But this is not all. Thus doomed to the dreary isolation of a manqué and mutilated life, yet, in the midst of his privations, retaining his natural passions, his longings of the heart and affections, the Romish priest is employed in no ordinary task of clerical occupation or superintendence—in preaching merely or in prayer—in the visitation of the sick and afflicted. The Confessional is added to his duties, as if on purpose to enhance the misery of his condition, and the mischief of his influence. And with whom is the confessional chiefly conversant? The male penitent, we presume, is content with a very general acknowledgment of his errors, and seldom indulges in great outpourings of the spirit, or would submit to any stretch of authority over his conscience or conduct. But the softer sex, whose own tenderness of heart, and whose power over the hearts of others, make all converse with them so potent for good or for harm—maidens, and wives in the prime of life, and in the pride of beauty, opening their souls to a confessor, revealing all their secret emotions, their hopes, their disappointments, their fears, their failings, submitting to his questions, and hanging upon his words of acquittal or condemnation; surely this is a subject of contemplation full of awful interest, and on which it is impossible to be at ease where the mysterious intercourse is without a witness and without a check—but the consciences of two frail and fallible human beings. Well may we say with Michelet, that under such a system the priest ought to be truly a πρεσβυτεροϛ, "a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much." A young priest as a father-confessor is not merely "a nonsensical contradiction," but a snare and a source of peril both to himself and his penitents.
The pomp of Popery gives its clergy sufficient aids to their influence by other means.
"The priest takes advantage of every thing that is calculated to make him be considered as a man apart—of his dress, his position, his mysterious church, that invests the most vulgar with a poetical gleam.
"What an immense place is this church, and what an immense host must inhabit this wonderful dwelling! Optical delusion adds still more to the effect. Every proportion changes. The eye is deceived and deceives itself, at the same time, with these sublime lights and deepening shades, all calculated to increase the illusion. The man whom in the street you judged, by his surly look, to be a village schoolmaster, is here a prophet. He is transformed by this majestic framework; his heaviness becomes strength and majesty; his voice has formidable echoes. Women and children tremble and are afraid.
"Do you see that solemn figure, adorned with all the gold and purple of his pontifical dress, ascending, with the thought, the prayer of a multitude of ten thousand men, the triumphal steps in the choir of St Denis? Do you see him still, above all that kneeling mass, hovering as high as the vaulted roofs, his head reaching the capitals, and lost among the winged heads of the angels, whence he hurls his thunder? Well, it is the same man, this terrible archangel himself, who presently descends for her, and now, mild and gentle, goes yonder into that dark chapel, to listen to her in the languid hours of the afternoon! Delightful hour of tumultuous, but tender sensations! (Why does the heart palpitate so strongly here?) How dark the church becomes! Yet it is not late. The great rose-window over the portal glitters with the setting sun. But it is quite another thing in the choir; dark shadows envelope it, and beyond is obscurity. One thing astounds and almost frightens us, however far we may be, which is the mysterious old painted glass, at the farthest end of the church, on which the design is no longer distinguishable, twinkling in the shade, like an illegible magic scroll of unknown characters. The chapel is not less dark on that account; you can no longer discern the ornaments and delicate moulding entwined in the vaulted roof; the shadow deepening blends and confounds the outlines. But, as if this chapel were not dark enough, it contains, in a retired corner, a narrow recess of dark oak, where that man, all emotion, and that trembling woman, so close to each other, are whispering together about the love of God."
The details of a priest's education for the confessional office are necessarily deplorable. We blame not so much the men as the system. Yet books, apparently, are continued among the preparations for this duty, which might well be dispensed with as wholly unsuited to the age. We believe that Sanchez was a man of holy life, though his purity, after the analogy of one of Swift's paradoxes, left him a man of impure ideas; and no one was ever forced by dire necessity to read his book without disgust and dismay. It may be good for the students of medicine to penetrate into every form in which bodily disease can show itself; but the pathology of the mind thus hideously represented is degrading even to the observer.
"A worthy parish priest has often told me that the sore part of his profession, that which filled him with despair, and his life with torment, was the confession.