Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/135

Rh of seven is capable of meriting eternal damnation by its acts. Needless to say, the confession of the average child of seven or eight is a mere farce: they used to be marched over to us from the schools every three months, after a careful drilling from their teachers, but scarcely one child in ten had the faintest glimmering of an idea of the nature of the operation they were subjected to. Few of them could even be sufficiently instructed to fulfil the material part of the ceremony: they mixed the various parts of the formulæ in the most unintelligible fashion, and generally wished to retreat before they had received the essential object of their coming—absolution.

The method of the ceremony is described in any Roman Catholic prayer book. The penitent first kneels for ten or fifteen minutes in the church and, with the aid of the minute catalogue of sins in his book, recalls his transgressions since his last confession. Entering the box, and usually asking the priest's blessing, he states the occasion of his last confession, so that the confessor may form a correct estimate of his sinfulness. He then states his faults, the number of times he has committed each, and any aggravating circumstances; if the confessor is not satisfied he questions him and elicits further details. Then premising, as a rule, a few words of exhortation or reproof, he imposes a penance and dismisses him with absolution, after an act of sorrow and a promise