nds, to make a solitude, and call it
peace. Slowly, but still surely, am I working out that will. Meanwhile,
however, there is no need to advertise for heroes; they are only too
rife, clinging like bats to the curtains of my chambers of imagery, or
with attendant satellites hanging in bunches, as swarming bees about
their monarch, to the rafters of my brain. Selection is the hardest
difficulty; here is the labour, here the toil; because for just
selection there should be good reasons. Now, amongst other my
multitudinous authorial projects, this perhaps is not the worst; namely,
by a series of dissimilar novels, psychological rather than religious,
and for interest's sake laid in diverse ages and countries, to
illustrate separately the most rampant errors of the Papacy. For
example, say that Lewis's '_Monk_' is a strong delineation of the evils
consequent on constrained and unchosen celibacy; though its colouring be
meretricious, though its details offend the moralities of nature, still
it is a book replete to thoughtful minds with terrible teaching--be not
high-minded, but fear. In like manner, guilty thoughts dropped upon
innocent young hearts in that foul corner,

THE CONFESSIONAL,

might make a stirring tale, or haply a series of them: the cowled
hypocrite suggesting crime to those whose answer is all innocence; his
schemes of ambition, or avarice, or lust, slowly elaborated by the
fiend-like purposes to which he puts his ill-used knowledge of the human
heart; his sacrilegious violation of the holy grievings made by mistaken
penitence. History should bring its collateral assistance: the Medicean
Queens, Venice, bloody Spain, hard-visaged monks calmly directing the
engines of torture, the poison of anonymous calumny, and dread secrets
more dreadfully betrayed, could furnish much of truthful precedent. The
bad obstructions placed between the sinner and his God by selfish
priestcraft; the souls that would return again, like Noah's weary dove,
enticed by ravens to forsake the ark, mate with them, and feed on their
banquet of corruption; the social, religious, philosophic, and eternal
harms brought out in full detail; the progress of this world's misery in
the lives of the confessing, and of studious crime in the heart of the
absolver: a scene laid among the high Alps, and the sunny plains they
topple over; the time, that of some murderous Simon de Montfort; the
actors, Waldensian saints, and demon inquisitors; t