ous, the man of the civil law, the judge, whose protection he
expects, acts like a priest, seizes him by the robe, and hands him over
degraded to the yoke of the canon law. Agree together, then, O laws!
and let us be able to find authority somewhere. If this be law, and
the other one directly contrary be also law, what will he do, who
believes them both to be sacred?

Oh how my heart swells for all these unfortunate men! How many prayers
have I made that they may be permitted to abandon a condition, which
gives so rude a contradiction to nature and to the progress of the
world! Oh! that I might with my hands build up and cheer the domestic
hearth of the poor priest, give him the first rights of man,
re-establish him in truth and life, and say to him, "Come and sit with
us, leave that deadly shadow, and take thy place, O brother, in the
sunshine of God!"

Two men have always deeply touched my heart, two solitary beings, two
monks--the soldier and the priest. I have seen, often in my thoughts,
and always with sadness, these two great sterile armies, to whom
intellectual food is refused, or measured out with so niggardly a hand.
They whose hearts have been weaned would require to be nourished with
the vivifying food of the mind.

What will be the ameliorations and the remedies for these serious
evils? We shall not attempt to tell them now. Either means and
contrivances are found out by time, or it manages to do without them.

What we may safely say is, that one day or other, these terms _priest_
and _soldier_ will indicate two ages, rather than two conditions. The
word _priest_, in its origin, meant _old man_; a young priest is a
nonsensical contradiction.

The soldier is the youth who, after the school of childhood, and that
of work, comes to be proved in the great national school of the army,
and to gain strength, before he settles down to the quiet state of
matrimony and the family table. Military life, when the state has made
it what it ought to be, will be the last education, varied with
studies, voyages, and perils, the experience of which will be of
advantage to the new family which the man will form on his return.

The priest, on the contrary, in the highest acceptation of the term,
ought to be an old man, as he was at first, or at least a man of a
mature age, who, having passed through the cares of this world, and
being well acquainted with family life, has been taught by his
experience to understa