"Never sit in secret, alone, in a retired place, with a female who is alone with you. If she has any particular thing to tell you, let her take the female attendant of the house, a young girl, a widow, or a married woman. She can not be so ignorant of the rules of human life as to expect to have you as the only one to whom she can trust those things." It would be easy to cite a great number of other remarkable passages where Jerome shows himself the most determined and implacable opponent of those secret "tete-a-tete" between a priest and a female, which, under the plausible pretext of mutual advice and spiritual consolation, are generally nothing but bottomless pits of infamy and perdition for both. But this is enough. We have also the admirable life of St. Paulina, written by St. Jerome. And though in it he gives us every imaginable detail of her life when young, married and widow, though he tells us even how her bed was composed of the simplest and rudest materials, he has not a word about her ever having gone to confess. Jerome speaks of the acquaintances of St. Paulina and gives their names; he enters into the minutest details of her long voyages, her charities, her foundations of monasteries for men and women, her temptations, human frailties, heroic virtues, her macerations and her holy death: but he has not a word to say about the frequent or rare auricular confessions of St. Paulina; not a word about her wisdom in the choice of a prudent and holy (?) confessor. He tells us that after her death, her body was carried to her grave on the shoulders of bishops and priests, as a token of their profound respect for the saint. But he never says that any of those priests sat there in a dark corner with her, and forced her to reveal to their ears the secret history of all the thoughts, desires, and human frailties of her long and eventful life. Jerome is an unimpeachable witness that his saintly and noble friend St. Paulina lived and died without having ever thought of going to confess. Possidius has left us the interesting life of St. Augustine, of the fifth century; and again it is in vain that we look for the place or the time when that celebrated bishop of Hippo went to confess, or heard the secret confessions of his people.