But the things asserted are not inventions of imagination. No person could thus delineate scenes which he had not beheld; and therefore Maria Monk witnessed them; consequently, she was a member of that family community; for the circumstances which she narrates nowhere else occurred. At all events, it seems more reasonable to suppose that an individual can more certainly tell what had been his own course of life, than persons who, by their own admission, know nothing of the subject; and especially when her statements are confirmed by such unexceptionable witnesses. There are, however, two collateral points of evidence which strongly confirm Maria Monk's direct statements. One is derived from the very character of the acknowledgments which she made, and the period when they were first disclosed. "A death-bed," says the Poet, "is a detector of the heart." Now it is certain, that the appalling facts which she states, were not primarily made in a season of hilarity, or with any design to "make money" by them, or with any expectation that they would be known to any other person than Mr. Hilliker, Mr. Tappan, and a few others at Bellevue; but when there was no anticipation that her life would be prolonged, and when agonized with the most dreadful retrospection and prospects. It is not possible to believe, that any woman would confess those facts which are divulged by Maria Monk, unless from dread of death and the judgment to come, or from the effect of profound Christian penitence. Feminine repugnance would be invincible. Thus, the alarm of eternity, her entrance upon which appeared to be so immediate, was the only cause of those communications; which incontestably prove, that Nunneries are the very nurseries of the most nefarious crimes, and the most abandoned transgressors. The other consideration is this--that admitting the statements to be true, Maria Monk could not be unconscious of the malignity of Roman Priests, and of her own danger; and if her statements were fictitious, she was doubly involving herself in irreparable disgrace and ruin. In either case, as long as she was in New York she was personally safe; and as her disclosures had been restricted to very few persons, she might have withdrawn from the public institution, and in privacy have passed away her life, "alike unknowing and unknown." Lunacy itself could only have instigated a woman situated as she was, to visit Montreal, and there defy the power, and malice, and fury of the Roman Priests, and their myrmidons; by accumulating upon them charges of rape, infanticide, the affliction of the tortures of the Inquisition, and murders of cold-blooded ferocity in the highest degree, with all the atrocious concomitant iniquities which those prolific sins include.