(Lest you heed the deceptive talk which endeavors to convince you that the old tree is now bearing different fruit, read Hogan's "Popish Nunneries," McCabe's "Ten Years in a Monastery," McCarthy's up-to-date "Priests and People in Ireland;" and the astounding, undenied statements of Bishop Manuel Ferrando, in "The Converted Catholic" magazine of New York City.) In Delisser's powerful book, "Pope, or President?" there is a masterly summing up against "Romanism as revealed by its own writers." Among other witnesses, he cites the evidence of Mahoney, the priest who was examined by a Committee of the House of Commons. "A very nefarious use was made of convents," testified this honest Irishman. His disclosures corroborated what another honest Irish priest, Hogan, said several centuries later. "A woman ... is seduced into a convent to live in sin with the bishop and other confessors. It is not human to place a priest where he is allowed to fall, and suppose him innocent. Reader, commit your daughter to the soldier or hussar who can marry her, rather than to a Romish priest." ("Pope, or President," p. 59.) In fact, Delisser's chapter on "Convent Exposed" is one of the most frightful that I ever read--doubly frightful because the Romanist writers therein quoted _assume it to be their right_ to mistreat women, just as they please! It is only in such a chapter, composed of citations from orthodox Roman Catholics, that you can obtain anything like a true conception of _the priest's point of view_. They have the right to kidnap children: they have a right to restrain prisoners; they have a right to compel obedience: they have a right to shut out the State and its law: they have a right to punish the refractory, to flog the unruly girl, to starve her into submission, to degrade her with disgusting services, to use her person for their lusts! _That is the priest's point of view!_ Study the horrible "theology" of Dens and Liguori: read what popes have said in denial of a layman's right to criticise a priest; read what Rev. Blanco White said of the systematic depravity of Romanism. Cardinal Newman had to acknowledge that Blanco White was a man or irreproachable character, "a man you can trust." "I have the fullest confidence in his word," &c. And what does this ex-Catholic, for whom Cardinal Newman vouched, have to say about convents? "I cannot," says he, "find tints sufficiently dark to portray the miseries which I have witnessed in convents. Crime, in spite of the spiked walls and prison gates is there. The gates of the holy prison are forever closed upon the inmates: _force and shame_ await them wherever they might fly." Then the ex-priest tells the tragic story of his two sisters, virtually tortured to death in the Spanish convent, he being a witness to their misery and powerless to relieve it. The system held them all! He continues-- "Of all the victims of the church of Rome, _the nuns_ deserve the greatest sympathy."