Excerpt from Letters of Dr. Chiniquy to Senator Tasse Pagan antiquity has never known any institution more polluting of the soul and body than the Roman Catholic auricular confession. No, there is nothing under heaven more corrupting than the law which forces a female to' tell her thoughts, desires, and most secret feelings and actions to a bachelor, an unmarried man. Let him be called priest or monk, it makes no difference. Your priests may deny that before you; they will never dare to deny it before me. Now, my dear sir, if you look upon me as a degraded priest, because my heart, my soul, my mind, as those of all your priests, were plunged into those bottomless waters of iniquity which flow from the confessional, I confess guilty. I was polluted, and I was polluting the souls Of my female penitents just as every priest has to do every day. It has required the whole blood of the great victim, who died on Calvary, for you and for me, and for all the sinners, to purify me. And I pray that you and all your priests who are required to live in the same pestilential atmosphere may be purified through the same blood. But now that, by the great mercy of God, I have been taken away from the ways of perdition in which Rome was forcing me to walk with all her priests, I have no fear to be confronted with you or any of my other small or big slanderers. Many times, since that, I have challenged my bitterest enemies to find anything in my life for which an honest man must blush. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.