There is a fact well known in Spain, which proves the abuses to which the practice of confession may lead. A husband who suspected the fidelity of his wife, knowing that she was accustomed always to go to the same church and the same confessional to confess, dressed himself up as a friar, and taking care to conceal his face with the capucha, entered the church and sat down in the confessional. The unlucky woman fell into the snare, and confided to her husband the particulars of her faithless conduct. The result was, as the reader may readily suppose, a great outcry among the clergy against such profanation and sacrilege; but the man who was guilty of this delinquency being high and powerful, escaped punishment. The canon law imposes on the confessor the most inviolable secrecy, and provides severe penalties for the least infraction. This injunction, it must be admitted, is most scrupulously obeyed; but then it must be considered, that, if the prohibition favour the penitent by preventing the disclosure of her frailties, it equally favours the clergy themselves, by making them the masters of all consciences, and lifts up to their own eyes the veil which is supposed to conceal the infirmities of their fellow-creatures. It is not difficult to calculate the advantages the clergy are able to draw from this intimate knowledge of the interests, and the ambition, hatred, and other passions of the mind most dangerous to the quietude of families. One would think it impossible that there could exist a human society in which a privileged body of men were to be found, invested with the faculty of penetrating into those mysteries which are generally supposed to be open only to the Almighty. But it was for the possession of this very faculty, that the Jesuits, so clever in discovering and practising the means of their greatness and influence, abandoning their vulgar ambition, their mitres, and other ecclesiastical insignia, fixed all their hopes and attention on the confessional. Before the extinction of that order, confessors of the popes, kings of Europe, and the chief persons of their courts, pertained to it. Leo X., Louis XIV., Louis XV., and Catherine de Medicis, may be looked upon as regulators who qualified that temperament of Christian morals which domineered over the world under the imperium of those reverend fathers.