rform acts of confession and communion, but they have not the
temerity to go from house to house to collect them as formerly, and the
clergy who would venture to demand them would be exposed to mortification
and rebuke. Still, however, in some families, the children are bound in
duty to prove before the paternal tribunal their compliance with those
obligations, by means of those official documents; but even this test is
easily evaded by the purchase of the tickets, which are publicly sold in
the churches by the sacristans and other inferior agents of the
priesthood, for the moderate sum of a _peseta_, (ten-pence.)

The practice of confession, however, is not quite extinct, particularly
among the inferior classes of society, and it is natural that the clergy
should represent it as absolutely necessary to the salvation of souls,
looking to the great advantages which they themselves derive from it. By
means of the sacrament of confession, the confessor makes himself the
absolute master of the conscience of his penitent,--not merely of his own
secrets, but of those of his whole family; he directs all their
operations, and superintends all their domestic concerns, as well as
their social and even their political affairs. The confessor has
constantly suspended over the head of his penitent the terrible menace of
eternal punishment. It is not the pure and genuine law of God which the
devotee observes,--it is the law of God explained, augmented, or
diminished, and often distorted, by the voice of a fallible man, only his
equal, and perhaps vastly inferior to him in point of erudition and
purity of morals. The devotee has no right to obey God in the way he
understands the precepts imposed upon him by God and God's church. In
his view, God and the church are a sort of concrete centred in the
confessor. The confessor not only directs him, but punishes him with the
severest penances that a confessor can enjoin, for the penal code of the
confessional not only embraces the religious practices of fasting, alms,
scourging, and other inflictions, which are entirely at the disposal of
that terrible judge, but he has, or assumes to have, the power of denying
absolution; that is to say, of condemning the soul to the terrible state
of mortal sin, of interposing himself between the sinner and the divine
mercy, and of annulling the consoling hopes of Him who in compassion to
human weakness has said, "I have no pleasure in the death of a