earth. "There is one GOD and one MEDIATOR between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." I. Timothy ii. 5.

If we think to let priests on earth offer a sacrifice to God for our sins, we REJECT the all-sufficient sacrifice made by Himself for us upon the Cross. And if we think to get the Virgin Mary or the saints to intercede for us with God in Heaven, we REJECT the intercession of our High Priest, Jesus Christ.

When Korah and his company acted presumptuously by offering incense before the Lord (which only the Jewish High Priest Aaron and his sons were allowed to do) they were consumed by fire from Heaven.-Num. xvi., 35. What else are Romish and Ritualistic "priests," doing when they presume to offer the MASS as a sacrifice for sins, and to offer incense, which signifies the intercession of Christ, our High Priest before God! No wonder, then, that it is declared in the Book of Revelations that Rome itself, the head of all this presumptuous and blasphemous idolatry, shall be burned with fire. "For her sins have reached unto Heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire; for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her."-Rev. xviii. 5-8.

Then there is another way, in which the Ritualists imitate the Romish Priests, namely in the Confessional, that is, the practice of making the people confess their sins to the priest, instead of to God.

Do Englishmen and Englishwomen know that the ROMISH CONFESSIONAL HAS BEEN SET UP AMONGST US?

Do English fathers and mothers, husbands and brothers, know that their daughters, wives, and sisters are shut up alone with young unmarried priests ("as they delight to call themselves") and are pressed to open to them the inmost secrets of their hearts? THIS IS THE FACT.

The Confessional, as practised by the Ritualists and Tractarian clergymen of the Church of England, is as bad as the Romish Confessional-and worse. The Union (a leading Ritualist paper) says, "The mode of making and receiving a Confession (by the Ritualists) is substantially identical (with that of Rome); the same questions are asked, the same sort of penances given, and it appears to us somewhat dishonest to pretend that it is otherwise."

The Ritualist Confessional then is as bad as the Romish, for "THE SAME QUESTIONS ARE ASKED."

It is even worse; for in the Church of Rome the Confessional is set up in a public place in the church, where both the confessor and the person confessing can be seen by all. But the Ritualist "priests hear confessions in vestries and private rooms, where they are shut up in perfect secrecy, the priest and the penitent alone, for so long a time and so often as the priest thinks proper to direct.

Let fathers, mothers, husbands, and brothers imagine the situation of a young woman, married or unmarried, closeted with a young priest, married or unmarried, for an hour or two at a time-and that not once, but again, and again, and again! and that, too, when "the same questions are asked" as in the Romish Confessional!

But what questions?

The questions asked by a priest in confessing a penitent in the Church of Rome are such as no modest woman could endure to hear, nor any modest person would think of asking. They are such questions as a mother could not ask her own daughter. They are such as it would be an outrageous insult for a husband to ask his own wife. They are such, that if a maiden goes to confession with a mind as pure as the driven snow, she comes out from it with a mind stained with sin-polluted with evil and abominable thoughts. If her heart was innocent before confession, it becomes guilty afterwards. In that hateful Confessional she has got a knowledge of wickedness and shameful ideas which would never else have come into her head. Questions are asked of young women and girls in the Confessional so scandalous and so abominable that "it is a shame even to speak of those things that are done of them in secret."

A visitor went to a Ritualistic church in London to see and judge for himself. Before the service began, a door was opened near the vestry, within a space cut off from the body of the church by a railing. From that door there came out a young lady attended by a young "priest," who opened another little door in the railing to let her out and then retired again into the vestry. The young lady came down in the church and passed close by the visitor, and though she wore a veil, the

visitor could not but see her face was one crimson blush of shame. No wonder, when we know from the Union that "THE SAME QUESTIONS ARE ASKED" by the Ritualists, in confession, as by the Romish priests.

What those questions are we cannot write for very shame; it would pollute the pages of any book to do it.

Vice is always vice and hateful, but never so hateful as when it pretends to be virtue. Impurity is always loathsome, but never so loathsome as when it puts on the mask of religion.

And what sight on earth can be more hateful than the prying priest sitting before the pure-minded maiden? There he sits

"Squat, like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,
Assaying by his dev'lish art to reach

The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list-phantasms and dreams—
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint

Th' animal spirits that from pure blood arise,

Like gentle breaths from rivers pure: hence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires."

The priests of Rome, though bachelors, are drilled and trained in the knowledge of every secret sin that can be committed by man or woman; they have great books filled with all uncleanness to teach them what questions to ask in the Confessional. Of one of these books, the Rev. Mr. Fey, of Durham, says, "While prosecuting this disgusting branch of our subject, I was led to borrow, from a friend, a monster volume of twelve hundred pages in Latin, which is a great authority amongst the professors of Rome, and to my horror I found it crammed with such indecent and abominable trash, so impure and disgusting, that I flung it from me, as unfit to be read, whose very touch is pollution." No wonder that a Romish priest seems as if he never could look -you in the face, for his mind is like a common sewer, into which all the filthy sins and impurities of a whole country side have been poured in the Confessional; then he has poured them back again into the ears of young and simple persons by wicked questions, corrupting and polluting their minds with the dirtiness of his own. He knows it, and his guilt is stamped on his very forehead.

But as the Union tells us "the same questions are asked" by the Ritualist priests, they must of course have studied the same filthy books, or books of the same kind. They must do the same thing which the Romish priest does-first fill their own minds with all manner of wicked ideas, and then, by dirty questions, pollute the minds of innocent and simple-hearted girls with bad thoughts, to which before they were utter strangers. Who can imagine, without indignation and disgust, the shame and distress of a modest maiden at such cross-examination, or the burning blush that must crimson the cheek of the newly-married wife? Many-a-one, both man and woman, could testify that they first learned wickedness from the priest in confession. Yet these abominations are done amongst us, and done by men who still are not ashamed to eat the bread of the Church of England, and to call themselves its ministers!

In a Ritualistic church in London there was lately put up a public notice of the days and hours when a priest would attend to hear confessions. There were particular times for men only, other times for both men and women, and others again for women only, and others for girls only. When this was mentioned in a public meeting soon afterwards, the room resounded with cries of "shame, shame!" And well it might. It is a shame that such things should be done, and it is a shame that men who do such things remain clergymen of the Church of England. Let them go to Rome; it is their proper place. If they will teach the false doctrines of Rome, and practice the foul abominations of Rome, let them at once go over to the Church of Rome, and not act the part of hypocrites, smugglers, and traitors, by remaining in the Church of England. They are not Protestants at all; they hate and denounce the very name of Protestant. They are Roman Catholics in heart, and their own paper-the Union-tells them the truth when it tells them they are dishonest in pretending to anything else.

Besides setting up the Romish Confessional, the Ritualists. praise the state of celibacy-the unmarried state of the clergy. Roman Catholic priests are not allowed to marry; Ritualist priests admire and praise the rule which condemns them to remain bachelors for life. They think it a good thing-" a sacramental gift," "a new creation of grace," "a note of the

kingdon of God," for any one to remain unmarried. They even teach that young persons ought to be encouraged by the priests to remain always unmarried, even against the will of their parents. Now just consider the natural consequences of this state of things-bachelor priests hearing constantly and in private the confessions of young unmarried women, who open to them the very secrets of their hearts.

This confession is held up by the Ritualists as the best and almost the only remedy against immorality and improper intimacy between young men and women.

We can prove, on the contrary, that it is a cause of the most frightful and scandalous immorality, and that from the confessions of Roman Catholies themselves. There is no writer held in greater esteem among Roman Catholics than Liguori. His writings are approved of by the highest authority in the Church of Rome. And what does Liguori say about the Confessional? He says, that “a frequent familiarity (between the priest and the female penitent) renders danger familiar "—and that, "in a short time such persons come to this, that they no longer act towards each other as angels, as they commenced, but as those who are clothed in flesh; they interchange looks, and their minds are affected by soft expressions which still seem to proceed from the first devotions; hence the one begins to long for the other, AND THUS THE SPIRITUAL DEVOTION IS CONVERTED INTO CARNAL. And, indeed, oh, how many priests who before were innocent, on account of similar attractions which began in the spirit, HAVE LOST BOTH GOD AND THEIR SOULS!" What would Liguori have thought of confession, now practised by Ritualists and Tractarians, in private houses and rooms?

And what are the consequences? Just what might be expected the most scandalous and frightful state of immorality in Roman Catholic countries.

A good state or proof of morality in a country is the number of children born of parents who are not married.

The number of such children born in Roman Catholic towns, as compared with London, are as follows:

In Brussels, out of every hundred children, thirty-five.

In Paris, thirty-three.

In Munich, forty-eight.