"The romish religion teaches that if you omit to name anything in confession, however repugnant or revolting to purity, which you even doubt having committed, your subsequent confessions are thus rendered null and sacrilegious; while it also inculcates that sins of thought should be confessed in order that the confessor may judge of their mortal or venial character. What sort of a chain this links around the strictly conscientious I would attempt to portray, if I could. But it must have been worn to understand its torturing character! Suffice it to say that, for months past, according to this standard, I had not made a good confession at all! And now, filled with remorse for my past sacrilegious sinfulness, I resolved on making a new general confession to the religieux alluded to. But this confessor's scrupulosity exceeded everything I had, hitherto, encountered. He told me some things were mortal sins, which I had never before imagined could be such: and thus threw so many fetters around my conscience, that a host of anxieties for my first general confession was awakened within me. I had no resource then, but to re-make that, and thus I afresh entered on the bitter path I had deemed I should never have occasion again to tread. But if my first confession had lacerated my feelings, what was it to this one? Words have no power, language has no expression to characterise the emotion that marked it!
"The difficulty I felt in making a full and explicit avowal all that distressed me, furnished my confessor with a plea for his assistance in the questioning department, and fain would I conceal much of what passed then, as a foul blot on my memory. I soon found that he made mortal sins of what my first confessor had professed to treat but lightly, and he did not scruple to say that I had never yet made a good confession at all. My ideas therefore became more complicated and confused as I proceeded, until, at length, I began to feel doubtful of ever accomplishing my task in any degree satisfactorily: and my mind and memory were positively racked to recall every iota of every kind, real or imaginary, that might, if omitted, hereafter be occasion of uneasiness. Things heretofore held comparatively trifling were recounted, and pronounced damnable sins: and as, day after day, I knelt at the feet of that man, answering questions and listening to admonitions calculated to bow my very soul to the dust, I felt as though I should hardly be able to raise my head again!" (page 63.)
This is the peace which flows from auricular confession. I solemnly declare that except in a few cases, in which the confidence of the penitents is bordering on idiocy, or in which they have been transformed into immoral brutes, nine-tenths of the multitudes who go to confess, are obliged to recount some such desolate narrative as that of Miss Richardson, when they are sufficiently honest to say the truth.
The most fanatical apostles of auricular confession cannot deny that the examination of conscience, which must precede confession, is a most difficult task; a task which, instead of filling the mind with peace, fills it with anxiety and serious fears. Is it then only after confession that they promise such peace? But they know very well that this promise is also a cruel deception ... for to make a good confession, the penitent has to relate not only all his bad actions, but all his bad thoughts and desires, their number, and various aggravating circumstances. But have they found a single one of their penitents who was certain to have remembered all the thoughts, the desires, all the criminal aspirations of the poor sinful heart? They are well aware that to count the thoughts of the mind for days and weeks gone by, and to narrate those thoughts accurately at a subsequent period, are just as easy as to weigh and count the clouds which have passed over the sun, in a three days storm, a month after that storm is over. It is simply impossible, absurd! This has never been, this will never be done. But there is no possible peace so long as the penitent is not sure that he has remembered, counted and confessed every past sinful thought, word and deed. It is then impossible, yes! it is morally and physically impossible for a soul to find peace through auricular confession. If the law which says to every sinner: "You are bound, under pain of eternal damnation, to remember all your bad thoughts and confess them to the best of your memory", were not so evidently a satanic invention, it ought to be put among the most infamous ideas which have ever come out from the brain of fallen man. For, who can remember and count the thoughts of a week, of a day, nay, of an hour of his sinful life?
Where is the traveller who has crossed the swampy forests of America, in the three months of a warm summer, who could tell the number of musquitoes which have bitten him and drawn the blood from the veins?
What should that traveller think of the man who, seriously, would tell him: "You must prepare yourself to die, if you do not tell me, to the best of your memory, how many times you have been bitten by the musquitoes, the last three summer months, when you crossed the swampy lands along the shores of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers?
Would he not suspect that his merciless inquirer had just escaped from a lunatic asylum?
But it would be much more easy for that traveller to say how many times he has suffered from the bitings of the musquitoes, than for the poor sinner to count the bad thoughts which have passed through his sinful heart, through any period of his life.
Though the penitent is told that he must confess his thoughts only according to his best recollection,—he will never, never know if he has done his best efforts to remember everything: he will constantly fear lest he has not done his best to count and confess them correctly.
Every honest priest will at once admit that his most intelligent and pious penitents, particularly among women, are constantly tortured by the fear of having omitted to disclose some sinful deeds or thoughts. Many of them, after having already made several general confessions, are constantly urged by the pricking of their conscience, to begin afresh, in the fear that their first confessions had some serious defects. Those past confessions, instead of being a source of spiritual joy and peace, are, on the contrary, like, so many Damocles' swords, day and night suspended over their heads, filling their souls with the terrors of an eternal death! Sometimes the terror-stricken consciences of those honest and pious women tell them that they were not sufficiently contrite; at another time, they reproach them for not having spoken sufficiently plain on some things fitter to make them blush.