2. In the middle of the sixteenth century ''the majority of the clergy were nearly illiterate, and many of them addicted to drunkenness and low vices.--Hallam, "Const. Hist, of Eng."
3. "The clergy have ruined Italy."--Brougham, "Pol. Phil."
4. "It was a significant prudence of many of the lay Catholics, who were accustomed to insist that their priests should take a concubine _for the protection of the families of the parishioners_.... It can hardly be questioned that the extreme frequency of illicit connections among the clergy _tended during many centuries most actively to lower the moral tone of the laity_.... An impure chastity was fostered, which continually looked upon marriage in its coarsest light.... Another injurious consequence, resulting, in a great measure, from asceticism, was a tendency to depreciate extremely the character and the position of woman."--Lecky.
1. "The great and main duty which a wife, as a wife, ought to learn, and so learn as to practise it, is to be subject to her own husband.... There is not any husband to whom this honor of submission is not due; no personal infirmity, frowardness of nature; no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it."--Fergusson on "the Epistles."
2. "The sum of a wife's duty unto her husband is subjection. "--Abernethy.
3. "We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of obedience [upon wives]; as every established fact _which is too bad to admit of any other defense, is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. The Church, it is true, enjoins it in her formularies_."--Mill.
"The principle of the modern movement in morals and in politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, _merit and not birth is the only rightful claim to power and authority_."--Ibid.
"Taking the care of people's lives out of their own hands, and relieving them from the consequences of their own acts, _saps the very foundation_ of the self-respect and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue."--Ibid.
"Inferior classes of men always, at heart, feel disrespect toward those who are subject to their power."--Ibid.