confessional are mainly responsible. In these novels by Jesuit pupils in revolt, the abuses of the confessional in the training of boys are clearly indicated, and though these abuses are considerably diminished in the case of secular priests, I still have no faith in the discretion of the good Fathers of Stanislas. When I was present at the distribution of prizes at the Sorbonne, a very imposing spectacle, the display of Stanislas was that of a charming, well-bred group of French lads, but behind each I saw the spectre of dissimulation, the insidious suggestion of the “priestly Father,” and the glory of the Church to the detriment of the State, the significant, inalterable law of Catholicity, that the triumph of good is the justification of evil, and that the law of Christ is less important than the maintenance of sacerdotal prestige and power. I looked attentively at those boys, and asked myself what the value of such training could be for them. For the priests who have educated them, they represent so many prized instruments against the Republic, and possibly so many future souls in paradise. But they themselves? When the present fashionable craze for mere “exterior” Catholicity—which is nothing more than an exasperated revolt against foreign influences, on a level, in the record of modern civilisation, with the outbreak of the Boxers of China—shall have exhausted itself, many of the lads will be mediocre freethinkers; the greater part will be what are euphemistically called “non-practical Catholics,” that is, men who are not expected to go to Mass of a Sunday in the shooting season, because it interferes with their sport; who regard confession as a distraction for women; who allow neither God nor the devil to stand between them and the most shameless vices, but who are married and buried by the ritual of Holy Mother, the Church, and whose friends, after their death, piously contemplate them aloft, wreathed and winged, playing harps and chanting hymns, who in life never listened with pleasure to any but ribald songs and unedifying verse.