Pkre Hyacinthe (M. boron) has broken through the rule of
the Roman-Catholic Church against the celibacy of priests, having been married on Tuesday to an American lady, daughter of Mr. Amory Butterfield, and widow of the late Mr. Edwin Ruthven Merriman. He has published a long and rather rhetorical letter vindicating him- self beforehand from the attacks which he anticipates on the score of his marriage, and especially declaring that his thought of marriage was, as we understand the letter, long subsequent to the public -opposition he give to the doctrine of papal infallibility, and only connected with it as one assertion of individual liberty in a priest is connected with another assertion of it. Marriage, says Pere Hyacinthe, comes home to him as one of those laws of the moral government of the world which cannot be set aside " with- cut overturning the fabric of life, and running counter to the will of God." "I do not say," he adds, "that this law comes home to all. I believe that celibacy may be a holy and glorious exception. I only say that this law presents itself unmistakably to me. When a man has received in his heart, as another exception no !less rare, holy, and glorious, that pure and lofty love in which the world does not believe because it is not worthy of it,—such a man, be he priest or be he monk, has the most absolute proof that he is not of those self-dedicated victims of whom the Gospel speaks. Such a man am I." He adds that he intends to remain ever a priest and a Catholic, but in what sense he repudiates having broken away from the Church, whose authority he sets utterly at defiance, we do not quite understand.
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