the Diocesan Statutes, at the Bible of Rheims and Douay, with their Annotations, and all the mendacious knavery connected with them. But the subject is before the public, and I trust it will unceasingly be so, till the proper effect is produced.
I am not so much concerned with these engines
tion for the Roman Catholic priesthood of Ireland! How can that unhappy country be expected to break its adamantine fetters, while Maynooth College continues to be supported by the Government and the country for the propagation of treason, perjury, sedition, immorality, and vice! How long will the people of England tamely look on, and passively behold the application of the funds of the country to the support of a system of education which openly inculcates perjury and murder for the purpose of supporting the diabolical Confessional—an institution to which may be ascribed the greater part of the outrages and crimes, the murders and massacres, which have stained and are daily staining unhappy Ireland? Owing to the ease of mind necessarily experienced by the murderer in communicating his horrid deed to the priest at confession, and also the facility of obtaining absolution for his awful crime, murders have lost the greater part of their enormity in the eyes of the demoralised peasantry of Ireland. I am thoroughly convinced that the frequent occurrence of murder in Ireland is principally to be attributed to the pain of mind attendant on being the confidant of a guilty secret being removed, by communicating the secret to the priest in confession, and receiving absolution. Every one of common understanding must know what a heavy burden it is to bear the consciousness of crime—how distressing it is to he the confidant of a guilty secret; but in Ireland, owing to the Confessional, that pain is not felt. If there was no such institution as the Confessional to interpose its authority and give the troubled mind an opportunity of obtaining all the comforts of a superstitious religion, not only would murder and other heinous crimes become of less frequent oc-
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