The custom of examining the women compromised by the self-accuser gradually grew obsolete, doubtless because they mostly protected themselves from exposure by denial. Thus, in 1707, in the Madrid tribunal, when Padre Pablo Delgado, provost of the Casa del Espiritu Santo, accused himself, there seems to have been no examination of the women and his case was promptly suspended, with a monition to abstain for six months from confessing women.[288] So, in the case of the Observantine Fray Gabriel Pantoja, who denounced himself, May 8, 1720, to the Toledo tribunal, for offences committed during the previous ten years, which show him to have lost no opportunity of seducing women, in the confessional or out of it, and of promising absolution if they would yield to his desires, the absence of his name from the record of _autos particulares_ shows that none of the women were examined and that no action was deemed necessary.[289] Indeed, what chiefly impresses one, in a series of these cases, is the matter of fact way in which every body--priests, penitents and inquisitors--seems to take it for granted that such things were a matter of course and that the confessor should be in pursuit of every woman who came before him. So, in a letter of the Mexican tribunal, May 13, 1719, to its commissioner, in the case of Fray Antonio Domínguez, who had denounced himself, the instructions are that the culprit is to be exhorted to abstain in future and to sunder an illicit connection with a daughter of confession; he is to be absolved sacramentally which, as the rule in all cases of self-denunciation, is to be made known to all confessors in the district "for the solace and comfort of their souls"--thus assuming them to be all guilty of the same offence.[290] [Sidenote: _INDIFFERENCE_]