand gument. Forbidden fruit is proverbially of this?

all fruit the most coveted. The very fact This the priest has to suffer; and to him. of man's imagination being thus stimulated the peril is greater, because he is blinded by contradiction is enough to constitute by sophisms. A man in love with his temptation. What is temptation? It is friend's wife sees every thing clearly the irritation of the soul, produced by the enough; he knows his guilt, and shuns or presence of an object desired, but forbid- braves it with open eyes. But the priest den. Were it not desired, there could be has the spiritual care of her he loves; her no temptation. Often there would be no soul is in his bands. He is connected with desire were it not forbidden. Now it is her by the most sacred ties; his interest in well that men should conquer their desires; her he disguises to himself under the cloak it is well that they should learn to calculate of spiritual anxiety. He can always quiet consequences, and to forego the present en- the voice of conscience, by an equivoque. joyment, if that enjoyment must be too dear- The mystic language of Love is also the ly purchased. And such mastery all wise mystic language of Religion, and what men possess. But, although a man may con- guilt is shrouded under this equivoque, the quer one desire, although he may resist history of priestcraft may show. Parler one temptation, because by an effort of the l'amour c'est faire l'amour, is a profound will he can rise superior to his own pas- truth. From the love of God, it is easy to sions, such a state of effort is spasmodic, descend to the love of man; especially not normal: it may conquer once, it can- when this man is a priest, that is to say, not always conquer. It is an effort; and a mediator between the woman and God, the very nature of effort is spasmodical and temporary; it must relax, and in relaxing the man succumbs. The vehemence with which a man resists temptation is a latent cause of his fall, if the temptation continue. 'When a woman hesitates she's lost;' when a man does not at once shut himself out from the possibility of a recurring tempta

tion he is lost.

Let us take an illustration from another class. You are residing in the house of a friend whose wife is extremely fascinating. You begin to perceive that she interests you too much, and, conscious of the peril, you either put a guard upon your feelings, or, which is by far the wiser plan, you quit the house. By an effort you have conquered.

one who says, 'God hears you through me; through me he will reply.' This man whom she has seen at the altar, and there invested with all the sacred robes and sacred associations of his office; whom she has visited in the confessional, and there laid bare her soul to him; whose visits she has received in her boudoir, and there submitted to his direction, this man whom she worships, is supposed to be an idea, a priest; no one supposing him to be a man, with a man's passions!

M. Michelet's book contains the proofs of what we have just said; but they are too numerous to quote. We shall only borrow from his work the passages he gives from an unexceptionable authority, Llorente:

But there was only wisdom in your "Llorente, a contemporary, relates (t. iii., effort; there was no virtue; for this fascin-ch. 28, article 2, ed. 1817), that when he was ating woman was not only another's, but secretary to the Inquisition, a capuchin was had shown no signs of interest in you. This brought before that tribunal, who directed a is a simple and, doubtless, common case. community of béguines, and had seduced alBut now let us make it more complicated. most all of them, by persuading them they Instead of being merely her friend, you are were not leaving the road to perfection. He her confidant; you are made the repository told each of them in the confessional that he of all her secrets, of thoughts which neither had received from God a singular favor: 'Our Lord,' he said, 'has deigned to show her mother nor her husband ever know; himself to me in the Sacrament, and has said you are reverenced as a superior being; to me: Almost all the souls that thou dost diyour word is law; your menace terrible. rect here, are pleasing to me, but especially She almost worships you; and you cannot such a one (the capuchin named her to whom leave her, cannot shun her, cannot put a he spoke). She is already so perfect, that she stop to those confidences which torment you desire which torments her very much. Therehas conquered every passion, except carnal In vain you struggle: you conquer to-day fore, wishing virtue to have its reward, and only to renew the fight to-morrow. The that she should serve me tranquilly, I charge agonizing irritation of the soul, named thee to give her a dispensation, but only to be Temptation, is perpetually present. How made use of with thee; she need speak of it to VOL. V.-No. III.

27

no confessor; that would be useless, as with libacy, confession, and direction, have an such a dispensation she cannot sin.' Out of almost inevitable tendency to convert the seventeen béguines of which the community priest into a lover. This being the point was composed, the intrepid capuchin gave the dispensation to thirteen, who were discreet we wish to illustrate, we are right in sefor some length of time: one of them, howev-lecting only such cases as admit of the nater, fell ill, expected to die, and discovered ural operation of this tendency. It would every thing, declaring that she had never been be no argument against the purity of a able to believe in the dispensation, but that she clergyman's doctrine and example, that had profited by it. several persons who never entered his church, and never paid attention to his acts, were notoriously dissolute and profane. In the same way, it is no argument against the danger of priesthood, that those persons who have no religion, or who seldom come in contact with the priests, are entirely free from the evil effects which

"I remember," says Llorente, "having said to him: But father, is it not astonishing that this singular virtue should have belonged exactly to the thirteen young and handsome ones, and not at all to the other four, who were ugly and old?' He coolly replied, The Holy Spirit inspires where it listeth.'

"The same author in the same chapter, while reproaching the Protestants with hav ing exaggerated the corruption of confessors, are found to follow in other cases. If there avows that: In the sixteenth century, the Inis a real vice in the institution, it will best quisition had imposed on women the obliga-display itself where the surrounding cirtion of denouncing guilty confessors, but the cumstances are most favorable to its free denunciations were so numerous, that the operation: that is, in convents, and in fampenitents were declared dispensed from de-ilies such as we have described. nouncing."

It is painful thus to drag to light the iniquities which have sullied the past; but our arguments would be suspected of gross exaggeration, were they not in some measure supported by these historical facts; and although we are as unwilling as any one, to hold a body of men responsible for the acts of their predecessors, we are surely keeping within the legitimate bounds of argument, in thus pointing out the results of an institution; results which we hold to be inherent in the very nature of that institution. We may as well anticipate an objection which is sure to be made. It will be said that the picture we have drawn of the Priest and the Wife is not a fair one, because it is not true of all priests and all wives; it is an exception, and not to be treated as the rule.

M. Michelet says, that the priest is the cause of the social disunion; and to show how he is the cause, the book was written. He is the cause, because he possesses the wife: possesses her soul as a confessor, directs it as a director. He is the real mas ter of the house. Old Selden long ago saw the nature of the priestly tactics. When the priests come into a family,' he says, they do as a man that would set fire on a house; he does not put fire to the brick wall, but thrusts it into the thatch. They work upon the women, and let the men alone.' And have we not had experience enough of the truth of this in our own country? Are not the Cantwells and the Stigginses abundant? Do we not find the essence of direction,' if not its name, among certain classes of religionists professing the strongest antipathy to Romanism? It were a serious error to suppose, We accept this objection, and admit that that M. Michelet is only fighting against the case we have considered does not ap- an evil endured by France. He fights ply to all wives. Let us explain, however. against an evil which we are all bound to In the case we have considered, we assum- take arms against, because it more or less ed the wife to be truly religious, to have openly menaces us all. Wherever the married a man she does not love, and who priest departs from the strict nature of his does not share her faith, and to have no office, interferes with temporal matters, children at home with her. This we say and with the private concerns of family is the common, though not universal, posi-life, and makes himself privy keeper of the tion of French wives; and wherever it ex-several consciences of his flock, there diists, the consequences we have pointed out will certainly follow. But the wife is not religious? In that case she would not be in danger from the priest; but in that case the evils of the institution of priesthood would not have a trial. We say that ce

rection exists to all intents and purposes.

Having thus endeavored to point out the dangerous tendencies of direction, especially when accompanied by celibacy, we may now proceed to give an account of the book in which M. Michelet has so brilliantly ex

posed them an account we would gladly translations before us,- "The Soldier of enrich with piquant extracts, but that our the Foreign Legion," and "The Prisoners space forbids it. of Abd-el Kader." Next to listening to the veteran soldier, by a winter's hearth, telling the exciting tale of his past adventures, of his "hair-breadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach," and seeing him

"Shoulder his crutch, and show how fields were won,"

It is divided into three parts. The first is an historical appreciation of direction and its theories in the seventeenth century. This is touched in his own masterly manner. All the brilliant qualities of the historian assist him here; and exquisite are the pictures he paints of Saint François de Sales and Madame de Chantal, of Bossuet and la Sœur Cornuau, of Fénélon and Madame de la Maison Fort, and Madame is reading the rapid unvarnished narrative Guyon. Beside these portraits are little of the genuine old campaigner. Here we cabinet pictures of the inner life of much have a brace of them. Clemens Lamping, of the seventeenth century; and La Dévo- a young lieutenant in the Oldenburg sertion Aisée, and La Dévotion Galante, let us vice, who thought it better to be engaged into the secret of the times. Contrasted on any side than inactive when fighting with these cabinet pictures, there are some was going forward, went to win his spurs of those ghastly subjects worthy of the pen- under Espartero, but coming too late, cils of Rebeyra and Francia; we speak of passed over as a volunteer to Africa, to join Molinos-the society of Le Sacré Cœur -la mère Agueda et Marie Alacoque.

The second part is devoted to an appreciation of direction in the nineteenth century. In this Michelet examines, in detail, the whole question of direction; the means by which the priest acquires his power, and the ends for which he uses it. This second part we have made use of in the foregoing pages, but the reader will find it a far more satisfactory exposition. It contains, moreover, a fearful exposure of the convent system; in the course of which he refers to Eugène Sue's Juif Errant,' the third volume of which contains the real history of Mademoiselle B. It took place recently,' says M. Michelet, but in a convent, not in a mad house.'

The third part is devoted to a brief consideration of the Family; a subject we have already touched upon. From this brief outline, our readers will gather an idea of the extent and variety of the subject treated; and when we add, that it is treated by M. Michelet, we have said enough to excite the most eager curiosity.

THE FRENCH IN ALGIERS.

From Tait's Magazine.

the new crusade against the infidels. In this service he remained for above two years, during which he made the discovery that the war was not quite so holy as he had imagined.

The second contributor to the volume is M. de France, a lieutenant in the French navy, who suffered a captivity of five months among the Arabs, and whose adventures are translated in an abridged form. The translator is Lady Duff Gordon, whose felicitous version of the Amber Witch of Meinhold must be familiar to many of our readers. The Amber Witch is a story which has been described as of the school of De Foe, though it is more closely allied to that of John Galt. The knowledge which the translator possesses of the Scottish language, and her frequent, skilful, and happy use of Scottish phrases and idioms, give the story in its English dress an air of verisimilitude, for which one looks in vain even in the great majority of original fictions. Her new translation, though well executed, does not admit of this delightful feature, which makes Meinhold's tale more resemble a native than a translated story, and which only requires the substitution of northern names and localities to make it completely Scottish.

In the French in Algiers, Lieutenant Lamping's narrative is not taken up until The French in Algiers. No. XIX. of he is fairly in Africa. He was first engagMurray's Home and Colonial Library.ed in the expedition against Thaza, a forNo. VIII. of Wiley and Putnam's Li-tress belonging to Abd-el-Kader, on the brary. borders of the desert, and afterwards in No new narratives more attractive have laying waste the plains of Chellif with fire yet been embodied in this series than the and sword.

their faces express but two passions-love and hate; all nicer shades of feeling are wanting. How, indeed, would it be possible for them to acquire intellectual or bodily cultivation, when

It was exactly harvest time. In order to cut off from the Bedouins all means of existence, it was of course necessary to drive away their cattle and to burn their corn. Before long the whole plain looked like a sea of the greater part of their time is spent seated

fire.

This painful and exhausting duty, which sent a third of the troops to the hospital, being accomplished, our volunteers of the Foreign Legion got into comfortable quarters at Coleah, and first had leisure to look about on the strange new country he had entered.

Coleah is a true Arab town, which stands on the south-eastern declivity of the Sahel range of mountains, in a charming little nook, and is well supplied with water.

We are only twelve leagues from Algiers, and about three from the sea, the proximity to which makes the place extremely healthy. The constant sea-breeze renders the heat even of this season quite tolerable.

At our feet is stretched the vast plain of Metidja, bounded by the blue hills of the lesser Atlas range. We are quartered in a fortified camp outside the town, on a small eminence which commands it. Of course, all the gates of the town and the market-place are guarded by our troops. My leisure hours, which, indeed, are not too many, are generally passed in sauntering about the streets.

The inhabitants of Coleah are pure descendants of the Moors, and still retain some traces of their former refinement; you must not confound them with the Bedouins and Kabyles, who always have been, and still are, the lowest in point of civilization. I have nowhere found the Arab so polished and so attractive as at Coleah, not even at Algiers and Oran; in those towns their intercourse with the French has called forth all their rapacity, and spoiled the simplicity of their manIt is a remarkable fact, that in all these towns near the sea, the Spanish language is still spoken, of course in a most corrupt dialect; a proof that some connexion with Spain has constantly existed-often, no doubt, a very reluctant one on their parts; as in the reign of Charles V. who conquered great part of this coast. To me this is very welcome, as it enables me to talk with the Arabs.

ners.

The women naturally attract some of the attention of the volunteer, and we gladly follow him over one native threshold, which in those lax times he was permitted to

cross.

The fair sex is not altogether fair here, at least in my opinion. No one can deny that the Arab women have graceful figures and regular features, but they want those essential requisites of beauty-a soul and individual expression. They are all exactly alike, and

cross-legged grinding corn in a hand-mill, or asleep?

The married women are seldom seen out of

their houses, and then only closely veiled. The young girls, on the contrary, are to be found every morning at sunrise outside the gate of the town, standing by the fountain, at which they assemble with stone jars on their shoulders, to fetch water for the day's consumption. This truly eastern scene calls to mind Rebecca at the well, drawing water for her father's flocks.

If a stranger asks a daughter of the town to give him a draught of water, (alma.) the maiden reaches him the jar with a kindly nod; but when he has slaked his thirst she pours away the remainder, and draws fresh water, for the lips of the infidel have polluted it.

The Arab women wear a white woollen garment confined under the breast by a girdle, and a white cloth twisted round the head. Their ornaments generally consist in rings in their ears and on their ankles, which are invariably naked. One cannot deny the efficiency of this graceful manner of calling attention to the beauty of their feet, which are truly exquisite. These rings, among women of the lower class, are of silver; among those of the higher class, (and here, as in every other country, there are distinctions of class,) they are of gold.

A few days ago my friend Ben Jussuf invited me to go with him to his house. I, of course. seized with joy this opportunity of seeing him in his domestic circle.

He knocked at the door, which is invariably kept shut by day and by night in all Arab houses: awoman shortly appeared and inquired who was there; at Ben Jussuf's answer the door was opened, but when the woman saw me with her husband she instantly concealed her face, and was about to run away; my friend. however, commanded her to remain. She was his wife; and besides her he had two others, who were seated cross-legged in the court, one of them grinding corn in a hand-mill, the other combing the hair of a boy about five or six years old. I should have guessed them all three to be at least forty, but Ben Jussuf assured me that they were all under five-and-twenty; their faces and figures were withered, and the bloom of youth quite gone, their eyes alone still retained their fire. At twenty the Arab women begin to fade, and at thirty they are old matrons.

They all seem to live in perfect harmony, and the manner of the women towards their lord and master was obliging even to servility. To judge by appearances, it must be easier to keep house with three wives than with one; perhaps the rule "divide et impera" holds good in love as well as in politics. I must however confess that I do not envy the Mahomedan gentlemen their frigid joys; nor do