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554 through God's mercy, in our Catholic schools and colleges; it is confession that enables the Catholic parent to entrust his boy to the good priests, whether secular or regular, who devote themselves to the work of education, without any of those qualms or fears, that anxiety and foreboding about the future, that fill the heart of the Protestant parent when he bids farewell to his innocent child on his first plunge into the vortex of a Protestant public school.

"But there is one charge, one false and cruel charge, which some Protestant writers bring against confession. They say that it introduces the young and innocent to a knowledge of subjects which are sacro digna silentio, and even suggests to them evil of which they would otherwise be ignorant. I can only assure my readers (in answer to this gratuitous calumny), on the word of an honest man, that during the twenty years and more that I have been constantly hearing confessions of men and women, boys and girls, of every class and in various countries, I have never known of a single instance of any knowledge of evil having been imparted in the confessional. I am sure that I may speak for all my fellow priests all over the world, when I say that I would, with God's help, far rather be torn in a thousand pieces than say one word in the confessional that could endanger the purity of the young, or impart a knowledge of evil to one previously ignorant of it.

"But if there should be any of my readers who are not willing to accept my own personal assurance, there is another consideration which ought to convince them. If there were in this accusation the smallest element of truth, every good mother would, in her