hich contains
incomparably plainer and more palpable allusions to gross crimes than are
found in our books of devotion? Let us not forget the adage, "_Honi soit
qui mal y pense._"

I may be permitted, in concluding this subject, to add the testimony of my
own experience on the beneficent influence of the confessional; for, like
my brethren in the ministry, I am, in the language of Dryden,

"One bred apart from worldly noise,
To study souls, their cures, and their diseases."

Since the time of my ordination up to the present hour I have been
accustomed to hear confessions almost every day. I have, therefore, had a
fair opportunity of ascertaining the value of the "system." The
impressions forced upon my mind, far from being peculiar to myself, are
shared by every Catholic Priest throughout the world charged with the care
of souls. The testimony of ten experienced confessors ought, in my
estimation, to have more weight in enabling men to judge of the moral
tendencies of the confessional than the gratuitous assertions of a
thousand individuals who have no personal experience of it, but who draw
on their heated imaginations or on the pages of sensational novels for the
statements they offer.

My experience is that the confessional is the most powerful lever ever
erected by a merciful God for raising men from the mire of sin. It has
more weight in withdrawing people from vice than even the pulpit. In
public sermons we scatter the seed of the Word of God; in the confessional
we reap the harvest. In sermons, to use a military phrase, the fire is at
random, but in confession it is a dead shot. The words of the Priest go
home to the heart of the penitent. In a public discourse the Priest
addresses all in general, and his words of admonition may be applicable to
very few of his hearers. But his words spoken in the confessional are
directed exclusively to the penitent, whose heart is open to receive the
Word of God. The confessor exhorts the penitent according to his spiritual
wants. He cautions him against the frequentation of dangerous company and
other occasions of sin, or he recommends special practices of piety suited
to the penitent's wants.

Hence missionaries are accustomed to estimate the fruit of a mission more
by the number of penitents who have approached the sacred tribunal than by
the number of persons who have listened to their sermons.

Of all the labors that our sacred ministry imposes on us, the