ess,--so managed, the practice of confession
is undoubtedly the most demoralising practice known to any Christian
society. Innocent young persons, whose thoughts would never have
wandered out upon any impure images or suggestions, have their ingenuity
and their curiosity sent roving upon unlawful quests: they are
instructed to watch what else would pass undetained in the mind, and
would pass unblameably, on the Miltonic principle: ('Evil into the mind
of God or man may come unblamed,' &c.) Nay, which is worst of all,
unconscious or semi-conscious thoughts and feelings or natural impulses,
rising, like a breath of wind under some motion of nature, and again
dying away, because not made the subject of artificial review and
interpretation, are now brought powerfully under the focal light of the
consciousness: and whatsoever is once made the subject of consciousness,
can never again have the privilege of gay, careless thoughtlessness--the
privilege by which the mind, like the lamps of a mail-coach, moving
rapidly through the midnight woods, illuminate, for one instant, the
foliage or sleeping umbrage of the thickets; and, in the next instant,
have quitted them, to carry their radiance forward upon endless
successions of objects. This happy privilege is forfeited for ever, when
the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct
knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty
familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality.

[13] This appeared in _Tait's Magazine_ for February, 1841. Although
practically an independent paper, it was included in the series entitled
'Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English
Opium-Eater.' The reference to Allan Cunningham occurs in the previous
chapter of these 'Sketches.'--H.

Here, then, are objections sound and deep, to casuistry, as managed in
the Romish church. Every possible objection ever made to auricular
confession applies with equal strength to casuistry; and some
objections, besides these, are peculiar to itself. And yet, after all,
these are but objections to casuistry as treated by a particular church.
Casuistry in itself--casuistry as a possible, as a most useful, and a
most interesting speculation--remains unaffected by any one of these
objections; for none applies to the essence of the case, but only to its
accidents, or separable adjuncts. Neither is this any curious or subtle
observation of little pra