ed to me, when
he first came into the room; I had even admired the neatness of his
trousers and waistcoat: but as I looked and listened, big drops of blood
seemed to come out upon them,--a drop for every word, slowly exuding
from some mysterious source, till he was bathed all over in it from head
to foot. A day or two afterwards, I met him upon the Pincian, in the
midst of walkers and riders and all the gay throng of a crowded
promenade at its most crowded hour. But the blood was on him still, and,
under the locks that clustered darkly over his forehead, the
ineffaceable mark of Cain.

But even the story of murder may become familiar. Human nature at the
confessional is the dark side of human nature, and it is as hard for the
moral eye to preserve a healthy tone in the midst of this moral darkness
as for the physical eye to preserve its clearness and strength in the
constant presence of physical darkness. Curious questions come up there,
undoubtedly, of a deep, strange interest, and often, too, of a deep and
strange fascination. But it is not Nature's generous impulses, its
tender yearnings, its noble aspirations, that the stricken conscience
pours into the confessor's ear. The strugglings and writhings of the
soul, the convulsive efforts to cast off an insupportable burden, to
escape from an insufferable anguish, to find rest for itself in its
weariness, peace for its warring passions, an answer and a solution to
its doubts,--these are the events of the confessional. And its fruits
are the folios of Molina and Vasquez and Filutius and Lessius and
Escobar, wherein sin and temptation are weighed in scales so delicate
that the tenderest conscience can hardly hesitate to indulge itself now
and then in the flowery little by-paths that run so pleasantly close to
the straight and narrow way. It was not in the confessional that
Filangieri and Gioja and Romagnosi studied, that Adam Smith sought the
secret of national prosperity, or that Sismondi found that perennial
fountain of generous sympathies, which, through his fifty years of
incessant labor, welled up with such a quickening and invigorating
vitality from the profound investigations of the historian and the
patient statistics of the economist.

Not all, however, who wear the priest's dress are confessors and
priests. There is a body of reserves always in waiting upon the vast
army of regular ecclesiastics: men ready to push forward into the
ranks, but who stop short at