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    This spirited description of the great Tuscan novelist , written about the year 1340 , would require some modification in order to be applicable to the year 1780 . Yet , although vice did not stalk abroad so boldly in the day of the eighteenth as it had done in the night of the fourteenth century , while it was compelled by the improved manners and advancing illumination of the times to shrink into concealment , the disease appeared to assume a more

    malignant and pestilential form , in proportion as it became pent up within a narrower space . The most corrupt of the religious houses , at the period of which we speak , were those under the spiritual direction of the Dominicans . Although Ricei had prepared and designed for publication the detail of circumstances dishonourable to human nature , correctly alleging that " the scandal belongs not to those who expose vice , but to those who are guilty of it , " the reader will gladly be spared the repetition . Suffice it to remark , that indecent comedies were acted by the monks and nuns , and that the

    minds of the latter were imbued with a revolting species of Atheism , in which , while the existence of a Spiritual Being , of a future state , human accountability , and the possibility of sin , were distinctly denied , the most sacred rites of the Church of Rome * and even the language of Scripture itself , were made the channel of conveying licentious sentiments to the mind . While the worldly libertine seeks only the sensual gratification of his passions , the ecclesiastical seducer begins with perverting the conscience and

    seducing the soul . We should not have said even thus much , but for two reasons ; first , because the existence of such abuses of the original design of monastic institutions , in modern times , is sometimes denied by Catholics ; and , secondly , for the sake of the warning it holds out to us against the pretended harinlessness of error . That persons of either sex should bind themselves by the most solemn vows , in the name of their Maker and their Redeemer , to shut themselves out from the commerce of their fellow-men

    for their whole remaining days , to lead a chaste and single life , and abstain from all the pleasures of the world , in order to spend the hours of the day in holy meditation and devotion , and even cut short the hours of nightly repose in order to rise and trim the lamp of watchfulness and prayer , and that the flesh should be mortified by abstinence and chastised by stripes into

    complete subjection to the spirit , may seem a harmless if not laudable addition to the Christian system . But all such vows of seclusion and abstinence are a perversion of the precepts and spirit of the gospel of Christ , ( which requires us not to shut ourselves out from the world , but faithfully to discharge our duties in it , ) and a tempting of feeble human nature beyond its strength . The result is easy to be anticipated , and was seen in the monasteries

    of Pistoia and Prato . The inquiries of Ricci having fully convinced him that the disorders of these convents were principally owing to their being under the controul of the Dominican monks , he fully informed the Sovereign Pontiff of the true state of the case , and at once obtained from him , with apparent frankness and cordiality , the power of himself directing the spiritual affairs of the

    misguided devotees . But as the Generals of all the religious orders reside at Rome under the immediate eye of the Pope , and are the principal instru * ments by which his secret influence is extended through all its va , st ramifications ; and as th , e Dominicans were amongst the most enterprising and faithful soldiers of the church militant , it would have been too much ( o have expected the Court of Rome , however surprised by shame or fear , cordially to approve or permanently to acquiesce in ; a measure , so opposed to its

    Untitled Article

    Memoir of Svipw da llicci . 445

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1828, page 445, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2562/page/13/