tents of the weaker sex,
is the facility it offers for seduction.

Consider the situation of a single man in the presence of a young and
beautiful woman, alone with her, and master of her conscience and all the
secrets of her heart. How much denial, how much virtue must he not
possess to resist the temptation which such circumstances bring before
him! That great crimes do very commonly result from such circumstances
in Roman Catholic countries, is proved by the existence of the penalties
which the canon law imposes on the authors of such crimes, in the book
which goes by the title of "_De Solicitante in Confessione_." In almost
all the cities of Spain are recounted scandalous examples of this class
of abuses, and it is generally believed that in the greater number of the
cases, criminal relations between the clergy and women of all classes had
their origin in the confessional. When the people in Spain rose against
the Inquisition in 1820, and sacked the archives of that tribunal, they
found numerous informations by modest women against their confessors, who
had assailed their virtue in the confessional. The interests of the
clergy required that a veil should be thrown over those excesses, and
thus we find but very few instances in which the Inquisition awarded
punishment to the culprits.

With such efficacious instruments of power and of influence, it is not
surprising that the clergy and friars should wield an authority, without
limit, over all the affairs of families. Spaniards, who are old enough
to remember the moral state of their country towards the end of the last
century, are well aware that there was scarcely a family of any
importance in Spain which was not blindly subjected to the advice and
even orders of some individual member of the priesthood. Nothing could
be done without such advice and sanction. The clergy had great influence
in the marriages, domestic disputes, business, studies, and even
diversions, of all who recognised their superiority. They prohibited the
reading of the most innocent books,--even those respected by "the Index."
They exacted acts of devotion, such as masses, romerias, novenas, and
others, from which there resulted constant droppings of money into the
coffers of the church. In short, it may be taken as a fact, that, until
the period of the French invasion, the true government of the Spanish
nation had been a theocracy in the hands of forty or fifty thousand
individuals,