devoted, and in the Church of Rome there are great organised associations of women entirely under the control of ecclesiastics. Again, there is a lay element in a clergyman's family, which brings the world into his own house, to the detriment of its religious character. The sons of the clergy are often anything but clerical in feeling. They are often strongly laic, and even sceptical, by a natural reaction from ecclesiasticism. On the whole, therefore, it seems certain that an unmarried clergy more easily maintains both its own dignity and the distinction between itself and the laity.

Auricular confession is so well known as a means of influencing women that I need scarcely do more than mention it, but there is one characteristic of it which is little understood by Protestants. They fancy (judging from Protestant feelings of antagonism) that confession must be felt as a tyranny. A Roman Catholic woman does not feel it to be an infliction that the Church imposes, but a relief that she affords. Women are not naturally silent sufferers. They like to talk about their anxieties and interests, especially to a patient and sympathetic listener of the other sex, who will give them valuable advice. There is reason to believe that a good deal of informal confession is done by Protestant ladies; in the Church of Rome it is more systematic and leads to a formal absolution. The subject which the speaker has to talk about is that most interesting of all subjects -self. In any other place than a confessional to talk about self at any length is an error, in the confessional it is a virtue. The truth is, that pious Roman Catholic women find happiness in the confessional and try the patience of the priests by minute accounts of trifling or

imaginary sins. No doubt confession places an immense power in the hands of the Church, but at an incalculable cost of patience. It is not felt to weigh unfairly on the laity, because the priest who to-day has forgiven your faults, will to-morrow kneel in penitence and ask forgiveness for his own. I do not see in the confessional so much an oppressive institution as a convenience for both parties. The woman gets what she wants, an opportunity of talking confidentially about herself; and the priest gets what he wants, an opportunity of learning the secrets of the household.

Nothing has so powerfully awakened the jealousy of laymen as this institution of the confessional. The reasons have been so fully treated by Michelet and others, and are in fact so obvious, that I need not repeat them. The dislike for priests that is felt by many continental laymen is increased by a cause that helps to win the confidence of women. 66 Observe," the laymen say, "with what art the priest dresses so as to make women feel that he is without sex, in order that they may confess to him more willingly. He removes every trace of hair from his face, his dress is half feminine, he hides his legs in petticoats, his shoulders under a tippet, and in the higher ranks he wears jewellery, and silk, and lace. A woman would never confess to a man dressed as we are, so the wolf puts on sheep's clothing."

Where confession is not the rule the layman's jealousy is less acrid and pungent in its expression, but it often manifests itself in milder forms. The pen that so clearly delineated the Rev. Charles Honeyman was impelled by a layman's natural and pardonable jealousy. A feeling of this kind is often strong in laymen of mature years.

They will say to you in confidence-" Here is a man about the age of one of my sons, who knows no more concerning the mysteries of life and death than I do, who gets what he thinks he knows out of a book which is as accessible to me as it is to him, and yet who assumes a superiority over me which would only be justifiable if I were ignorant and he enlightened. He calls me one of his sheep. I am not a sheep relatively to him. I am at least his equal in knowledge, and greatly his superior in experience. Nobody but a parson would venture to compare me to an animal (such a stupid animal too!) and himself to that animal's master. His one real and effective superiority is that he has all the women on his side."

You poor, doubting, hesitating layman, not half so convinced as the ladies of your family, who and what are you in the presence of a man who comes clothed with the authority of the Church? If you simply repeat what he says you are a mere echo, a feeble repetition of a great original, like the copy of a famous picture. If you try to take refuge in philosophic indifference, in silent patience, you will be blamed for moral and religious inertia. If you venture to oppose and discuss you will be the bad man against the good man, and as sure of condemnation as a murderer when the judge is putting on the black cap. There is no resource for you but one, and that does not offer a very cheering or hopeful prospect. By the exercise of angelic patience, and of all the other virtues that have been preached by good men from Socrates downwards, you may in twenty or thirty years acquire some credit for a sort of inferior goodness of your own a pinchbeck goodness, better than nothing,

but not in any way comparable to the pure golden goodness of the priest; and when you come to die, the best that can be hoped for your disembodied soul will be mercy, clemency, indulgence-not approbation, welcome, or reward.

ESSAY XIV.

WHY WE ARE APPARENTLY BECOMING LESS

RELIGIOUS.

It has happened to me on more than one occasion to have to examine papers left by ladies belonging to the last generation who had lived in the manner most esteemed and respected by the general opinion of their time, and who might, without much risk of error, be taken for almost perfect models of English gentlewomen as they existed before the present scientific age. The papers left by these ladies consisted either of memoranda of their private thoughts or of thoughts by others which seemed to have had an especial interest for them. I found that all these papers arranged themselves naturally and inevitably under two heads; either they concerned family interests and affections or they were distinctly religious in character, like the religious meditations we find in books of devotion.

There may be nothing extraordinary in this. Thousands of other ladies may have left religious memoranda, but consider what a preponderance of religious ideas is implied when written thoughts are entirely confined to them! The ladies in question lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of great intellectual ferment, of the most important political and social changes,