not think that the feelings of the heart can be guessed at
more easily. A man without wife or child might study the mysterious
working of a family in books and the world for ten thousand years
without ever knowing one word about them. Look at these men: it is
neither time, opportunity nor facility, that they lack to acquire
knowledge; they pass their lives with women who tell them more than
they tell their husbands; they know, and yet they are ignorant;
they know all a woman's acts and thoughts, but they are ignorant
precisely of what is the best and most intimate part of her
character, and the very essence of her being. They hardly
understand her as a lover, (of God or man,) still less as a wife,
and not at all as a mother. Nothing is more painful than to see
them sitting down awkwardly by the side of a woman to caress her
child; their manner towards it is that of flatterers or
courtiers--anything but that of a father.

"What I pity the most in the man condemned to celibacy, is not only
the privation of the sweetest joys of the heart, but that a
thousand objects of the natural and moral world are, and ever will
be, a dead letter to him. Many have thought, by living apart, to
dedicate their lives to science; but the reverse is the case. In
such a morose and crippled life, science is never fathomed; it may
be varied, and superficially immense; but it escapes--for it will
not reside there. Celibacy gives a restless activity to researches,
intrigues, and business--a sort of huntsman's eagerness--a
sharpness in the subtilties of school-divinity and disputation:
this is at least the effect it had in its prime. If it makes the
senses keen and liable to temptation, certainly it does not soften
the heart. Our terrorists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
were monks. Monastic prisons were always the most cruel. A life
systematically negative--a life without its functions--developes in
man instincts that are hostile to life; he who suffers is willing
to make others suffer. The harmonious and fertile parts of our
nature, which on the one hand incline to goodness, and on the other
to genius and high invention, can hardly ever withstand this
partial suicide.

* * * * *

"I have never been insensible either to the humiliation of the
church, or to the su