Note 4 — TOUCHING OXFORD. A LETTER TO PROFESSOR NEBEL.

“To make her clergy fit ministrants of that priestcraft which is its certain fruit, the Romish system draws after it the enforced celibacy of their order, and so their separation from all the purifying and humanising influences which God’s holy ordinance of marriage sheds over a married priesthood; and, lastly, through the ever-encroaching presence, amidst the sanctities of family life, of one thus invested with a character of supernatural holiness, whom all are bound to make the official depositary of every secret, and who is cognisant of every real or suspected infirmity of his devotee, and so (unavoidably) of those who have shared with him in the sins he has from time to time confessed, it dissolves the most sacred ties by which God has bound society together,—introducing another, and how often an adverse counsel between father and child, between the mother and her daughter, between the husband and the wife of his bosom.”—Bishop of Oxford’s Sermon on the 5th of November 1855.