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the marriage of the clergy. Paul, addressing Timothy and Titus, represents the bishop as "the husband of one wife." In another place, he characterizes "forbidding to marry," as "a doctrine of devils." The apostles have left examples, as well as precepts, to the same effect. Ambrose says that all the apostles, except John and Paul, were married men. Peter, who is claimed as the special depository of ecclesiastical authority, certainly was married, as the sickness of his wife's mother is expressly mentioned.

Some

of the fathers assert that Paul also was married. Neither was celibacy a doctrine of the primitive church. No vestige of the prohibition can be found in the first three hundred years of the Christian era. On the contrary, many documents remain, which testify the unrestrained liberty of the clergy to enjoy the nuptial connexion.

Celibacy, in the stringent form in which it now exists in the Romish church, owes its origin to Gregory VII. It forms one of the most mournful and shocking pages in human history. It has been the polluted fountain of multiplied abominations. The relations of the best and most credible ecclesiastical historians, especially from the twelfth century to the Reformation, are absolutely frightful, and would utterly exceed belief, if not corroborated by the testimony of universal history. St. Bernard, in the twelfth century, admitted and lamented the improprieties of the priesthood, "who committed in secret such acts of turpitude as would be shameful to express."

Agrippa, another historian, accuses the bishops of taxing the inferior clergy for liberty to violate the laws of chastity. "One bishop," says he, " on one occasion, boasted of having in his diocese 11,000 priests, who paid their superior every year a guinea for leave to keep a concubine." Licenses of this kind were common in many European kingdoms.

Henry K., professor of theology, and vice-chancellor of the university of Paris, in the fifteenth century, draws a picture equally odious, including pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, and monks. He attributes ignorance, pride, simony, and licentiousness, to the pontiff, the cardinals, and the prelacy, while the priests, according to him, "wallowed in sensuality."

Clemangis declared the adultery and impurity of the clergy beyond all description: "They frequent stews and taverns, and spend their whole time in eating, drinking, rioting, gaming, and dancing.

LICENTIOUSNESS THE FRUIT OF CELIBACY.

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Surfeited and drunk, these sacerdotal sensualists fought, shouted, rioted, and blasphemed, and passed directly from the embrace of the harlot to the altar of God."

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Alvares, a Spanish author, asserts that "the sons of the Spanish clergy were as numerous as those of the laity." They will pass," says he, "without confession, from their concubines to God's altar." It is almost beyond credit, the extent to which this author represents the evil to have spread. The seductive arts of the priests became so notorious and alarming, as to require the interference of the pope. On one occasion, a papal enactment required all who had been solicited or insulted by the priests to inform against the guilty. Maids and matrons, of the nobility and peasantry, of every rank and situation, crowded to the inquisition. In Seville alone, it took all the inquisitors and thirty notaries thirty days to take the depositions of these injured women.

The German clergy are represented to have been as bad as the Spanish. The evidence of their horrible licentiousness appears in the decrees of councils, princes, and emperors. One German council asserted that the priesthood were widely guilty of unchastity, voluptuousness, and obscenity. Some are charged with living in open concubinage; others of committing incest; and, according to its expressive language, "wallowing in sensuality, plunging, with slackened rein, into the lake of misery, and mire of filthiness." Albert, duke of Bavaria, depicted the infamy of the German priesthood in glowing colors: "The recital," says he, "of clerical criminality would wound the ear of chastity." "Debauchery has covered the ecclesiastics with infamy."

Switzerland was the scene of similar profligacy. It rose to such a height prior to the Reformation, that the Swiss laity compelled every priest to take a concubine of his own, in order to preserve the safety of others. Clemangis also narrates, that the laity would tolerate the clergy only on condition of their keeping concubines.

The French clergy were by no means behind those of other countries in this disgraceful career. According to the account of Mezerey, an eminent historian, all the French ecclesiastics were in a sad state of irregularity. The majority had concubines, while some of the deacons had four or five female companions.

The Italian and Roman clergy surpassed all others in infamy. A select council of cardinals and bishops, assembled by Pope Paul

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III., have drawn a picture of the morals of the Roman clergy, which is absolutely frightful. Amours were carried on in open day, and with most unblushing effrontery. Popes, too, were as badly implicated as the clergy. Some of these hierarchs licensed houses of ill fame, and gathered large taxes from this source. John, Boniface, Sextus, Alexander, Julius, Leo, and other popes, were notoriously guilty of adultery and incest. A Roman council convicted John XII. of adultery and incest with two of his sisters. John XXII. was also guilty of a like crime. So profligate were the clergy, that the meeting of a council in a city was enough to demoralize it. At a general council in Lyons, a Cardinal Hoge, in a speech to the citizens, immediately after the dissolution of the sacred synod, alleged that, by the perpetration of licentiousness, the city had been converted into one vast fermenting, overflowing sink of pollution. At the general council of Constance, it was quite as bad. It is said that the number of females of bad character in attendance was not less than fifteen hundred.

These are but specimens of the deliberate assertions of the most authentic historians of the church. And what a horrible, disgusting picture do they present of the fruits of the celibacy of the clergy! Human depravity never had a worse development, if these accounts are to be believed-and believed they must be, if any credit is ever to be put in any history. And what this practice has done once, it will do again. The grosser and more open manifestations of crime, of course, are prevented by the civilization of the age; but to deny that the same cause will produce the same effect, would be to deny that human passions still exist, and that the depravity of the heart is more intense in one age than another. Celibacy has ever been the source of impurity and licentiousness. It is so now. There are evidences in our own possession, which will show that the Romish priesthood, since the Reformation-nay, in our own country-are deeply implicated in the crime, so deeply as to proclaim, in tones that should reach every parent's heart, that so long as it forms a feature of catholic policy, the priesthood are never to be trusted. In another place we may present some of the evidences of this criminality; but meanwhile, we can not forbear to ask the protestant reader, if a system having such fruit, shall spread and grow in the midst of us, with his co-operation or con

sent.

CONFESSION OF PRIEST RIEMBAUER.

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CONFESSION OF PRIEST RIEMBAUER.

THE following extracts are from the "Confession of the Rev. F. Riembauer, a Roman catholic priest, who was convicted of the murder of Anna Eichstaedter." We copy from the "Investigator," edited by J. F. Polk, brother of the president of the United States:

"The letters that I received from Anna Eichstaedter filled me with terror. Unless I would provide for the child, and receive her into my house, she threatened to denounce me to my ecclesiastical superiors. The result of my visit to her at Ratisbon increased my alarm. I explained to her my pecuniary embarrassments, and the impossibility of my receiving her; but she would listen to no excuses, and would be convinced by no arguments. My honor [!], my position, my powers of being useful, all that I value in the world, were at stake. I often reflected on the principle laid down by my old tutor, Father Benedict Sattler, in his Ethica Christiana (a principle which he often explained to his young clerical pupils), That it is lawful to deprive another of life, if that be the only means of preserving one's own honor and reputation." "

6

"Two days afterward, I buried her; and as the hands had stiffened, in an attitude of entreaty, they rose above the grave, and I was forced to remove them. I have nothing more to relate, except that I have frequently said masses to her soul, and that her death has always been a source of grief to me, though the motives which led me to effect it were PRAISEWORTHY. These motives-my only motives—were, to save the credit of my honorable profession, and to prevent the many evils and crimes which a scandalous exposure must have occasioned. Had I not stood so high with my people, I would have submitted to that exposure. But if the faults of a priest, revered as I was, had been revealed, many men would have thought that my example justified their sins, others would have lost confidence in their clergy, and some, perhaps, might have thought religion a fable. As these calamities could be prevented only by the getting rid of Anna Eichstaedter, I was forced to get rid of her. The end was good-her death was the only means. Therefore, I The same motive

CAN NOT BELIEVE THAT IT WAS A CRIME.

induced me to endure, year after year, a dungeon. As soon as I

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CATHOLICS OWE NO ALLEGIANCE, &C.

had reason to believe it to be the will of God that I should myself reveal what I have done, I made a full confession.

"My failings (so far as they were failings) were the incidents of my position. They were the failings of celibacy. They never disturbed my conscience; for I could defend them, both by reasoning and by examples taken from ecclesiastical history; and I think that I deserve credit for having so managed my conduct as to give no public offence."

"In one of his examinations, he said: 'I thought upon the remark of St. Clement, of Alexandria, that "man is never so obviously the image of God as when he assists God in the creation of a human being!" To do so can not be against the will of God, since thereby the number of the elect may be increased; nor against the will of the church, since it adds one to the number of her communion; nor against that of the state, which gains a citizen.' " My conscience, therefore, gave me no uneasiness.'" Such abominable principles need, in a community like ours, no

comment.

CATHOLICS OWE NO ALLEGIANCE TO THE UNITED STATES.— Every Romish bishop, before he is permitted to exercise his episcopal functions in the United States, is obliged to take an oath, in which he solemnly swears "to defend the domain of St. Peter against every aggressor; to preserve, augment, and extend, the rights, honors, privileges, and powers, of the LORD POPE, and his successors; to observe and enforce his decrees, ordinances, reservations, provisions, and all dispositions whatever, emanating from the COURT OF ROME; to persecute and combat to the last extremity, heretics, schismatics, and all who will not pay to the sovereign pontiff all the obedience which the sovereign shall require." Consequently, no catholic bishop can become a citizen of this country, nor even put himself under the control of the government. There is not one of these bishops, nor of the numerous army of priests, it is believed, are naturalized citizens. Are these men to be trusted? Should they be allowed to interfere with the laws, or institutions, of the country, while preserving, in the most solemn form, an allegiance to a foreign power, and that power a deadly enemy to our liberty and religion?