ete, an irretrievable perdition; for, not knowing the guilt,
they will not cry for mercy--not suspecting the fatal disease that is being
fostered, they will not call for the true Physician. It was evidently when
thinking of the unspeakable ruin of the souls of men through the wickedness
culminating in the "Pope's confessors," that the Son of God said:--"If the
blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." To every woman, with
very few exceptions, coming out from the feet of her confessor, the
children of light may say:--"I know thy works, that thou hast a name that
thou livest, but thou art dead!" (Revelations iii.)

Nobody has yet been, nor ever will be, able to answer the few following
lines, which I addressed some years ago to the Rev. Mr. Bruyere, Roman
Catholic Vicar-General of London, Canada:--

"With a blush on my face and regret in my heart, I confess, before God and
man, that I have been like you, and with you, through the confessional,
plunged twenty-five years in that bottomless sea of iniquity, in which the
blind priests of Rome have to swim day and night.

"I had to learn by heart, like you, the infamous questions which the Church
of Rome forces every priest to learn. I had to put those impure, immoral
questions to old and young females who were confessing their sins to me.
These questions--you know it--are of such a nature that no prostitute would
dare to put them to another. Those questions, and the answers they elicit,
are so debasing that no man in London--you know it--except a priest of
Rome, is sufficiently lost to every sense of shame as to put them to any
woman.

"Yes, I was bound, in conscience, as you are bound to-day, to put into the
ears, the mind, the imagination, the memory, the heart and soul of females,
questions of such a nature, the direct and immediate tendency of which--you
know it well--is to fill the minds and the hearts of both priests and
female penitents with thoughts, phantoms, and temptations of such a
degrading nature, that I do not know any words adequate to express them.
Pagan antiquity has never seen any institution so polluting as the
confessional. I know nothing more corrupting than the law which forces a
female to tell all her thoughts, desires, and most secret feelings and
actions to an unmarried priest. The confessional is a school of perdition.
You may deny that before the Protestants; but you cannot deny it before me.
My dear Mr. Bruyere, if you call me a deg