A peculiar taste of this kind, like
smoking tobacco or drinking whiskey, cannot be given up all
at once. The ancient Egyptians, for many years after they
had lost every trace of the intellectual character of their
religion, yet worshipped and adored the ox, the bull, and
the crocodile. They had not discovered the art, as we
Catholics have done, of making a God out of bread, and of
adoring and eating him at one and the same moment. This
latter piece of sublimity or religious cookery (we don't
know which) was reserved for the educated and talented
clergy from the tenth up to the nineteenth century. Yet we
do not advise the immediate disturbance of this venerable
piece of rottenness and absurdity. It must be retained, as
we would retain carefully the tooth of a saint or the
jawbone of a martyr, till the natural progress of reason in
the Irish mind shall be able, silently and imperceptibly, to
drop it among the forgotten rubbish of his early loves, or
his more youthful riots and rows.
"There must be a thorough reformation and revolution in the
American Catholic Church.
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