But most crushing of all was, the performance of certain ceremonies at the altar, by which, as I knew and could perceive, many of the community were misguided into superstition and hypocrisy. Was I not forced to be a party to dissimulation, in the performance of such ceremonies? Could I help feeling myself lowered in my own opinion? When I knelt at the altar, with the credulous people behind me, and cast a look within, I shuddered in my inmost soul, an unspeakable woe tormented me, and I uttered the despairing cry, "And hast thou so long suffered this humiliation?" Each morning I was awakened, as with a piercing shriek, by the thought that I was a slave, and that my life was not only useless but fraught with degradation to my fellow-men--that I had been robbed of a bright career of useful labour, and that not even time itself might put an end to all my ignominy! My fetters were indeed consecrated, and, according to the prejudices of the world, they seemed to be unremovable. The world appeared determined to bear patiently the hideous yoke--its course was still the same! I saw before me the abyss of falsehood or an early grave! Should I succumb? Unworthy cowardice! My courage gradually rose; courage for the contest of life and death within me. I determined to burst my fetters, and to leave the enchanted circle,--a circle drawn amid the incantations and the curses of Romish tyranny in the middle ages; I resolved to assist in tearing off the mask of holiness from the hypocrisy of a thousand years. This my resolve was only strengthened by contemplating the fate of my colleagues, some of whom were greater sufferers than even I. A few were snatched away by early death; they sank mute, and cheated of their lives, into the grave. He cannot surely have a drop of blood within his veins, who would not feel it boil with indignation to witness such a sight. And yet their fate was envied by the others, who glided through the world like mummies, in the springtime of their days, and hourly, slowly faded into death. Some rush, to deaden feeling, into drunkenness and other vices, or sink into insensibility, and passively vegetate from one day to the next. Others still, of livelier character, seek to lose themselves in the hierarchical spirit of the middle ages, and because ours are other days, and they, although they know it not, belong to _them_, have originated that modern species of bigotry which rises ofttimes into madness. Such heroes then surround themselves with halos borrowed from the early Fathers, and affect the startling voice of the preacher of repentance. At last I sought, in order quite to fix my resolution, the countenance of those among the priests esteemed of noblest character; but found little real manliness, good and amiable (?) as several of them might be,---or from a certain vacuity of mind, effeminate inertness, or well-concealed ambition, might _appear_ to be.