particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its right and become an active influence in religious society itself. {33} But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked. Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to individuals. {34} From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness; they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being; they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate result of which has been so glorious. {35}