Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. REVELATION. Before approaching his assault on
revelation, Mr. Paine premises many things that cannot well be -classified. At the bottom of page 6, he speaks of one as a type of a class who takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this ? We answer candidly, nothing! But what is the inference which Mr. Paine would have us draw from his remark ? Surely not that all priests, or that a majority of them, have gone into the ministry for sake of gain. We know the abuses of- the Scottish monasteries in the sixteenth century; abuses that rendered the Protestant apostasy possible in Scotland. We know the scandals of the German mediaeval clergy, when the emperors sold mitres and croziers to the highest bidder in spite of the popes; we know the abuses of Louis XlVth’s half schismatic national church; but are we to judge all the clergy by these abuses, abuses condemned repeatedly by the supreme Church authority? Are we to condemn anything because of the abuses of it ? Are we to take Erasmus’ joke of Kerdos or gain rhyming with sacerdos, as an indication of universal corruption even in the sixteenth century; and forget the glories of the past and of the present ? Could not Mr. Paine admirethe holy priests of the first ages of the Church, who died poor, chaste martyrs to truth; or the saintly friars of the thirteenth century, sons of Dominic and Francis, who taught the afflicted serfs of Europe to bear their burdens, by setting them examples of absolute voluntary poverty, or the learning and missionary zeal of the Sons of Loyola, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; or the clergy of modern times, robbed by followers of Mr….