Prejudice or ignorance can alone construe such an inestimable treasure, which brings peace of conscience and heavenly consolation, into "making the priest the keeper of a man's conscience, and the destroyer of man's spiritual liberty and of his responsibility to his Creator." How different are the opinions of thoughtful men, concerning this Tribunal of Penance, will be seen from the following: One is a Frenchman, who, unhappily, apostatized from the Catholic Church; the second is a distinguished German philosopher, who lived and died a Protestant; the third is one of the profoundest thinkers of our day, who, born in the Episcopal Church in England, served her some forty years, and then left her to enter the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church. The first of these--Voltaire--thus writes: "The enemies of the Roman Church, who have assailed the salutary institution of confession, appear to have removed the strongest restraint which can be put upon secret crimes. The sages of antiquity themselves felt the importance of it."[61] The second--Leibnitz--in his "System of Theology" says: "The institution of sacramental confession is assuredly worthy of the divine wisdom, and, of all the doctrines of religion, it is the most admirable and the most beautiful. It was admired by the Chinese and the inhabitants of Japan. The necessity of confessing sin is sufficient to preserve from it those who still preserve their modesty; and yet, if any fail, confession consoles and restores them. I look on a grave and prudent confessor as a great instrument of God for the salvation of souls. His counsels regulate the sentiments, reprove vices, remove occasions of sin, cause the restitution of ill-acquired property, and the reparation of wrongs; clear up doubts, console under afflictions--in fine, cure or relieve all the evils of the soul; and as nothing in the world is more precious than a faithful friend, what is the value of that friend when he is bound by his functions and fitted by his knowledge to devote to you all his care, under the seal of the most inviolable secrecy?" The third--Cardinal Newman--says, in "Anglican Difficulties": "If there is a heavenly idea in the Catholic Church--looking at it simply as an idea--surely, next after the Blessed Sacrament, confession is such. And such is it ever found, in fact; the very act of kneeling, the low and contrite voice, the sign of the cross--hanging, so to say, over the head bowed low--and the words of peace and blessing. Oh, what a soothing charm is there which the world can neither give nor take away! Oh, what piercing heart-subduing tranquility, provoking tears of joy, is poured almost substantially and physically upon the soul--the oil of gladness, as Scripture calls it--when the penitent at length rises, his God reconciled to him, his sins rolled away for ever! This is confession as it is in fact, as those bear witness to it who know it by experience."[62] FOOTNOTES: [56] Matt. xvi, 19, and xviii, 18.