At the remembrance that this power, in these very words, had been conferred on him, when ordained to the priesthood, Luther used, in after years, with a shudder, to express his astonishment that "the earth had not opened its mouth and swallowed up both him who uttered these words, and him to whom they were addressed." The sacrifice which the papal priesthood are empowered to offer, as a "true propitiatory sacrifice" for the sins of the living and the dead, is just the "unbloody sacrifice" of the mass, which was offered up in Babylon long before it was ever heard of in Rome. Now, while Semiramis, the real original of the Chaldean Queen of Heaven, to whom the "unbloody sacrifice" of the mass was first offered, was in her own person, as we have already seen, the very paragon of impurity, she at the same time affected the greatest favour for that kind of sanctity which looks down with contempt on God's holy ordinance of marriage. The Mysteries over which she presided were scenes of the rankest pollution; and yet the higher orders of the priesthood were bound to a life of celibacy, as a life of peculiar and pre-eminent holiness. Strange though it may seem, yet the voice of antiquity assigns to that abandoned queen the invention of clerical celibacy, and that in the most stringent form. In some countries, as in Egypt, human nature asserted its rights, and though the general system of Babylon was retained, the yoke of celibacy was abolished, and the priesthood were permitted to marry. But every scholar knows that when the worship of Cybele, the Babylonian goddess, was introduced into Pagan Rome, it was introduced in its primitive form, with its celibate clergy. When the Pope appropriated to himself so much that was peculiar to the worship of that goddess, from the very same source, also, he introduced into the priesthood under his authority the binding obligation of celibacy. The introduction of such a principle into the Christian Church had been distinctly predicted as one grand mark of the apostacy, when men should "depart from the faith, and speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared with a hot iron, should forbid to marry." The effects of its introduction were most disastrous. The records of all nations where priestly celibacy has been introduced have proved that, instead of ministering to the purity of those condemned to it, it has only plunged them in the deepest pollution. The history of Thibet, and China, and Japan, where the Babylonian institute of priestly celibacy has prevailed from time immemorial, bears testimony to the abominations that have flowed from it. The excesses committed by the celibate priests of Bacchus in Pagan Rome in their secret Mysteries, were such that the Senate felt called upon to expel them from the bounds of the Roman republic.