ibacy, by continence promised and kept; he is
married,[5333] father of a family, needy, obliged to shear his flock to
support himself and those belonging to him, and therefore is of little
consideration; he is without moral ascendancy; he is not the pastor who
is obeyed, but the official who is made use of.

The role of the priest in the Catholic Church is quite different.
Through her theory of rites she confers on him incomparable dignity
and real personal power.--According to this theory, observances and
ceremonies possess intrinsic and peculiar virtue; undoubtedly, these
require some mental base, which is found in earnest piety; but
earnest piety independent of these is not enough; it lacks its final
consequence, its praiseworthy completion or "satisfaction,"[5334] the
positive act by which we atone for our sins to God and demonstrate our
obedience to the Church.[5335] It is the Church, the living interpreter
of God's will, which prescribes these rites; she is then the mistress of
these and not the servant; she is empowered to adapt their details and
forms to necessities and circumstances, to lighten or simplify them
according to time and place, to establish the communion in one shape, to
substitute the Host in place of bread, to lessen the number and rigor of
the ancient Lents, to determine the effects of diverse pious works, to
apply, ascribe and transfer their salutary effects, to assign proper
value and reward to each devotional act, to measure the merit derived
from them, the sins they efface and the pardons these obtain not only in
this world but in the next one. By virtue of her administrative habits,
and with the precision of a bookkeeper, she casts up her accounts
of indulgences and notes on the margin the conditions for obtaining
them,--a certain prayer repeated so many times on certain days and
what for, so many days less in the great penitentiary into which every
Christian, however pious, is almost sure to get on dying, this or that
diminution of the penalty incurred, and the faculty, if the penitent
rejects this deduction for himself, of bestowing the benefit on another.
By virtue of her authoritative habits and the better to affirm her
sovereignty, she regards as capital sins the omission of the rites
and ceremonies she commands,--"not going to mass on Sunday or on
fete-days;[5336] eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not
confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one o