“I take this book, as its contents show, to be meant for the instruction of very young children.  I find, in one of the pages of it, the statement that between the ages of six and six and a half years would be the proper time for the inculcation of the teaching which is to be found in the book.  Now, six to six and a half is certainly a very tender age, and to these children I find these statements addressed in the book: 

“’It is to the priest, and to the priest only, that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him.’

“I hope and trust the person, the three clergymen, or however many there were, did not exactly realise what they were writing; that they did not mean to say that a child was not to confess its sins to God direct; that it was not to confess its sins, at the age of six, to its mother, or to its father, but was only to have recourse to the priest.  But the words, to say the least of them, are rash.  Then comes the very obvious question: 

“’Do you know why?  It is because God, when he was on earth, gave to his priests, and to them alone, the Divine Power of forgiving men their sins.  It was to priests alone that Jesus said:  “Receive ye the Holy Ghost.” . . .  Those who will not confess will not be cured.  Sin is a terrible sickness, and casts souls into hell.’

“That is addressed to a child six years of age.

“‘I have known,’ the book continues, ’poor children who concealed their sins in confession for years; they were very unhappy, were tormented with remorse, and if they had died in that state they would certainly have gone to the everlasting fires of hell.’” . . .

Now here is something against nature, something that I have seen time after time in the faces and bearing of priests and heard in their preaching.  It is a distinct lust.  Much nobility and devotion there are among priests, saintly lives and kindly lives, lives of real worship, lives no man may better; this that I write is not of all, perhaps not of many priests.  But there has been in all ages that have known sacerdotalism this terrible type of the priest; priestcraft and priestly power release an aggressive and narrow disposition to a recklessness of suffering and a hatred of liberty that surely exceeds the badness of any other sort of men.

8.  The children’s god

Children do not naturally love God.  They have no great capacity for an idea so subtle and mature as the idea of God.  While they are still children in a home and cared for, life is too kind and easy for them to feel any great need of God.  All things are still something God-like. . . .