er--in the visitation of
the sick and afflicted. The CONFESSIONAL is added to his duties, as if
on purpose to enhance the misery of his condition, and the mischief of
his influence. And with whom is the confessional chiefly conversant? The
male penitent, we presume, is content with a very general acknowledgment
of his errors, and seldom indulges in great outpourings of the spirit,
or would submit to any stretch of authority over his conscience or
conduct. But the softer sex, whose own tenderness of heart, and whose
power over the hearts of others, make all converse with them so potent
for good or for harm--maidens, and wives in the prime of life, and in
the pride of beauty, opening their souls to a confessor, revealing all
their secret emotions, their hopes, their disappointments, their fears,
their failings, submitting to his questions, and hanging upon his words
of acquittal or condemnation; surely this is a subject of contemplation
full of awful interest, and on which it is impossible to be at ease
where the mysterious intercourse is without a witness and without a
check--but the consciences of two frail and fallible human beings. Well
may we say with Michelet, that under such a system the priest ought to
be truly a ~presbyteros~, "a man who has seen, learned, and
suffered much." A young priest as a father-confessor is not merely "a
nonsensical contradiction," but a snare and a source of peril both to
himself and his penitents.

The pomp of Popery gives its clergy sufficient aids to their influence
by other means.

"The priest takes advantage of every thing that is calculated to
make him be considered as a man apart--of his dress, his position,
his mysterious church, that invests the most vulgar with a poetical
gleam.

* * * * *

"What an immense place is this church, and what an immense host
must inhabit this wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still
more to the effect. Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived
and deceives itself, at the same time, with these sublime lights
and deepening shades, all calculated to increase the illusion. The
man whom in the street you judged, by his surly look, to be a
village schoolmaster, is here a prophet. He is transformed by this
majestic framework; his heaviness becomes strength and majesty; his
voice has formidable echoes. Women and children tremble and are
afraid.

*