a thousand years ago could have conceived the meaning of St. Augustine’s Confessions.  For what we see is this—­that when the personal influence of the white missionary is withdrawn, and the Negro left to perpetuate his sect on democratic principles, his creed merely feeds his inordinate natural vanity with the notion that everybody who differs from him is going to hell, while he is going to heaven whatever his morals may be.’

If a Roman Catholic priest should say all this, he would at least have a right, I believe, to a respectful hearing.

Nay, more.  If he were to say, ’You are afraid of our having too much to do with the education of the Negro, because we use the Confessional as an instrument of education.  Now how far the Confessional is needful, or useful, or prudent, in a highly civilised and generally virtuous community, may be an open matter.  But in spite of all your English dislike of it, hear our side of the question, as far as Negroes and races in a similar condition are concerned.  Do you know why and how the Confessional arose?  Have you looked, for instance, into the old middle-age Penitentials?  If so, you must be aware that it arose in an age of coarseness, which seems now inconceivable; in those barbarous times when the lower classes of Europe, slaves or serfs, especially in remote country districts, lived lives little better than those of the monkeys in the forest, and committed habitually the most fearful crimes, without any clear notion that they were doing wrong:  while the upper classes, to judge from the literature which they have left, were so coarse, and often so profligate, in spite of nobler instincts and a higher sense of duty, that the purest and justest spirits among them had again and again to flee from their own class into the cloister or the hermit’s cell.

’In those days, it was found necessary to ask Christian people perpetually—­Have you been doing this, or that?  For if you have, you are not only unfit to be called a Christian; you are unfit to be called a decent human being.  And this, because there was every reason to suppose that they had been doing it; and that they would not tell of themselves, if they could possibly avoid it.  So the Confessional arose, as a necessary element for educating savages into common morality and decency.  And for the same reasons we employ it among the Negroes of Trinidad.  Have no fears lest we should corrupt the minds of the young.  They see and hear more harm daily than we could ever teach them, were we so devilishly minded.  There is vice now, rampant and notorious, in Port of Spain, which eludes even our Confessional.  Let us alone to do our best.  God knows we are trying to do it, according to our light.’

If any Roman Catholic clergyman in Port of Spain spoke thus to me—­ and I have been spoken to in words not unlike these—­I could only answer, ’God’s blessing on you, and all your efforts, whether I agree with you in detail or not.’