Dr. William Barry's Memoirs

Once upon a time a clerk in Holy (Roman) Orders was ipso facto a professional man of letters-even in England. Nowadays, the profession of letters is become a secular luxury for which English Catholic priests, though amply endowed with the requisite talents, rarely have opportunity, inclination, time or energy. They do not, any more than other classes of Englishmen, lack ambition to enrich the literature of which they are the heirs, and to win it back to the service of Catholic Truth in which it was begotten. But as a class they are disciplined to selfdenial . Though devotion to letters may be urged upon them as a duty-which indeed it is-there are other more pressing and less romantic duties, in sacristy, confessional, class-room and slum, which most of them would consider it a treason to postpone to the delights of reading and writing in a well-appointed study. Here and there, however, circumstances make it possible, or even necessary, to develop a vocation along the line more agreeable to nature. Such circumstances are becoming more normal nowadays than they were formerly. The discipline of self-denial is as necessary for young priests to-day as ever it was-perhaps more necessary than ever it was. But there are certain external conditions, as well as certain internal dispositions generated by modern education in many candidates for the priesthood, which make the old-time discipline of parochial life, with its paucity of pens and books, and its plenitude of accounts, bazaars, and committee-meetings, as dangerous to some individuals as it would be unprofitable to the community if those individuals were condemned to it

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