say so in print was ignored. Most ex-priests have the same experience. One of the most refined and religious of these seceders, a man who became a most respected professor at Oxford, was pursued by the calumny (never printed) that he had shown indecent photographs to servant-girls!
This tactic of the Church militant is happily so notorious that little harm is done among the general public, but Catholics are gravely deluded, in the hope that they will be induced to refrain from reading any except their own mendacious literature.
Yet one of the most familiar themes of the men who pursue this tactic is that they alone can inspire high character! Notoriously insincere in their professions, teachers of doctrines which the higher culture of our time and many of their own leading scholars condemn, living in an atmosphere of untruth and unreality, relying on a literature which is generally as indifferent to truth as it is to grace, unscrupulously repeating idle slanders of their opponents, they ask us to believe that they are genuinely concerned about the future of society if we continue to reject their authority. It is not strange that the great cities of the modern world are unmoved by their dirges.
The third point of my indictment is that the clergy have forged the historical credentials by which they lay claim to our respect. I have already observed that their version of the history of Europe is peculiar to their own literature, and I have else-
