The accusation against the pretended virgins involves so many apparently good men and chaste women, that we shrink from remembering the difference between publicity and privacy; we forget that the treacherous inclination is not felt in the church and in the crowd, but that it creeps to the secret couch, under cover of night, when there is silence, freedom from interruption and security from detection. We forget how this passion takes advantage of night, of undress, and of secret contact of the physical man and woman, to heat their normal blood, _no matter how sanctified they may really be in their daily visible life_. "Saint" Bernard of the 10th century exhausts his wrath upon the hideous vices of the monks and nuns "behind the partition." "What abominable lust!" cries this stern old anchorite. He exclaims-- "Would that those who cannot rule their sexuality would fear to give their conduct the name of celibacy. It is better to marry than to burn.... Take away from the church honorable marriage and the undefiled bed, and do you not fill it with concubines, incestuous persons, onanists, male concubines, and with every kind of unclean person?" (Bernard's Sermons V. 29, cited in Elliott, II., 410.) Take away honorable marriage from the priests, and what do you get in place of the bed undefiled? Read again that tremendous sentence of Saint Bernard, and then ask yourself, _Has human nature changed_? A typical illustration of priestly seduction is the following: "A lady of the name of Maria Catharine Barni, of Santa Croe, declared on her death-bed, that she had been seduced through the confessional, and that she had during twelve years maintained a continual intercourse with priest Pachiani. He had assured her _that by means of the supernatural light which he had received from Jesus and the holy virgin_, he was perfectly certain that neither of them was guilty of sin, &c." (Secrets of Female Convents, p. 58, cited by Elliott, Vol. II., p. 448.) Substantially, that is the way every priest seduces every nun who yields to him. Almost the very formula is mentioned in Dr. Justin D. Fulton's book which was submitted to Anthony Comstock, the modern Cato, before it was published. And Dr. Fulton asserts that Pope Pius IX. authorized this concubinage of priests with nuns, _by a formal Vatican decree of 1866_. Dr. Fulton says--page 97 of "Why Priests Should Wed"-- "In the year 1866, Pope Pius IX. sanctioned the establishment of one of the most appalling institutions of immorality and wickedness ever countenanced under the form and garb of religion."