ional to confess, dressed himself up as a friar, and
taking care to conceal his face with the capucha, entered the church and
sat down in the confessional. The unlucky woman fell into the snare, and
confided to her husband the particulars of her faithless conduct. The
result was, as the reader may readily suppose, a great outcry among the
clergy against such profanation and sacrilege; but the man who was guilty
of this delinquency being high and powerful, escaped punishment.

The canon law imposes on the confessor the most inviolable secrecy, and
provides severe penalties for the least infraction. This injunction, it
must be admitted, is most scrupulously obeyed; but then it must be
considered, that, if the prohibition favour the penitent by preventing
the disclosure of her frailties, it equally favours the clergy
themselves, by making them the masters of all consciences, and lifts up
to their own eyes the veil which is supposed to conceal the infirmities
of their fellow-creatures.

It is not difficult to calculate the advantages the clergy are able to
draw from this intimate knowledge of the interests, and the ambition,
hatred, and other passions of the mind most dangerous to the quietude of
families. One would think it impossible that there could exist a human
society in which a privileged body of men were to be found, invested with
the faculty of penetrating into those mysteries which are generally
supposed to be open only to the Almighty. But it was for the possession
of this very faculty, that the Jesuits, so clever in discovering and
practising the means of their greatness and influence, abandoning their
vulgar ambition, their mitres, and other ecclesiastical insignia, fixed
all their hopes and attention on the confessional. Before the extinction
of that order, confessors of the popes, kings of Europe, and the chief
persons of their courts, pertained to it. Leo X., Louis XIV., Louis XV.,
and Catherine de Medicis, may be looked upon as regulators who qualified
that temperament of Christian morals which domineered over the world
under the imperium of those reverend fathers.

The administration of the sacrament of absolution does not figure in the
tariff of regular parochial dues, payable for baptism, marriage, and
burial. That act, according to the canons of the church, must be
gratuitous. But in Spain, since the abolition of the tithes, which
brought with it that state of poverty under which the clergy no