avored by English
catechumens--(by the way, what _do_ you all mean by "auricular"
confession--confession that can be heard? and is the Protestant
pleasanter form one that can't be?)

(9.) The ninth is that passage of St. John (i. 9), the favorite
evangelical text, which is read and preached by thousands of false
preachers every day, without once going on to read its great companion,
"Beloved, if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and
knoweth all things; but if our heart condemn us _not_, then have we
confidence toward God." Make your people understand the second text, and
they will understand the first. At present you leave them understanding
neither.

262. And the entire body of the remaining texts is summed in Joshua vii.
19 and Ezra x. 11, in which, whether it be Achan, with his Babylonish
garment, or the people of Israel, with their Babylonish lusts, the
meaning of confession is simply what it is to every brave boy, girl,
man, and woman, who knows the meaning of the word "honor" before God or
man--namely, to say what they have done wrong, and to take the
punishment of it (not to get it blanched over by any means), and to do
it no more--which is so far from being a tone of mind generally enforced
either by the English, or any other extant Liturgy, that, though all my
maids are exceedingly pious, and insist on the privilege of going to
church as a quite inviolable one, I think it a scarcely to be hoped for
crown and consummation of virtue in them that they should tell me when
they have broken a plate; and I should expect to be met only with looks
of indignation and astonishment if I ventured to ask one of them how she
had spent her Sunday afternoon.

"Without courage," said Sir Walter Scott, "there is no truth; and
without truth there is no virtue." The sentence would have been itself
more true if Sir Walter had written "candor" for "truth," for it is
possible to be true in insolence, or true in cruelty. But in looking
back from the ridges of the Hill Difficulty in my own past life, and in
all the vision that has been given me of the wanderings in the ways of
others--this, of all principles, has become to me surest--that the first
virtue to be required of man is frankness of heart and lip: and I
believe that every youth of sense and honor, putting himself to faithful
question, would feel that he had the devil for confessor, if he had not
his father or his friend.

263. That a clergyman should ev