dified when morals change. Morality does not vary, but morals do,
according to the lapse of time; yet this very simple truth never once
entered their heads. They have adhered to the morals of the period,
when the intellectual movement ceased, as far as they were concerned.
The manuals they put into the hands of the young confessor are grounded
upon the authority of the casuists, whom Pascal annihilated long ago.
Even if the immorality of their solutions had not been demonstrated,
remember that Escobar and Sanchez made their questions for a horribly
corrupt period, from which, thank God, we are far removed. Their
casuistry was from the first addressed to the corrupt and disordered
state of society occasioned by long religious warfare. You will find
among them crimes that were perhaps never perpetrated, except by the
brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva, or by the exiled, lawless, and
godless band that Wallenstein drew after him, a wandering mass of
iniquity which would have been abhorred by ancient Sodom.

We know not how to qualify this culpable routine. These books,
composed for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same that
you give to your pupils in our own civilised age. And this young
priest, who, according to your instructions, believes that the world is
still that dreadful world, who enters the Confessional with all this
villanous science, and his imagination full of monstrous cases, you,
imprudent men! (what shall I call you?) you confront him with a child
who has never left her mother's side, who knows nothing, has nothing to
say, and whose greatest crime is that she has not learned her catechism
properly, or has hurt a butterfly!

I shudder at the interrogatories to which he will subject her, and at
what he will teach her in his _conscientious brutality_. But he
questions her in vain. She knows nothing, and says nothing. He scolds
her, and she weeps. Her tears will be soon dried, but it will be long
before she ceases to reflect.

A volume might be composed on the first start of the young priest, and
his imprudent steps, all fatal either to himself or others. The
penitent is occasionally more circumspect than the confessor. She is
amused at his proceedings, and looks at him coldly when he becomes
animated and goes too far. Sometimes, forgetting himself in his
impassioned dream, he is suddenly and roughly awakened by a lesson from
an intelligent and satirical woman kneeling before him.