crossed the swampy lands along the
shores of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers?

Would he not suspect that his merciless inquirer had just escaped from a
lunatic asylum?

But it would be much more easy for that traveller to say how many times he
has suffered from the bitings of the musquitoes, than for the poor sinner
to count the bad thoughts which have passed through his sinful heart,
through any period of his life.

Though the penitent is told that he must confess his thoughts only
according to his _best_ recollection,--he will _never, never_ know if he
has done his _best_ efforts to remember everything: he will constantly fear
lest he has not done his _best_ to count and confess them correctly.

Every honest priest will at once admit that his most intelligent and pious
penitents, particularly among women, are constantly tortured by the fear of
having omitted to disclose some sinful deeds or thoughts. Many of them,
after having already made several general confessions, are constantly urged
by the pricking of their conscience, to begin afresh, in the fear that
their first confessions had some serious defects. Those past confessions,
instead of being a source of spiritual joy and peace, are, on the contrary,
like, so many Damocles' swords, day and night suspended over their heads,
filling their souls with the terrors of an eternal death! Sometimes the
terror-stricken consciences of those honest and pious women tell them that
they were not sufficiently contrite; at another time, they reproach them
for not having spoken sufficiently plain on some things fitter to make them
blush.

On many occasions, too, it has happened that sins which one confessor had
declared to as venial, and which had long ceased to be confessed, another
more scrupulous than the first would declare to be damnable. Every
confessor thus knows perfectly well that he proffers what is flagrantly
false every time he dismisses his penitents, after confession, with the
salutation:--"Go in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee."

But it is a mistake to say that the soul does not find peace in auricular
confession: in many cases, peace is found. And if the reader desires to
learn something of that peace, let him go to the grave-yard, open the
tombs, and peep into the sepulchres. What awful silence! What profound
quiet! What terrible and frightful peace! You hear not even the motion of
the worms that creep in, and the worms that creep out, as they feast upo