Did it not suggest itself to the mind of the author of this essay, when he perused the passage quoted against the monks, that he exposed himself to a flank movement? For where could you find better specimens and more plentifully of “introspective dreamers” and “tyrannical theorizers” than in the State, in the very city, nay, in the actual audience which assembled at the time to listen to Mr. Alger’s essay? “O wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion.” Why is it that a certain number of New England authors, whenever they can find an occasion or make an opportunity, are sure to cast a fling at monks and nuns and a celibate priesthood? Even the genial author, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, not to mention Whittier and others, from some yet unexplained cause, will turn bitter and his temper grow ruffled when he encounters in his literary excursions a monk or speaks of the celibate clergy of the church. There is no difficulty in acquitting such authors of intentional malice, but men so well bred and of such broad experience ought and do know better, and should not blot their otherwise pleasant pages with foul abuse. But whence does this acrimony spring? Does it spring from the bully who strikes a victim, knowing himself safe from a return blow? or is it that the intellectual faculty of insight is lacking in these highly-gifted authors? Is this rancor to be attributed to their environment? or, finally, is it to be classified by some future clerical Darwin as an instance of Puritanical “inherited habit”? Be that as it may, Catholics ask no favors from the opponents of the church, but they have good reason to look for, and the right to demand, fair play, sound scholarship where scholarship is needed and claimed, and at least an average amount of intelligence. These monks—and let us add also nuns, for their aim is identical—who have as a distinctive principle of life the resolve always to tend towards perfection, are not perfect and make no pretension to being saints, for although human nature is immanently good, there is notwithstanding much evil in the world, and no class of men or women, whoever they may be, is wholly free from the possibility of deviating from the path which leads to their true destiny. That there have been among monks and nuns hypocrites, fanatics, and those who have forgotten the sacredness of their calling and given public scandal everybody knows: “Canker vice the sweetest buds doth love.” Had these incurred the severe animadversion of the author of this essay, his abusive language might have passed unnoticed; but no qualification is made between innocent and guilty—the exemplary and scandalous, one and all, are passed upon as the same by a most unsparing and unjust sentence.