In the month of December 1839, I was received into the Seminary, and
entered on a period of mournful and painful conflict. The confidence I
had hitherto reposed in our spiritual teachers was soon expelled from
my breast by a nearer survey of their mode of life, and replaced by the
deepest horror and loathing, which seized me when I became aware how
shamefully they abused religion, for the purpose of degrading and
subjecting the people to their will; when I saw by what a fearful veil
of hypocrisy deceitful Rome surrounds us from our cradles to our graves;
when I saw how the holiest ordinances are insultingly misused, to crush
the dignity of human nature. The disgraceful fetters galled me, which,
till now, I had not felt, and I perceived what many of my fellow
sufferers endured, and all the more severely, the less they dared _avow_
the causes of their suffering. For the policy of Rome knows how to
entwine in bonds from which there is no escape, all Christians who
profess its creed, and more skilfully than Moses, who once drew water
from the barren rock, can conjure money from the impoverished people;
but their principal care and most consummate skill are constantly
directed towards their servants, that is to say, to the inferior clergy
and _their_ education. The inferior clergy are so securely bound in
spiritual and external fetters, that for the greater number it is almost
impossible to escape. The peculiar and appropriate armoury for these
degrading bonds is the College or Seminary for priests. It is there that
the youth, who wishes to devote himself to the teaching of the people,
has the brand of slavery stamped deep and painfully upon him; it is
there that he is condemned to holy idleness; it is there that his spirit
is fettered, and bowed to blind obedience by superstitious dread and
sacred statutes; it is there that he is inoculated in heart and soul
with hypocrisy and selfish egotism; it is there that man is degraded
to the condition of a slave, and becomes a passive tool. The pain, the
torment of this sacrifice is fearful, and nature instinctively revolts
when she is robbed of her holiest rights, of the most valued gifts of
the Creator. And yet the slave is silent, and all the more so, as the
grave is deeper where his freedom and his dignity lie buried. It is but
seldom that a despairing cry escapes from his inmost soul, and dies away
in utterance, amid the empty sounds of simulated prayer.
I cannot think, without a trembling in my every nerve, on all the
ignominy which was heaped upon us, and on the disgraceful treatment
which we _must_ endure; and I could wish the pen I write with were a
blazing torch, to illuminate the deep abyss wherein hearts are stifled,
and spirits overwhelmed amid hymns of praise! I need, however, only to
depict in quiet, softer colours, what I have seen and felt, to rouse
with certainty the wrathful horror, and the deepest sympathy of the
greater part of my fellow citizens, who may still be unacquainted with
the fearful strategy of the Church of Rome.