“I shall not recapitulate my injunctions to this poor woman, to tranquillise her mind with respect to having to denounce her son. I advised her to change her confessor. But, had I really been vicar of the Holy Office, what was my duty in this matter? To receive the accusation of this mother against her own son. An unheard-of enormity! She naturally would have made it with grief and tears, and I should have had to offer her consolation. And since this horrible act of treason has the pretence of religion about it, I should have employed the aid of religion to persuade her that the sacrifice she made was most acceptable to God. Perhaps, to act my part better, I might have alluded to the sacrifice demanded of Abraham, or Jephtha; or cited some apposite texts from Scripture, to calm and silence the remorse of conscience she must have experienced, on account of the iniquity of bringing her child before the Inquisition.”--Pp. 115-119. CHAPTER XXII. FEMALE INQUISITIONS IN ROME. Policy of the Inquisition in the Romish Church--In Nunneries--They are Prisons--Testimony of Rev. B. White--Case of Abduction at Turin--Testimony of Rev. M. H. Seymour--Society in Rome--Italian estimate of Woman--Reasons for Nunneries--Their walls and iron gratings--Their secrecy--Testimony of an Officer--Religious temptations--Impurity in Nunneries--Instances of wickedness--Suicide of an Abbess--Popery as regarded by the Romans. Romish policy in the Inquisition, as we have seen, is not limited to the Holy Office. Its influence and its morals are felt throughout the whole circle of society in popish countries; and its operations extend to all classes, even to the educational and public institutions. It is seen in the religious houses. We have, in Chapter XIX., some affecting examples and illustrations of the enormities and immoral practices of the _celibate_ priests, among all ranks. And such evils are known to have been common in convents and nunneries. These have been considered as so many “Female Inquisitions.” Many of them are, in a proper sense of the term, _prisons_, whose unhappy inmates are altogether in the power of the priests. They are governed and regulated by rules framed or sanctioned by the “Holy Office;” and in what manner soever the recluses are treated, they have no means of redress, being entirely removed from the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, _secluded in secret apartments, to which priests only have access_.