But even the story of murder may become familiar.  Human nature at the confessional is the dark side of human nature, and it is as hard for the moral eye to preserve a healthy tone in the midst of this moral darkness as for the physical eye to preserve its clearness and strength in the constant presence of physical darkness.  Curious questions come up there, undoubtedly, of a deep, strange interest, and often, too, of a deep and strange fascination.  But it is not Nature’s generous impulses, its tender yearnings, its noble aspirations, that the stricken conscience pours into the confessor’s ear.  The strugglings and writhings of the soul, the convulsive efforts to cast off an insupportable burden, to escape from an insufferable anguish, to find rest for itself in its weariness, peace for its warring passions, an answer and a solution to its doubts,—­these are the events of the confessional.  And its fruits are the folios of Molina and Vasquez and Filutius and Lessius and Escobar, wherein sin and temptation are weighed in scales so delicate that the tenderest conscience can hardly hesitate to indulge itself now and then in the flowery little by-paths that run so pleasantly close to the straight and narrow way.  It was not in the confessional that Filangieri and Gioja and Romagnosi studied, that Adam Smith sought the secret of national prosperity, or that Sismondi found that perennial fountain of generous sympathies, which, through his fifty years of incessant labor, welled up with such a quickening and invigorating vitality from the profound investigations of the historian and the patient statistics of the economist.

Not all, however, who wear the priest’s dress are confessors and priests.  There is a body of reserves always in waiting upon the vast army of regular ecclesiastics:  men ready to push forward into the ranks, but who stop short at the prima tonsura till they have ascertained how much their chances will be bettered by taking the final and irrevocable step.  Yet, although they now and then bring somewhat more of worldly leaven into their intellectual and moral training, they well know that there is but one road to the red hat and the tiara, and that they who give themselves up to this ambition must give themselves up to it with undivided hearts.  Thus the models which they set before themselves, the ideals after which they strive, are all taken from successful aspirants to the honors of the Church.  And the interests of that great body, as a body independent of laymen, and which can preserve its immunities only by preserving its independence, and its independence only by a rigid exclusion of foreign elements,[A] become as dear to them as if they already enjoyed all its privileges and had assumed all its obligations.