This exhaustive treatise of Mr. Lea upon ecclesiastical celibacy we take to possess, like his excellent work upon "Superstition and Force," all the capital requisites of an historical monograph,--an immense body of information and of reference on the subject in hand, a sufficiently cool and dispassionate manner of presenting facts, and a severe adherence to the central question. The amount of research and indeed of scholarship involved in the preparation of this volume is such as to command the warmest recognition. In these days of "picturesque" histories, of hasty criticism, and of precipitate generalizations, it is very gratifying to encounter a writer who construes his obligations with such austerity as Mr. Lea. He is content to marshal his facts and his _data_ into such an order that under a close inspection no one of them conceals the half-genuine look of its neighbor. He lets them tell their own story for good or for evil, and is never guilty, through the wish to be vivid and effective, of spreading his colors outside of the lines drawn by his authorities. Within these lines even his tints are sober and discreet, and careful not to depart too widely from those somewhat neutral hues which, wherever man's knowledge of the past rests upon accidentally preserved documents and monuments, must continue to be the colors of history. Nevertheless, with all the various merits of a well-executed monograph, Mr. Lea's work has certain of the corresponding defects. Perhaps, indeed, it were more just to say that these defects correspond to the limitations of the general reader's knowledge, rather than to any imperfection in the author's programme. In the course of a special history executed on such a scale as the present one, and with all its soberness of style, so little mechanical in spirit, and so free from chronological dryness, it is almost inevitable that the reader's impressions should become somewhat overbalanced. He is likely to forget that he is taking a partial view of a great subject, and that he must hold his opinions liable to correction when he has surveyed the whole field. A dishonest writer, we conceive, may readily take advantage of this perfectly logical error. He has accumulated an immense mass of material bearing on a particular point, extracted and expressed, by long labor, from a field in which it has lain interfused with material of a very different, and even of a directly opposite significance. There are a hundred literary arts by which a writer may put forward his fractional gleaning as a representation of the whole. In this matter of ecclesiastical celibacy, for instance, the result of Mr. Lea's researches is that practically the thing has never existed in the Christian Church. That is to say, the regulations enforcing it have at all times been more violated and eluded than obeyed. With the Reformation a large section of the Church ceased to admit its needfulness, and the field of its enforcement was very much curtailed.