But when you see, without a single exception, the nations whose women drink the impure and poisonous waters which flow from the confessional sinking down so rapidly, do you not wonder how fast the neighbouring nations, who have destroyed those dens of impurity, prostitution, and abject slavery, are rising up? What a marvellous contrast is before our eyes! On one side, the nations who allow the woman to be degraded and enslaved at the feet of the confessor--France, Spain, Romish Ireland, Mexico, &c., &c.--are, there, fallen into the dust, bleeding, struggling, powerless, like the sparrow whose entrails are devoured by the vulture. On the other side, see how the nations whose women go to wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb are soaring up, as on eagle wings, in the highest regions of progress, peace, and liberty! If legislators could once understand the respect and protection they owe to woman, they would soon, by stringent laws, prohibit auricular confession as contrary to good morals and the welfare of society; for, though the advocates of auricular confession have succeeded to a certain extent in blinding the public, and in concealing the abominations of the system under a lying mantle of holiness and religion, it is nothing else than a school of immorality. I say more than that. After twenty-five years of hearing the confessions of the common people and of the highest classes of society, of the laymen and the priests, of the grand vicars and bishops and the nuns, I conscientiously say before the world that the immorality of the confessional is of a more dangerous and degrading nature than that which we attribute to the social evil of our great cities. The injury caused to the intelligence and to the soul in the confessional, as a general rule, is of a more dangerous nature and more irremediable, because it is neither suspected nor understood by its victims.