to long for freedom: but the happiness boasted of in convents, is generally the effect of an honourable pride of purpose, supported by a sense of utter hopelessness. The gates of the holy prison have been for ever closed upon the professed inhabitants; force and shame await them wherever they might fly: the short words of their profession have, like a potent charm, bound them to one spot of earth, and fixed their dwelling upon their grave. The great poet who boasted that "slaves cannot live in England," forgot that superstition may baffle the most sacred laws of freedom: slaves do live in England, and, I fear, multiply daily by the same arts which fill the convents abroad. In vain does the law of the land stretch a friendly hand to the repentant victim: the unhappy slave may be dying to break her fetters; yet death would be preferable to the shame and reproach that await her among relatives and friends. It will not avail her to keep the vow which dooms her to live single: she has renounced her will, and made herself a passive mass of clay in the hands of a superior. Perhaps she has promised to practise austerities which cannot be performed out of

the convent-never to taste meat, if her life were to depend on the use of substantial food-to wear no linen-to go unhosed and unshod for life;-all these and many other hardships make part of the various rules which Rome has confirmed with her sanction. Bitter harassing remorse seizes the wavering mind of the recluse, and even a yielding thought towards liberty, assumes the character of sacrilege. Nothing short of rebellion against the church that has burnt the mark of slavery into her soul, can liberate an English nun. Whereto could she turn her eyes? Her own parents would disown her; her friends would shrink from her as if her breath wafted leprosy: she would be haunted by priests and their zealous emissaries; and, like her sister victims of superstition in India, be made to die of a broken heart, if she refused to return to the burning pile from which she had fled in frantic fear.

Suppose that the case I have described were of the rarest occurrence: suppose that but one nun in ten thousand wished vehemently for that liberty which she had forfeited, by a few words, in one moment: what law of God (I will ask) has en

titled the Roman church thus to expose even one human creature to dark despair in this life, and a darker prospect in the next? Has the Gospel recommended perpetual vows? Could any thing but a clear and positive injunction of Christ or his apostles justify a practice beset with dangers of this magnitude? Is not the mere possibility of repenting such vows a reason why they should be strictly forbidden? And yet they are laid on almost infants of both sexes. Innocent girls of sixteen

are lured by the image of heroic virtue, and a pretended call of their Saviour, to promise they know not what, and make engagements for a whole life of which they have seen but the dawn!

To what paltry shifts and quibbles will not Roman Catholic writers resort to disguise the cruelty of this practice! Nuns are described as superhuman beings, as angels on earth, without a thought or wish beyond the walls of their convents. The effects of habit, of religious fear, of decorum, which prevented many of the French nuns from casting off the veil, at a period when the revolutionary storm had struck awe into every breast; are construed into a proof of the unvariableness

of purpose which follows the religious profession. Are nuns, indeed, so invariably happy? Why, then, are they insulted by their spiritual rulers by keeping them under the very guards and precautions, which magistrates employ to secure external good behaviour among the female inmates of prisons and penitentiaries?-Would the nuns continue, during their lives, under the same privations, were they at liberty to resume the laical state? Why, then, are they bound fast with awful vows? Why are they not allowed to offer up, day by day, the free-will offering of their souls and bodies?

The reluctant nuns, you say, are few.—Vain, unfeeling sophistry! First prove that vows are recommended on divine authority, that Christ has authorized the use of force and compulsion to ratify them when they are made; and then you may stop your ears against the complaints of a few sufferers. But can millions of submissive, or even willing recluses, atone for the despair of those few? You reckon, in indefinite numbers, those that in France did not avail themselves of the revolutionary laws. You should rather inquire

how many, who, before the revolution, appeared perfectly contented in their cloistral slavery, overcame every religious fear, and flew into the arms of a husband as soon as they could do it with impunity. Two hundred and ten nuns were secularized in Spain during the short-lived reign of the Cortes *. Were these helpless beings happy in their former durance? What an appalling number of less fortunate victims might not be made out by averaging, in the same proportion, the millions of females who, since the establishment of convents, have surrendered their liberty into the hands of Rome!

Cruel and barbarous, indeed, must be the bigotry or the policy which, rather than yield on a point of discipline, sees with indifference even the chance, not to say the existence, of such evils. To place the most sensitive, innocent, and ardent minds under the most horrible apprehensions of spiritual and temporal punishment, without the clearest necessity; is a refinement of cruelty which has few examples among civilized nations. Yet

* Report of the minister Garelli, laid before the Cortes, 1st of March, 1822.