ffer by the comparison. According to
the Protestant system, repentance is necessary and sufficient for
justification. The Catholic system also requires repentance on the part of
the sinner as an indispensable prerequisite for the forgiveness of sin.
But it requires much more than this. Before the penitent receives
absolution he must carefully examine his conscience and confess his sins,
according to their number and kind. He is obliged to have a firm purpose
of amendment, to promise restitution, if he has defrauded his neighbor, to
repair any injury done his neighbor's character, to be reconciled with his
enemies and to avoid the occasions of sin. Do not these obligations afford
a better safeguard against a relapse into sin than a simple internal act
of contrition?

Many most eminent Protestant, and even infidel writers, who were
conversant with the practical workings of the confessional in the
countries in which they lived, bear testimony to the moral reformation
produced by it. The famous German philosopher, Leibnitz, admits that it is
a great benefit conferred on men by God that He left in His Church the
power of forgiving sins.(465)

Voltaire, certainly no friend of Christianity, avows "that there is not
perhaps a more useful institution than confession."(466)

Rousseau, not less hostile to the Church, exclaims: "How many restitutions
and reparations does not confession cause among Catholics!"(467)

The Protestant authorities of Nuremberg, in Germany, shortly after the
establishment of the reformed doctrines in that city, were so much alarmed
at the laxity of morals which succeeded after the abolition of confession
that they petitioned their Emperor, Charles V., to have it restored.

It is a favorite custom for the adversaries of the Catholic Church to
refer to the alleged loose morals prevailing in France and in other
Catholic countries as a proof of the inferior standard of Catholic
morality. This is a safe, and at the same time not the most honorable,
mode of attack, as the people of those nations are too far off to defend
themselves. For my part, I have spent a considerable time in various
portions of France, and more edifying Christians I have never witnessed
than those I met in that country. For six years I had for my professors
French Priests, whose exemplary lives were a daily sermon to all around
them.

I submit that the cosmopolitan city of Paris (waiving, for the present,
the enormities of which it