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.
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