I cannot quit the subject of clerical oratory without noticing one of its marked characteristics. The priest is not in a position of disinterested impartiality, like a man of science, who is ready to renounce any doctrine when he finds evidence against it. The priest is an advocate whose life-long pleading must be in favor of the Church as he finds her, and in opposition to her adversaries. To attack adversaries is therefore one of the recognized duties of his profession; and if he is not a man of uncommon fairness, if he has not an inborn love of justice which is rare in human nature, he will not only attack his adversaries but misrepresent them. There is even a worse danger than simple misrepresentation. A priest may possibly be a man of a coarse temper, and if he is so he will employ the weapons of outrage and vituperation, knowing that he can do so with impunity. One would imagine that these methods must inevitably repel and displease women, but there is a very peculiar reason why they seldom have this effect. A highly principled woman is usually so extremely eager to be on the side of what is right that suspension of judgment is most difficult for her. Any condemnation uttered by a person she is accustomed to trust has her approval on the instant. She cannot endure to wait until the crime is proved, but her feelings of indignation are at once aroused against the supposed criminal on the ground that there must be clear distinctions between right and wrong. The priest, for her, is the good man,--the man on the side of God and virtue; and those whom he condemns are the bad men,--the men on the side of the Devil and vice. This being so, he may deal with such men as roughly as he pleases. Nor have these men the faintest chance of setting themselves right in her opinion. She quietly closes the avenues of her mind against them; she declines to read their books; she will not listen to their arguments. Even if one of them is a near relation whose opinions inflict upon her what she calls "the deepest distress of mind," she will positively prefer to go on suffering such distress until she dies, rather than allow him to remove it by a candid exposition of his views. She prefers the hostile misrepresentation that makes her miserable, to an authentic account of the matter that would relieve her anguish. PART III.--ASSOCIATION.