1845.] Early Education. 353 connected with the old Andalusian "noblesse." His father was engaged in commercial pursuits, and although not rich, was able to maintain his family in the highest respectability. Joseph was brought up "with deeply inculcated habits of gentility." His mother despised trade as in itself demeaning, and did all she could to frustrate the father's intentions of educating her son to his own business. She had him instructed in Latin and in music by the time he was eight years old, and so encouraged his natural taste for knowledge, that his mercantile training became disgusting to him, as contrasted with his other pursuits. He declared his intention to become a priest, and his father and mother were both too deeply religious and too much under the influence of Catholic superstition, to oppose so holy a purpose, even had their judgment disapproved it. But it was in the highest degree gratifying to his mother. The truly religious character of his parents and their complete devotion to the Romish Church is one of the most interesting views opened in the work. They were persons of intelligence, of taste, of lofty virtue, of scrupulous conscience, and at the same time enthusiastic devotees to Catholicism. Blanco White represents their implicit obedience to their own views of religion as their greatest misfortune, and his own. But it is beautiful to see such fidelity to duty, and such practical benevolence, existing in the shadow of such dreadful superstition. The father spent a large part of every Sabbath in visiting the hospitals, exposing himself fearlessly to the most infectious disorders when raging with their most alarming fury. It would not have been strange if their son, with such evidences of real piety in his home, had grown up with an unquestioning confidence in the religion of his parents. Joseph was brought up entirely without companions of his own age. He had no brother, and his sisters were both sent to convents for their education. This made him solitary during his childhood. His early education was confined to the catechism and the jargon of School divinity. At twelve he had read no book, but "the Lives of the Saints,"except Don Quixote, by stealth, and Telemachus, a book which excited his earliest doubts; which he confesses to the priest, who smiles at the innocent skepticism of the child. He complains of the laborious observ ance of the Sabbath, which made him dread its return. At fourteen, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge takes possession of him. He read at this period a work of Feyjoo, a secret skeptic, in ten or twelve quartos, and imbibed from it the rudiments of the Baconian philosophy, which was in direct opposition to the whole spirit of his faith and education. He refers back to the opinions and feelings which reigned in his mind at this age, as being identical with those which governed him through subsequent life. He rejoices at sixty in his identity with the boy at fifteen. "A great love of knowledge and a hatred of established errors" took possession of him at that early age. He had been placed at fourteen at a College of Dominicans in Seville, but remains there only a short time and is removed to the University. Here he falls in with a tutor, Arjona, who is struck with his talents and takes him, with two others, under his special charge. This instructer, a priest, possesses extraordinary abilities and great worth, but "has that in his mind which could not fail to place him in a state of jarring dissonance with the religion of Spain." At this time, however, he is sincerely devoted to the Catholic religion. He initiates his pupil into French and Italian literature, and conducts with great success his Latin, rhetorical and oratorical studies, while he encourages his clerical tastes and purposes. We will add in passing, as an illustration of the tendencies of the Catholic system upon the best minds, that this Arjona, a priest and a scholar, becomes in the end a complete skeptic and a dissolute character. Joseph has, in accordance with the custom, chosen a confessor upon entering the University, at the church of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. He was guided in his choice by the splendor of the service at this particular chapel, by his love of music, which was carried to consummate perfection here, and by his inherited admiration of the Jesuits, who directed this church. He represents this St. Philip Neri, "as the spiritual opera-house of Seville," and being accomplished in music, he was accustomed, as a volunteer in the orchestra upon high festivals, to play from morning till sunset, "till his fingers were ready to bleed;" an illustration of the enthusiasm of his temperament. 1845.] Auricular Confession. 355 He complains of the extreme drudgery of his religious duties, during the whole period of his youth, when he fully believed in their efficacy and sanctity; of the weariness of waiting on his knees for his turn to confess; or of looking on while the priest went through "mass; " and of the long and unmeaning sermons to which he was compelled to listen. From fourteen to twenty-seven, the age at which for a time he became an unbeliever, he never, except under serious illness, omitted reading in an audible voice the whole service for the day out of the Breviary, which at the most rapid rate took an hour and a quarter. Nor was this the most burdensome task imposed upon him. He describes an exercise called "Oracion Mental," which was prescribed by his confessor, as still more annoying. It consisted in an hour equally divided between reading unmeaning books of devotion, and meditating upon the knees in perfect silence on what had been read. Although wholly incapable of fixing his attention, his sense of duty compelled him, watch in hand, to go through with this useless drudgery for many years. "It is indeed," he exclaims, "a matter of surprise to me at this moment, how I could, for so long a period, submit to such a series of fatiguing practices, and yet find time and strength for my mental studies. To feel indignant at this distance of time may be absurd; but it is with difficulty I can check myself, when I remember what I have suffered in the name of religion." - Vol. i. p. 29. The ardent imagination, with the decided love of every enjoyment, which characterised White, made him twice during his preparation for orders desire to quit the clerical profession, but domestic influence overruled his wishes. In speaking of the conflict between his love of freedom and his professional bondage and dependence upon the direction of his confessor, there occur these valuable observations upon the tendency of Confession. "In a country where every person's conscience is in the keeping of another, in an interminable succession of moral trusts, the individual conscience cannot be under the steady discipline of self-governing principle: all that is practised is obedience to the opinions of others; and even that obedience is inseparably connected with the idea of a dispensing power. If you can obtain an opinion favorable to your wishes, the responsibility falls on the adviser, and you may enjoy yourself with safety. The adviser on the other hand, having no consciousness of the action, has no sense of remorse, and thus the whole morality of the country, except in very peculiar cases, wants the steady ground of individual responsibility."- Vol. i. p. 33. We may add while on the subject of confession another extract. - "I will not stop to urge the grounds of a conviction, on which I have enlarged elsewhere-that auricular confession is one of the most mischievous practices of the Romanist Church. To those who are not totally ignorant of the philosophy of morals, it must be clear that such minute attention to individual faults— not to trace them to their source in the heart, but in order to ascertain whether they are venial or mortal sins according to the judgment of another man - must, in an infinite number of cases, check the development of conscience, and may totally destroy it in many. As far as my experience extends, the evils of auricular confession increase in proportion to the sincerity with which it is practised. * * Many, indeed, were the evils of which my subsequent period of disbelief in Christianity (a disbelief full of spite for the evils inflicted upon me in its name) was the occasion; yet I firmly believe that but for the buffetings of that perilous storm, scarcely a remnant of the quick moral perception which God had naturally given to my mind would have escaped destruction by the emaciating poison of confession. judge from the certain knowledge of the secret conduct of many members of the clergy, who were deemed patterns of devotion. Like those wretched slaves, I should have been permanently the worse for the custom of sinning and washing away the sin by confession. Free, however, from that debasing practice, my conscience assumed the rule, and, independently of hopes and fears, it clearly blamed what was clearly wrong, and, as it were, learnt to act by virtue of its natural supremacy.” — Vol. i. pp. 43, 44. We know no writer who has better explained and illustrated the connexion between animal spirits and religious enthusiasm than the author of this work, and whoever would see the machinery by which in the Catholic Church the imagination is rendered master of the reason, and the bodily passions are made to do the work of the moral affections, should read his account of the " Spiritual Exercises " under the direction of Father Vega, contained between the thirty-fifth and fiftieth pages of the first volume. Blanco White's natural disgust for the "cloying and 1845.] Change of Opinions. 357 mawkish devotion" in which he was compelled to participate made him very anxious to abandon his profession. His father would have supported him even at the last moment in this resolution, but his mother's tears so wrought upon his tender heart, that he had not strength to disappoint her fondest hope, and at the age of twenty-one he allowed himself to be admitted to sub-deacon's orders. There follow in the narrative some very interesting, but painful statements of the author upon the celibacy of the clergy, in which he declares unchastity to be the very general result. His opportunities as a confessor of knowing the condition of females in the nunneries, reveal a shocking state of impurity among that incarcerated race of vestals. He now passes four years in College as a Fellow, preparatory to taking priest's orders. It was not a season of improvement or of happiness. As the time approached, a sincere and determined effort to resume the retired life of his early youth, and obtain the peace of mind which had left him, returned. He had, he says, "an awful sense of the dignity of the priestly office and trembled at the idea of profaning it." With these feelings he entered the priesthood. It is impossible to recount even the principal events which now succeeded in his life. His ambition was aroused, and he made many and great efforts to distinguish himself. In public competitions for honors and places he was crowned with success, and there opened before him a professional career of honor and influence, bounded only by his ambition. But this career was quickly obstructed by his unconquerable skepticism. He gives the following account of his change of opinions. "The history of my change from a sincere belief of the Roman Catholic Creed to a total disbelief of Christianity, has been faithfully recorded in my works on Romanism. My rejection of Christianity was the necessary result of a free examination of that spurious, but admirably contrived form in which I had received it. I did not deny Christianity in order to live without a moral law. My change was not the effect of vicious inclinations, or immoral practices. My conduct was perfectly correct, when in spite of the most earnest efforts to resist conviction, I found conviction irresistible. In rejecting Christianity as an imposture I was certainly wrong, but I cannot discover how it could be possible in my circumstances to have |