[206] Const. pars iv. chap. vi. § iii.
[207] To ascertain whether every one goes to the confessional every other Saturday, each boarder receives a card with his own name written on it, which he must deliver to his confessor, who gives it back to the rector. I may here mention that this method is also practised at Easter in the whole of the States of the Church, with all the inhabitants. If your card is not among those collected from the different confessors, it is evident that you have not fulfilled the precept, and if you do not give a satisfactory reason for it before the 26th of August, your name is fixed on the door of the parish church as that of a sacrilegious and infamous person. In the college of Senegallia, where I was educated, we were about two hundred boarders. Eight confessors were appointed to shrive. At sunset we descended to the chapel, whence we went in turn into the different schoolrooms to confess. The rooms were darkened, and the fathers were seated each in an arm chair, before a sort of confessional, through a grating of which our sins had to find their way to their pious ears. To such confessors as had been more severe on former occasions we usually played some tricks, such as putting a piece of raw garlic into our mouths, and pretending to be seized with a fit of coughing or sneezing, so that the poor confessor, who, in order to hear our confession well, was obliged to have his face close to the grating, had his olfactory nerves assailed by a puff of breath which was anything but agreeable. The penance, you may be sure, was double, but it never deterred us from playing similar pranks again, though we religiously fulfilled it. Sometimes we contrived to evade confession altogether in the following manner:—One who was going in to the confessional took with him the card of another along with his own. In kissing the hand of the confessor, after having confessed, he put into it one card, and slipped the other upon the table on which the father laid those he was receiving. After all was over, the servant brought in a light, and the confessor collected all the tickets he found on the table, and took them with him. Meanwhile, the person whose card had thus passed through the confessional without its owner was skulking in a closet or some other hiding-place, till, after the lapse of a sufficient length of time, he returned, as if he had religiously fulfilled the duty required. If you ask whether we believed in the efficacy of confession, I answer that we all firmly believed in it, and that in any illness or danger we would have earnestly asked for a confessor; only we did not like to go to it so often.
[208] Crét. vol. iv. p. 226.
[209] Gioberti is a Roman Catholic priest, ex-Premier of the King of Sardinia, and one of our greatest living philosophers. Though strictly orthodox, and even partial to the Papal authority, he has contributed more than any other man to give the last fatal blow to the Jesuits in Italy. His Gesuita Moderno (Modern Jesuit), in which he lays bare all the iniquities of the fathers, has ruined their order for ever, in the estimation of the Italians, and effectually prevented them from again setting foot in Piedmont. I do not share his political or religious creed, but Italy must preserve the memory of the benefit he has conferred upon her on this point, and I, in particular, have to confess myself grateful to him for the advice and encouragement he has kindly given me in the compilation of this work.
[210] Gesuita Moderno, vol. iii. p. 226. Ed. di Losanna.
[211] Ranke, vol. ii. p. 92, in a note.
[212] Mémoires de Sully, tom. ii. ch. 3.
[213] See Ranke, vol. ii. p. 132.
[214] See Bellarmine in Ranke, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117.
[215] See l’Abbé Racine, Abrégé de l’Histoire Ecclésiastique, tom. x. p. 40. See also Fra Paolo Sarpi, who has immortalised his name as theologian of the Venetian Government, and historian of the contest.