and in the meanwhile blazons his licentiousness on every page of his writings, and makes the whole world the confidant of his crimes and miseries! The number of infidel and licentious books written by English authors, and read by English people, presents no flattering picture of the boasted progress of the English nation in civilization. We risk nothing in saying that one may take up almost any of our modern poets, who would in their simplicity have us believe that their mission is divine, and we should not find one that is not infected with idolatry of women and of self, and it requires no great powers of discrimination to tell in what this eventually terminates.

Even those among ourselves who pride themselves on their moral culture and delicate sense of propriety, often publish things, not concerning themselves alone, but their friends, which shock a rightly instructed conscience, and which had been much better hidden and forgotten under the seals of sacramental confession; as, for example, the authors of Margaret Fuller's life.

We say to such, you have no means to relieve

your consciences, so you make your confessions

to your friends, to

them to the world.

strangers, and even publish

You cannot help it, and we know it, for confession is the natural effort of the conscience to relieve itself of the burthen of sin, and its cry after help. The wretched man who is distracted by remorse or by chagrin has need of a friend, a confidant, who will listen to him and sometimes direct him. But how much easier, how much better would it be for society, even in a temporal view, leaving aside for a moment the eternal interests of the soul, if instead of making one like yourselves, or the public, your confidant, you would kneel to one who had the divine power to relieve your conscience of sin, and the science and skill to cure your soul of its ravages.

"One bred apart from worldly noise,

To study souls, their cures, and their diseases."*

How many crimes would have been unknown in society, if such men as Goethe, Schiller, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Bulwer, had sought

* Dryden.

relief for their consciences in the divine sacrament of penance, instead of flooding society with the details of their secret vices and miseries, and thus feeding men's passions until they ripen into crime.

In confirmation of the truth of this statement, listen to what Goethe says of "the Sorrows of Werther," which was the exciting cause of so many suicides in Germany. "I felt," says he in his Autobiography, "after having published Werther, once more happy and free, and entitled to a new life, as if I had made a general confession." Such are the means to which men are forced to resort, in order to relieve their consciences and hearts, when a false religion offers them no help, or when they are too ignorant or too proud to accept the easy, efficacious, and divine remedy which the true Church affords. They rid their hearts of the passions and miseries with which they are filled, by infecting the innocent and unsuspecting; they gain to their own minds a so-called peace and freedom, by corrupting the pure and virtuous. An admirable method this to purify the heart and conscience of sin! These very men, too, and their admirers would

have us believe that they are called to aid humanity in her progressive destiny!

How natural, how manly, how divine is the Catholic economy of purifying and restoring peace to the guilty conscience!

"HA

meaning of that word Confessor ? that divine friend, in whom friendship is raised to a Sacrament, and who is found in every church, seated, waiting for you? this man, this man, this stranger to whom you open the book of your conscience, in whom you have more confidence than in the whole world besides ?" Perhaps not; then let us do it now in few and simple words.