The lawgivers of various countries and ages have striven to discourage celibacy, <as far as it was in the power of law to do so. The mention by Dionysius of Halicarnassus of an ancient law by which all persons of mature age were obliged to marry, may be cited. More authentic is the Roman law of the time of Augustus known as the Lex Julia de maritandis Ordinibus. It was afterwards called Papia Poppoea, or Julia Papia, from some new sanctions and amendments under the consuls Papius and Poppaeus. Modern legislation has with increased wisdom shrunk from such direct attempts to coerce those subjected to it. But various provisions have in many European countries been enacted or proposed with the view of favouring the prevalence of marriage.

Any endeavour to give a satisfactory account of the investigations of physiologists, as bearing on this subject would lead us too far afield into the discussion of topics which fall more conveniently and appropriately under other headings. But it appears from recent statistics that married persons,—women in a considerable but men in a much greater degree,—have at all periods of life a greater probability of living than the single.

The ideas which, in the absence of or in opposition to the deductions of social philosophers and legislators, have found expression in the religious or ecclesiastical observances and theories of various ages aud creeds, require and are fitted to be treated, though with the utmost brevity, in a somewhat more historical manner. Beausobre, in his Histoire Critique du Manichéisme, lib. vii. cap. 3, shows that it was a prevalent opinion among the earliest Christians that if Adam had not fallen by disobedience, he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that a race of sinless beings would have peopled Paradise, produced by some less objectionable means than the union of the first pair of mortals. Marriage was considered by them as a consequence of the Fall, the brand of the imperfection it had entailed, and a tolerated admission of an impure and sinful nature. To abstain from it, therefore, was the triumph of sanctity and at the same time the proof and the means of spiritual perfection. The earliest aspirants to this perfection among the Christians were not ecclesiastics as such, but hermits and. anchorites, who adopted this among other means of attaining to recognizedly exceptional sanctity. It is not true, as is often stated, that the official expositors of Romanist theology and ecclesiastical law maintain that a vow of perpetual celibacy was required as a condition of ordination in the earliest ages of the church. It is fully admitted by them that, “although celibacy is preferable to matrimony, the divine law does not make it necessary for the reception of holy orders, or forbid cither the ordination of married men or the marriage of those already in orders.” In fact it would be impossible to maintain the reverse without denying the truth of many portions of ecclesiastical history, which the church cannot afford to spare, as to the conduct and lives of many of the early bishops, confessors, and martyrs, and without running very serious risk of damaging the favourite claim of the church to uninterrupted apostolical succession.

It was proposed in the second Council of Carthage (251) that celibacy should be required in candidates for the priesthood; but it cannot be pretended that even from that time it was always considered necessary. Moroni (Diet. Storico Eccles., vol. ii. p. 58) makes a very much modified statement :—“As regards the usage and laws of the church,” he says, “it has never been permitted to priests or to bishops to take wives, when they had declared at the time of their ordination that they would persevere in celibacy.” It must be observed, however, with regard to the citations of the cases of bishops and priests of the early Greek Church, that Romanist ecclesiastical writers have never pretended that the practice of the Greek Church was not much more lax in this respect than that of the Latin or Western Church. The difference between the discipline of the one and the other was this. In the Greek Church no objection was made to the ordination of married men purposing to continue living with their wives, if these wives were their first wives, and had not before their marriage been widows; whereas, as is claimed by Romanist writers, in the Latin Church neither priests’ nor bishops’ orders were ever conferred on married men without requiring from them and from their wives reciprocal consent, and a solemn promise, that they would live separately during the remainder of their lives. As regards bishops, however, the practice in the Greek Church was the same as in the Latin. The decrees of various councils, however, show that the practice of the Greek Church in this respect was by no means settled and uniform. That of Ancyra in 313 permitted marriage only to such deacons as had protested against accepting the obligation of celibacy at the time of their ordination. The Council of Nice thought that the ancient tradition of the church should be re-established in conformity with the 26th apostolical canon, which permitted marriage only to those who held the office of readers or chanters in the churches.

The principal Papal decrees which have been issued by the popes on the subject of sacerdotal celibacy are the following. It is said that Calixtus I., who was elected in 221, renewed a constitution forbidding the marriage of priests. It is said, too, that Lucius I., elected in 255, reenacted the same prohibition. We do not, however, reach any certainty on the subject till we come to the Council of Elvira, the first of those on matters of discipline the decrees of which are extant. It is doubtful whether this council was held in the year 300 or 313. The thirty-third and thirty-sixth canons of this council command bishops, priests, deacons, and subdeacons to live apart from their wives. The council further prohibited ecclesiastics from having any female in their houses save a sister or a daughter, and those only when virgins, who had consecrated their virginity to God. The ecclesiastical writers maintain that these constitutions were but the confirmation by authoritative sanction of the practice which had been immemυrially observed, rather as an apostolic tradition than a positive command. From that time to the time of Gregory VII. (the great Hildebrand, elected 1073), a series of popes issued decrees commanding bishops, priests, and deacons to observe celibacy. But all of them are couched in terms, and put forth under circumstances, which indicate that the regulation was by no means universally, perhaps even it may be said generally, observed. Gregory VII., in the council held at Rome in the year 1074, determined more decisively and vigorously that, according to the sacred canons and the decrees of his predecessors, no ecclesiastic could be a married man, that the sacrament of ordination should be conferred on none except those who professed perpetual celibacy, and that no wived priest should celebrate or even assist at the Mass.

Upon the whole it is clear that the pretensicn advanced by the Church of Rome to insist on the celibacy of its clergy was at first put forward tentatively and gradually, as a thing desirable and tending to higher perfection, rather than as a thing absolutely necessary; that, like so much else in that church, it was an encroachment on Christian liberty, originating in a mystic idea of the greater purity of a state of celibacy, which was a natural product of the working of the human intellect in the earliest centuries of Christianity, and became fixed and consolidated into a rigid law, as the rulers of the church, and especially Gregory VII., came to perceive that it was a potent engine of ecclesiastical power. It is probable that Hildebrand, the nature of whose intellect and temper was such as eminently to qualify him for perceiving, appreciating at its true value, and utilizing the doctrine of the universal celibacy of the clergy, was the first ruler of the church who clearly saw the incalculably enormous pow er which this rule placed in the hands of the hierarchy as a body, yet more notably than it tended to increase that of each individual priest. To this and to this alone it has been and is due that a Catholic priest is the citizen of no country, and acknowledges or at least feels no allegiance, unless perhaps a subordinate and secondary one, save to his church, and that to him his order is in the place of family and country; and the greatness, the power, the glory, and the supremacy of the church constitutes that for which the best minds among the priesthood labour and live. But while churchmen were becoming more and more alive to the vast importance of celibacy as a sine qua non of the priesthood, minds which were fitted to estimate that institution with a larger view to its ultimate results and consequences became at an early period aware of its veritable consequences. Erasmus, in his 19th Epistle (lib. 29) gives us at once his own and Augustine’s views of the subject in the following remarkable passage :—“Miruιn vero si procus amans laudat nuptias, dicitque castum conjugium non multum abesse a laude virginitatis, quum Augustinus patriarcharum polygamiam anteponat nostro caelibatui.”

But when the church stood at the diverging of the ways, fabled in the apologue, and at the Council of Trent decided once and for ever which of the two paths open before her she should follow, whether that of progressive reformation and amelioration, or that of a sint-ut sunt-autmon-sint persistence in her old ways and policies, the abolition of the celibacy of the clergy was discussed among other proposed measures of reform, and more peremptorily rejected than almost any other suggestion brought forward. The church understood too well what was around her, and too little what was ahead of her; was too clear-sighted, yet too shortsighted; and determined to retain the terrible engine of her power, which makes of her a caste, with a gulf between her ministers and the rest of humanity.