ch a scale as the present one, and with all its
soberness of style, so little mechanical in spirit, and so free from
chronological dryness, it is almost inevitable that the reader's
impressions should become somewhat overbalanced. He is likely to forget
that he is taking a partial view of a great subject, and that he must
hold his opinions liable to correction when he has surveyed the whole
field. A dishonest writer, we conceive, may readily take advantage of
this perfectly logical error. He has accumulated an immense mass of
material bearing on a particular point, extracted and expressed, by long
labor, from a field in which it has lain interfused with material of a
very different, and even of a directly opposite significance. There are
a hundred literary arts by which a writer may put forward his fractional
gleaning as a representation of the whole. In this matter of
ecclesiastical celibacy, for instance, the result of Mr. Lea's
researches is that practically the thing has never existed in the
Christian Church. That is to say, the regulations enforcing it have at
all times been more violated and eluded than obeyed. With the
Reformation a large section of the Church ceased to admit its
needfulness, and the field of its enforcement was very much curtailed.
But the Catholic Church continued to cling to it as almost the central
principle of its being, and continued likewise to connive at an
inveterate system of escape from its harsh conditions. Mr. Lea's volume
is a long record of reiterated legislation and exhortation against
unchastity, formal and actual, and of a series of equally uninterrupted
disclosures of the futility of such legislation. And, nevertheless,
there is no doubt that, during all the long ages of its history, the
Church was the abode and the refuge of a vast deal of purity and
continence, to say nothing of the various other virtues by which its
members have been distinguished. But the reader sees only the obverse of
the medal: he sees a custom of prodigious bearings, if duly carried out,
honored chiefly in the breach; and he will be very apt to close the book
with an impression that the Church has been through all time a sink of
incurable corruption. It is superfluous to say that this impression will
be quite as erroneous as it would be to assert that, on the other hand,
its practice has kept pace with its high pretensions. Neither view of
the case is just. If there is one thing that strikes us more than