refute what he has said. Those who have
any knowledge of history and philosophy know very well that the moral
degradation of the woman is soon followed, everywhere, by the moral
degradation of the nation; and the moral degradation of the nation is very
soon followed by ruin and overthrow.

That French nation had been formed by God to be a race of giants. They were
chivalrous and brave; they had bright intelligences, stout hearts, strong
arms, and a mighty sword. But as the hardest granite rock yields and breaks
under the drop of water which incessantly falls upon it, so that great
nation had to break and to fall into pieces under, not the drop, but the
rivers of impure waters which for centuries have incessantly flowed in upon
it from the pestilential fountain of the confessional. "Righteousness
exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach, to any people." (Proverbs xiv.)

Why is it that Spain is so miserable, so weak, so poor, so foolishly and
cruelly tearing her own bosom, and reddening her fair valleys with the
blood of her own children? The principal, if not the only, cause of the
downfall of that great nation is the confessional. There, also, the
confessor has defiled, degraded, enslaved women, and women in turn have
defiled and degraded their husbands and sons. Women have sown broadcast
over their country the seeds of that slavery, of that want of Christian
honesty, justice, and self-respect with which they had themselves been
first imbued in the confessional.

But when you see, without a single exception, the nations whose women drink
the impure and poisonous waters which flow from the confessional sinking
down so rapidly, do you not wonder how fast the neighbouring nations, who
have destroyed those dens of impurity, prostitution, and abject slavery,
are rising up? What a marvellous contrast is before our eyes! On one side,
the nations who allow the woman to be degraded and enslaved at the feet of
the confessor--France, Spain, Romish Ireland, Mexico, &c., &c.--are, there,
fallen into the dust, bleeding, struggling, powerless, like the sparrow
whose entrails are devoured by the vulture. On the other side, see how the
nations whose women go to wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb are
soaring up, as on eagle wings, in the highest regions of progress, peace,
and liberty!

If legislators could once understand the respect and protection they owe to
woman, they would soon, by stringent laws, prohibit auricular confe