The practice of confession, however, is not quite extinct, particularly among the inferior classes of society, and it is natural that the clergy should represent it as absolutely necessary to the salvation of souls, looking to the great advantages which they themselves derive from it. By means of the sacrament of confession, the confessor makes himself the absolute master of the conscience of his penitent,—not merely of his own secrets, but of those of his whole family; he directs all their operations, and superintends all their domestic concerns, as well as their social and even their political affairs. The confessor has constantly suspended over the head of his penitent the terrible menace of eternal punishment. It is not the pure and genuine law of God which the devotee observes,—it is the law of God explained, augmented, or diminished, and often distorted, by the voice of a fallible man, only his equal, and perhaps vastly inferior to him in point of erudition and purity of morals. The devotee has no right to obey God in the way he understands the precepts imposed upon him by God and God’s church. In his view, God and the church are a sort of concrete centred in the confessor. The confessor not only directs him, but punishes him with the severest penances that a confessor can enjoin, for the penal code of the confessional not only embraces the religious practices of fasting, alms, scourging, and other inflictions, which are entirely at the disposal of that terrible judge, but he has, or assumes to have, the power of denying absolution; that is to say, of condemning the soul to the terrible state of mortal sin, of interposing himself between the sinner and the divine mercy, and of annulling the consoling hopes of Him who in compassion to human weakness has said, “I have no pleasure in the death of a sinner, but rather that he should turn from his wickedness and live.” The confessor is just as frail, as mortal, as subject to human weakness, as susceptible of human passions and vices, as the penitent himself. The character he assumes to perform, by the imposition of his hands, does not allay in him either the violence of appetite, or the claims of self-interest. How is it possible to believe that, in the exercise of his ministry, he can entirely rid himself of sentiments of hatred, sympathy, rancour, and envy, with respect to the man or woman who kneels at his feet, imploring through him the pardon of sin?