The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-01-06 00:00:00

Li such unhol

1g intro-

th all. the

ding, with
),000 men,

Do voi

ss, hovering

capitals,
, whence

terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for her,
and now, mild and gentle. goes yonder into that dark
chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of the after-

hour of V:

tender sensa-

tions ! (Wliy does the heart palpitate
How dark the church becomes! Yet. it
great rose window over the portal glitters
sun. But it is quite another thing in t
shadows envelope it, and beyond
thing astounds and almost
may be, which is th- -
farthest end of the

o strongly here !)
s not late. The
with the setting

choir; dark
One

,scurity

wever far we
mysterious old painted glass at the

1, on which the designs is no
onger distinguishable. twinkling in the shade like an
illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel
is not less dark on that account; you tan no longer dis-
cern the ornamants and delicate moulding entwined in the
vaulted roof; the shadow deepening blends and confounds
the outlines. But, as if the chapel were not yet dark
enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess
of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that
trembling woman, so close to each other, are whispering
together about the love of God."

And who is the party—what have been the previous
training and course of discipline by which he, who is

aced as an interpreter between weak woman and
her maker, is enabled to bear himself scathless through
the ordeal to which he is submitted. Condemned to en-
forced celibacy, be has nevertheless been familiarized to

to the contemplation of every conceivable species of
human frailty and vice, Besides the printed books of
standard authority which reveal such an awful amount of
grossness, their copy books used during the two conclud-
ing years of their preparation for the confessional con-
tain, M. Michelet tells us, questions upon crimes and

practices of unimaginable atrocity, unknown in the
worst ages of barbarism, and probably not perpetrated at
all, "except by the brutal soldiers of the Duke of Alva,
or by th: exiled, lawless, and godless band which Wallen-
stein drew after him—a wandering mass of iniquity,
which would have:been abhorred by ancient S

Sodom."

"We know not," continues, or anther, " hor to
qualify this culpable routine. These books, composed
for a barbarous age, unparalleled in crimes, are the same
that you give to your pupil in our own civilized age.
And this young priest, who, according to your instruc-
tions, believes the world is still that dreadful world. who
enters the confessional with all this villainous science,
and his imagination full of monstrous cases, you, impru-
dent men!—(what shall I call you?)—you confront him
with a child who has never left her mother's aide, who
knows nothing, has nothing to say, and whose greatest
crime is, that she has not learned her catechism properly,
or has Burt a butterfly ! I shudder at the interrogatory
to which he will subject her, and what he will teach her
in his conscientious brutality. But be questions her in
vain. She knows nothing, and says nothing. He scolds
her and she weeps. Her tears will soon be dried, but it
be long before she ceases to reflect."

Change, as the object of this impioui and demoralizing

scrutiny, the shrinking virgin for the wilt

e or the mother,

The confessor has proclaimed his authority from Heaven
to bind and to loose—to listen to the tale of human frailty,

and to absolve from it

" A father," he urges, " has a right to knbw the se-
crets of his child; he is an indulgent father, who wants
to know them only to absolve them. He is a sinner like
yourself; has he, then, a right to be severe ? Come,
then, my child, come and tell.me—what you have not
dared to whisper in your mother's ear; tell it me; who
will ever know."

amidst sobs and sighs, from the choking
heaving breast, that the fatal word rises to the lips, es-
capes and she hides her head. Oh ! he who heard that
has gained an immense advantage, and will keep it ; would
to God that be did not abuse it! It was heard, remember,
not by the wood and the dark oak of the confessional, but
by ears of flesh and blood.

" Then is it,

" And this man now knows of this woman, what the
husband has not known in all the long effusion of his
heart by day and night ; what even her own mother does
not know, who thinks she knows her entirely, having had
her so many times a naked infant upon her knees.
"This man knows, and will know—don't be afraid of
his forgetting it. If the confession is in good hands, so
much the better, for it is for ever. And she—she knows
full well she has a master of her intimate thoughts. Never
will she pass by that man without casting down her
eyes."

We cannot trace, with Mr. Mickelet, the working of
the system in its datkest features. Not to enter, how-

ever, into the worst, of which it is capable, can we shut
our eyes to the fact that a woman, who has thus breathed
the secret nearest to her heart, to the ears of another,
must become, henceforth, his unresisting slave—the agent
of his efforts to subjugate the other sex—the accomplice
of his persecution of her father, her brother, or her son.
Does she revolt, there is the consciousness in her heart
that her family is known to her spiritual and temporal
tyrant ; and the meaning frown reminds her of the fetters