Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/64

58 Yet he is permitted, nay invited, to make that blind sacrifice and place himself in life-long antagonism to the deepest forces of his being before he can have the faintest idea of his moral strength. If it be true that monastic life is ever sinking into corruption, we should feel more inclined to pity than to blame the monks.

The secular clergy make no vow of poverty or obedience, and it may be urged that even their vow of celibacy is more defensible. The seminary student makes his vow when he is admitted to the subdiaconate, the first of the holy orders, and the canonical and usual age of the subdeacon is twenty-one. The average youth of twenty-one may be admitted to be capable, in ordinary circumstances, of forming an opinion on such matters, but we must remember that the ecclesiastical student has had an abnormal training. Every precaution has been taken to keep him in blank ignorance of sexual matters, and to defer the development of that faculty of which he is asked to make a life-long sacrifice. He has never come in contact with the complementary sex, for even during his vacation the fear of scandal hangs like a mill-stone about him; he has never read a line concerning the most elementary facts and forces of life—his classics, his history, his very fiction have been rigidly expurgated; the weekly minute confession of his thoughts, the incessant supervision of his superiors, the constant presence of innumerable ethico-theological scarecrows,