hing that I am bound in conscience to reveal is almost
incredible, but it is nevertheless true. The number of married and
unmarried females he had heard in the confessional was about 1500, of which
he said he had destroyed or scandalized at least 1000 by his questioning
them on most depraving things, for the simple pleasure of gratifying his
own corrupted heart, without letting them know anything of his sinful
thoughts and criminal desires towards them. But he confessed that he had
destroyed the purity of ninety-five of those penitents, who had consented
to sin with him.

And would to God that this priest had been the only one whom I have known
to be lost through the auricular confession! But, alas! how few are those
who have escaped the snares of the tempter compared with those who have
perished! I have heard the confessions of more than 200 priests, and, to
say the truth, as God knows it, I must declare that only twenty-one had not
to weep over the secret or public sins committed through the irresistibly
corrupting influences of auricular confession!

I am sixty six years old; in a short time I shall be in my grave. I shall
have to give an account of what I say to-day. Well, it is in the presence
of my great Judge, with my tomb before my eyes, that I declare to the world
that very few--yes, very few--priests escape from falling into the pit of
the most horrible moral depravity the world has ever known, through the
confession of females.

I do not say this because I have any bad feelings against those priests:
God knows that I have none. The only feelings I have are of supreme
compassion and pity. I do not reveal these awful things to make the world
believe that the priests of Rome are a worse set of men than the rest of
the innumerable fallen children of Adam. No, I do not entertain any such
views; for, everything considered and weighed in the balance of religion,
charity, and common sense--I think that the priests of Rome are far from
being worse than any other set of men who would be thrown into the same
temptations, dangers and unavoidable occasions of sin.

For instance, let us take lawyers, merchants, or farmers, and, preventing
them from living with their lawful wives, let us surround each of them from
morning to night by ten, twenty, and sometimes more, beautiful women and
tempting girls, who would speak to them of things which can pulverize a
rock of Scotch granite, and you will see how many of those lawyers