"I had to learn by heart, like you, the infamous questions which the Church of Rome forces every priest to learn. I had to put those impure, immoral questions to old and young females who were confessing their sins to me. These questions--you know it--are of such a nature that no prostitute would dare to put them to another. Those questions, and the answers they elicit, are so debasing that no man in London--you know it--except a priest of Rome, is sufficiently lost to every sense of shame as to put them to any woman. "Yes, I was bound, in conscience, as you are bound to-day, to put into the ears, the mind, the imagination, the memory, the heart and soul of females, questions of such a nature, the direct and immediate tendency of which--you know it well--is to fill the minds and the hearts of both priests and female penitents with thoughts, phantoms, and temptations of such a degrading nature, that I do not know any words adequate to express them. Pagan antiquity has never seen any institution so polluting as the confessional. I know nothing more corrupting than the law which forces a female to tell all her thoughts, desires, and most secret feelings and actions to an unmarried priest. The confessional is a school of perdition. You may deny that before the Protestants; but you cannot deny it before me. My dear Mr. Bruyere, if you call me a degraded man because I have lived twenty-five years in the atmosphere of the confessional, you are right. I was a degraded man, just as yourself and all the priests are to-day, in spite of your denegations. If you call me a degraded man, because my soul, my mind and my heart were, as your own are to-day, plunged into the deep waters of iniquity which flow from the confessional, I confess 'Guilty!' I was degraded and polluted by the confessional just as you and all the priests of Rome are. "It has required the whole blood of the great Victim, who died on Calvary for sinners, to purify me; and I pray that, through the same blood, you may be purified also." If the legislators knew the respect and protection they owe to women--I repeat it--they would by the most stringent laws prohibit auricular confession as a crime against society. Not long ago, a printer in England was sent to jail and severely punished for having published in English the questions put by the priests to the women in the confessional; and the sentence was equitable, for all who will read those questions will conclude that no girl or woman who brings her mind into contact with the contents of that book can escape from moral death. But what are the priests of Rome doing in the confessional? Do they not pass the greatest part of their time in questioning females, old and young, and hearing their answers, on those very matters? If it were a crime, punishable by law, to present those questions in a book, is it not a crime far more punishable by law to present those very things to married and unmarried women through the auricular confession?