The unfortunate woman who lives an immoral life knows her profound misery; she often blushes and weeps over her degradation; she hears from every side voices which call her out of those ways of perdition. Almost at every hour of day and night the cry of her conscience warns her against the desolation and suffering of an eternity passed far away from the regions of holiness, light, and life. All those things are often so many means of grace, in the hands of our merciful God, to awaken the mind and to save the guilty soul. But in the confessional the poison is administered under the name of a pure and refreshing water; the deadly wound is inflicted by a sword so well oiled that the blow is not felt; the vilest and most impure notions and thoughts, in the form of questions and answers, are presented and accepted as the bread of life! All the notions of modesty, purity, and womanly self-respect and delicacy, are set aside and forgotten to propitiate the god of Rome. In the confessional the woman is told, and she believes, that there is no sin for her in hearing things which would make the vilest blush--no sin to say things which would make the most desperate villain of the streets of London to stagger--no sin to converse with her confessor on matters so filthy that if attempted in civil life would for ever exclude the perpetrator from the society of the virtuous. Yes, the soul and the intelligence defiled and destroyed in the confessional are often hopelessly defiled and destroyed. They are sinking into a complete, an irretrievable perdition; for, not knowing the guilt, they will not cry for mercy--not suspecting the fatal disease that is being fostered, they will not call for the true Physician. It was evidently when thinking of the unspeakable ruin of the souls of men through the wickedness culminating in the "Pope's confessors," that the Son of God said:--"If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." To every woman, with very few exceptions, coming out from the feet of her confessor, the children of light may say:--"I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, but thou art dead!" (Revelations iii.) Nobody has yet been, nor ever will be, able to answer the few following lines, which I addressed some years ago to the Rev. Mr. Bruyere, Roman Catholic Vicar-General of London, Canada:-- "With a blush on my face and regret in my heart, I confess, before God and man, that I have been like you, and with you, through the confessional, plunged twenty-five years in that bottomless sea of iniquity, in which the blind priests of Rome have to swim day and night.