all trusts."

"Such an ordinance, sir, is a bounty and provocative to crime."

"It is a bounty and provocative to repentance, sir; and society has
gained much and lost nothing by its operation. Remember, sir, that those
who do not repent, never come to us to avow their crimes, in which case
we are ignorant both of the crime and criminal. Here there is neither
repentance, on the one hand, nor restitution, on the other, and society,
of course, loses everything and gains nothing. In the other case, the
person sustaining the injury gains that which he had lost, and society
a penitent and reformed member. If, then, this sacred refuge for the
penitent--not for the criminal, remember--had no existence, those
restitutions of property which take place in thousands of cases, could
never be made."

"Still, sir, you shield the criminal from his just punishment."

"No, sir; we never shield the criminal from his just punishment. God has
promised mercy to him who repents, and we merely administer it without
any reference to the operation of the law. It often happens, Sir Thomas
Gourlay, that a person who has repented and made restitution, is taken
hold of by the law and punished. This ordinance, therefore, does not
stand between the law and its victim; it only deals between him and his
God, leaving him, like any other offender, to the law he has violated."

"I am no theologian, sir; but without any reference to your priestly
cant, I simply say, that the man who is cognizant of another's crime
against the law, either of God or man, and who will shield him from
justice, is _particeps criminis_, and I don't care a fig what your
obsolete sacerdotal dogmas may assert to the contrary. You say you know
the man who unjustly deprived me of my property; if then, acknowledging
this, you refuse to deliver him up to justice, I hold you guilty of his
crime. Suppose he had taken my life, as he was near doing, how, pray,
would you have made restitution? Bring me to life again, I suppose, by a
miracle. Away, sir, with this cant, which is only fit for the barbarity
of the dark ages, when your church was a mass of crime, cruelty, and
ignorance; and when a cunning and rapacious priesthood usurped an
authority over both soul and body, ay, and property too, that oppressed
and degraded human nature."

"I will reason no longer with you, sir," replied the priest; "because
you talk in ignorance of the subject we are discussing--but having now
discharge