Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/96

 CHAPTER V.

PRIESTHOOD.

of the scheme of study which has been described would lead to the impression that Roman Catholic priests must be in a highly satisfactory condition of intellectual equipment. No other priesthood has, or ever had, a longer and more systematic course of training. For ten years, on the average, the candidate is under the exclusive control of the ecclesiastical authorities; authorities who have the advantage of an indefinitely long and world-wide experience in training their neophytes and of a religious authority over them. Their scheme of education, indeed, does seem perfectly constructed for the attainment of their particular object.

Yet it is generally recognised that the Catholic priesthood, as a body, are not at all remarkable for their attainments and intellectual training. Their system is admirable on paper, but it evidently breaks down somewhere. That this widely-felt impression of their inferiority is not a lingering deposit of the ancient prejudice against Rome is clear from the fact that Englishmen notice the inferiority more