United States or Togo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Celibacy came to be regarded as an obvious part of the self-sacrifice of a clergyman's life, and the belief and the profession of it formed a test, understood if not avowed, by which the more advanced or resolute members of the party were distinguished from the rest. This came home to men on the threshold of life with a keener and closer touch than questions about doctrine.
It's the half-educated, as usual, who's the enemy. He always is. The Wise Men and the shepherds both knelt in Bethlehem. It was the bourgeois who stood apart." "That's no answer," persisted the other. "Well, let's see," said the priest good-humouredly. "We'll begin with celibacy. Now it's perfectly true that it's thought almost a disgrace for a man not to have a large family.
The letter was made up of fifteen closely written pages, and it told the story of a young clergyman, who, convinced at last that celibacy and the shelter of the Roman priesthood were his true vocation, had, after long prayer and much mediation, decided to flee the snares of the world and to renounce its joys for the sake of bliss the other side of life.
There are the innumerable wives and daughters around the Parks, running in and out of their little red-brick villas; but the indignant shade of celibacy seems to have called down on the dons a Nemesis which precludes them from either marrying beauty or begetting it. But the casual feminine visitors?
You shall give us a little supper at your rooms and invite the Bellinghams to meet us. Then you and I will attack the old gentleman, and Thorndyke shall exercise his persuasive powers on the lady. These chronic incurable old bachelors, you know, are quite irresistible." "You observe that my respected junior condemns me to lifelong celibacy," Thorndyke remarked.
Then he was led on to attack all manner of abuses in ecclesiastical organization, but it was not until he was installed in 1518 as preacher in the great cathedral at Zuerich that he clearly denied papal supremacy and proceeded to proclaim the Scriptures as the sole guide of faith and morals. He preached against fasting, the veneration of saints, and the celibacy of the clergy.
Look at the question in this light, and you will understand two things; first, how horrible the times were, and secondly, why there grew up in the early middle age a passion for celibacy. Salvian, in a word, had already grown up to manhood and reason, when he saw a time come to his native country, in which were fulfilled, with fearful exactness, the words of the prophet Isaiah:
"If she marries and goes away from home, there will only be one thing for her father to do, and that will be to marry again," remarked Miss Le Grove, who found the state of forced celibacy unendurable. The others looked at each other. Some could not force back the smile that rushed to their lips. Miss Le Grove noticed the suppressed mirth and blushed.
It was once said by a witty and epigrammatic Italian that Church affairs were so corrupt that the interests of morality demanded the marriage rather than the celibacy of the clergy, and it would appear that this remark has a certain pertinency anent the present situation. To illustrate in what way such delinquency was made a matter of jest, the following story is related.
Prescriptions about forbidden kinds of food and about the mode of cooking food, which only excited the ridicule of Voltaire, have a real hygienic value in the eyes of Claude Bernard and of Pasteur. The Jews have never adopted the Catholic notions about the sanctity of celibacy and virginity, but they lay great stress on the purity of marriage.