SIR,—I have not come yet to the policy of the Society, but shall first introduce you to one of its leading principles. I refer to the palliatives which they have applied to confession, and which are unquestionably the best of all the schemes they have fallen upon to “attract all and repel none.” It is absolutely necessary to know something of this before going any further; and, accordingly, the monk judged it expedient to give me some instructions on the point, nearly as follows:— “From what I have already stated,” he observed, “you may judge of the success with which our doctors have labored to discover, in their wisdom, that a great many things, formerly regarded as forbidden, are innocent and allowable; but as there are some sins for which one can find no excuse, and for which there is no remedy but confession, it became necessary to alleviate, by the methods I am now going to mention, the difficulties attending that practice. Thus, having shown you, in our previous conversations, how we relieve people from troublesome scruples of conscience, by showing them that what they believed to be sinful was indeed quite innocent, I proceed now to illustrate our convenient plan for expiating what is really sinful, which is effected by making confession as easy a process as it was formerly a painful one.” “And how do you manage that, father?” “Why,” said he, “it is by those admirable subtleties which are peculiar to our Company, and have been styled by our fathers in Flanders, in “The Image of the First Century,”[204] ‘the pious finesse, the holy artifice of devotion—_piam et religiosam calliditatem, et pietatis solertiam_.’[205] By the aid of these inventions, as they remark in the same place, ‘crimes may be expiated now-a-days _alacrius_—with more zeal and alacrity than they were committed in former days, and a great many people may be washed from their stains almost as cleverly as they contracted them—_plurimi vix citius maculas contrahunt quam eluunt_.’” “Pray, then, father, do teach me some of these most salutary lessons of _finesse_.”