Sometimes they are women ‘with a history,’ which, in their morbid love of the secret conversation, they urge, freshly varnished and redecorated, upon every confessor they meet, and make him think that he has secured a Magdalen; frequently they are embryo novelists who deliberately concoct the most shameless stories in order to gratify their craving for that peculiar tête-à-tête which they have grown accustomed to in the confessional.
This, then, is the essential, inalienable evil of the confessional. It may not be so directly productive of gross acts as is frequently supposed, but it has a corrosive, corruptive influence that marks it out as an object of horror to all save those who have been familiar with it from childhood. And yet this system, of so grave a responsibility, has the most slender basis of all the institutions of the Church of Rome. The reasoning by which it is deduced from Scripture is a masterpiece of subtlety—certainly ‘unaided’ reason could not have achieved it. ‘Whose sins ye shall forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins ye shall retain they are retained,’ is the sole text bearing on the subject: the Catholic method of inferring the obligation of confession from the latter part of the text is interesting, and yet very simple. The apostles have the power of retaining sin: if it were possible to obtain forgiveness in any other way than by absolution from the apostles or their successors the power of retaining sin would be nugatory; therefore
