“Still, sir, you shield the criminal from his just punishment.”

“No, sir; we never shield the criminal from his just punishment.  God has promised mercy to him who repents, and we merely administer it without any reference to the operation of the law.  It often happens, Sir Thomas Gourlay, that a person who has repented and made restitution, is taken hold of by the law and punished.  This ordinance, therefore, does not stand between the law and its victim; it only deals between him and his God, leaving him, like any other offender, to the law he has violated.”

“I am no theologian, sir; but without any reference to your priestly cant, I simply say, that the man who is cognizant of another’s crime against the law, either of God or man, and who will shield him from justice, is particeps criminis, and I don’t care a fig what your obsolete sacerdotal dogmas may assert to the contrary.  You say you know the man who unjustly deprived me of my property; if then, acknowledging this, you refuse to deliver him up to justice, I hold you guilty of his crime.  Suppose he had taken my life, as he was near doing, how, pray, would you have made restitution?  Bring me to life again, I suppose, by a miracle.  Away, sir, with this cant, which is only fit for the barbarity of the dark ages, when your church was a mass of crime, cruelty, and ignorance; and when a cunning and rapacious priesthood usurped an authority over both soul and body, ay, and property too, that oppressed and degraded human nature.”

“I will reason no longer with you, sir,” replied the priest; “because you talk in ignorance of the subject we are discussing—­but having now discharged an important duty, I will take my leave.”

“You may of me,” replied the other; “but you will not so readily shift yourself out of the law.”

“Any charge, sir, which either law or Justice may bring against me, I shall be ready to meet; and I now, for your information, beg to let you know that the law you threaten me with affords its protection to me and the class to which I belong, in the discharge of this most sacred and important trust.  Your threats, Sir Thomas, consequently, I disregard.”

“The more shame for it if it does,” replied the baronet; “but, hark you, sir, I do not wish, after all, that you and I should part on unfriendly terms.  You refuse to give up the robber?”

“I would give up my life sooner.”

“But could you not procure me the missing note?”

“Of the missing note, Sir Thomas Gourlay, I know nothing.  I consequently neither can nor will make any promise to restore it.”

“You may tell the robber from me,” pursued the baronet, “that I will give him the full amount of his burglary, provided he restores me that note.  The other sixty-nine pounds shall be his on that condition, and no questions asked.”

“I have already told you, sir, that it was under the seal of confession the knowledge of the crime came to me.  Out of that seal I cannot revert to the subject without betraying my trust; for, if he acknowledged his guilt to me under any other circumstances, it would become my duty to hand him over to the law.”