a song.

Then again, I ask it, Who is the true lord, ruler, and master in that
house? For whom does that heart beat and live?

Thus it is that that stupendous imposture, the dogma of auricular
confession, does completely destroy all the links, the joys, the
responsibilities, and divine privileges of the married life, and transforms
it into a life of perpetual, though disguised, adultery. It becomes utterly
impossible, in the church of Rome, that the husband should be _one_ with
his wife, and that the wife should be _one_ with her husband: a "monstrous
being" has been put between them both, called the confessor! Born in the
darkest ages of the world, that being has received from hell his mission to
destroy and contaminate the purest joys of the married life, to enslave the
wife, to outrage the husband, and to damn the world!

The more auricular confession is practised, the more the laws of public and
private morality are trampled under feet. The husband wants his wife to be
_his_--he does not, and could not, consent to share his authority over her
with anybody: he wants to be the _only_ man who will have her confidence
and her heart, as well as her respect and love. And so, the very moment
that he anticipates the dark shadow of the confessor coming between him and
the woman of his choice, he prefers silently to shrink from entering into
the sacred bond; the holy joys of home and family lose their divine
attractions; he prefers the cold life of an ignominious celibacy to the
humiliation and opprobrium of the questionable privileges of an uncertain
paternity.

France, Spain, and many other Roman Catholic countries, thus witness the
multitude of those bachelors increasing every year. The number of families
and births, in consequence, is fast decreasing in their midst; and, if God
does not perform a miracle to stop those nations on their downward course,
it is easy to calculate the day when they will owe their existence to the
tolerance and pity of the mighty Protestant nations by which they are
surrounded.

Why is it that the Irish Roman Catholic people are so irremediably degraded
and clothed in rags? Why is it that that people, whom God has endowed with
so many noble qualities, seem to be so deprived of intelligence and
self-respect that they glory in their own shame? Why is it that their land
has been for centuries the land of bloody riots and cowardly murders? The
principal cause is the enslaving of the Irish women,