raded man because I have lived
twenty-five years in the atmosphere of the confessional, you are right. I
was a degraded man, just as yourself and all the priests are to-day, in
spite of your denegations. If you call me a degraded man, because my soul,
my mind and my heart were, as your own are to-day, plunged into the deep
waters of iniquity which flow from the confessional, I confess 'Guilty!' I
was degraded and polluted by the confessional just as you and all the
priests of Rome are.

"It has required the whole blood of the great Victim, who died on Calvary
for sinners, to purify me; and I pray that, through the same blood, you may
be purified also."

If the legislators knew the respect and protection they owe to women--I
repeat it--they would by the most stringent laws prohibit auricular
confession as a crime against society.

Not long ago, a printer in England was sent to jail and severely punished
for having published in English the questions put by the priests to the
women in the confessional; and the sentence was equitable, for all who will
read those questions will conclude that no girl or woman who brings her
mind into contact with the contents of that book can escape from moral
death. But what are the priests of Rome doing in the confessional? Do they
not pass the greatest part of their time in questioning females, old and
young, and hearing their answers, on those very matters? If it were a
crime, punishable by law, to present those questions in a book, is it not a
crime far more punishable by law to present those very things to married
and unmarried women through the auricular confession?

I ask it from every man of common sense, What is the difference between a
woman or a girl learning those things in a book, or learning them from the
lips of a man? Will not those impure, demoralizing suggestions sink more
deeply into their minds, and impress themselves more forcibly in their
memory, when told to them by a man of authority, speaking in the name of
Almighty God, than when read in a book which has no authority?

I say to the legislators of Europe and America: "Read for yourselves those
horrible, unmentionable things;" and remember that the Pope has 100,000
priests whose principal work is to put those very things into the
intelligence and memory of the women whom they entrap into their snares.
Let us suppose that each priest hears the confessions of only five female
penitents (though we know that the daily