St. Augustine, who lived fourteen hundred years ago, will answer the objection for me: “Let no one,” remarks this illustrious Doctor, “say to himself, I do penance to God in private; I do it before God. Is it, then, in vain that Christ has said: ‘Whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’? Is it in vain that the keys have been given to the Church?” The question for us is not what God is able to do, but what _He has willed to do_. God _might_ have adopted other means for the justification of the sinner, as He might have created a world different from the present one. But it is our business to take our Father at His word, and to have recourse with gratitude to the system He has actually established for our justification. Now, we are assured by His infallible word that it is by having recourse to His consecrated ministers that our sins will be forgiven us.(463) It is related in the Book of Kings that Naaman, the Syrian, was afflicted with a grievous leprosy, which baffled the skill of the physicians of his country. He had in his household a Jewish maid-servant. She spoke to her master of the great prophet Eliseus, who lived in her native country, to whom the Lord had given the power of performing miracles. She besought her master to consult the prophet. Naaman, accordingly, set out for the country of Israel and begged Eliseus to heal him. The prophet told him to go and wash seven times in the Jordan; but Naaman, instead of doing as he was directed, became very angry, and said: “I thought he would have come out to me, ... and touched with his hand the place of the leprosy, and healed me. Are not the Abana and the Pharfar rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel, that I may wash in them, and be made clean?”(464) But the servants of Naaman remonstrated with him, and besought him to comply with the prophet’s injunction, telling him that the conditions were easy and the Jordan was at hand. Naaman went and washed and was cleansed. Our opponents, like Naaman, cry out: “Why should you go to a Priest, a sinner like yourself, when secretly, in your own room, you can approach God, the pure fountain of grace, to be washed from your sins?” I answer, because Jesus Christ, a prophet, and more than a prophet, has commanded you to do so. The last charge that I will notice is the most serious and the most offensive. We are told that private confession is lawless; that the conscience soon becomes “enfeebled and chained and starved” by it, and, worse and worse, that sins are more readily committed, if followed by an absolution conveying pardon—in other words, that the more attached Catholics are to the practice of their holy religion the more depraved and corrupt they become. Or, if they remain faithful to God, this is not by reason of, but in spite of, their religious exercises.