lumpcheek, while he was off in Virginia, went to the party, and there
offered to kiss every man that would pay her a dollar for the proceeds
of the donation! The consequence was, that she realized seventy-five
dollars in hard cash, though most of the boys paid her but two
shillings. And thus poor Brother Funny made a handsome sum by the _free
charms_ of Mrs. Plumpcheek! Ever since her husband is made jealous, and
I think he has reason."
Sectarians, you who are so loud in your pretended zeal for education and
morals, you who talk so much and loudly about the corruption of Popery
at home and abroad, why do you not cast the beam out of your own impure
eyes, and then you may see in your own land of plenty, carried on under
the _sanction of what you call religion_, scenes such as the annals of
paganism can scarcely parallel.
We can prove the facts related above by Parson Gulmore to be literally
true, and to have happened annually for years under the sanction of
_religious_ ministers, and exposed to the cognizance of fathers and
mothers accompanied by their _daughters_ and _sons_.
We publish these things reluctantly, on account of our readers; but we
must tell the truth, though it be piecemeal and in fractional parts,
rather than in the full view of its naked reality.
Is it not time to say to these hypocritical sects, "Physicians, heal
yourselves"? Look into the conduct and constitutions of your own bodies
ere you turn censors on others. The corruptions and deformities of your
own bodies will take all your zeal, all your energy, and all your
lives, to correct, purify, and eradicate, leaving the Catholic church to
reform whatever abuses may have crept into the lives or morals of her
children by the ordinary resources, which are ample, and always within
her reach.
Really, the hypocrisy, audacity, and malice of the Pharisees of old, in
persecuting Jesus Christ in the flesh, were not equalled, in degree or
intensity, to the malice and hypocrisy of sectarians, under every
Protestant title, in their unrelenting hatred of the same divine Person
in his mystical body here on earth!
'Tis all nonsense to reproach _Catholics_ with conduct similar, or as
gross, as these instances of immorality which we justly charge on the
Protestant sects. Catholics, as individuals, may be, and have been,
guilty of grave crimes and scandalous immoralities; but does the church
countenance or connive at their conduct? No; we say, emphatically,
|