Training Your Children For Christ

by General William Booth

Edited and paraphrased by Martin Bennet

 

There are certain things that parents must do – indeed, that only parents can do – if their children are to become true servants of God. I don’t want to hide the fact that what I’m setting before you will not be gained without considerable difficulty, carefulness, and work. However, nothing truly good or great is ever accomplished without trouble. I am certain that for every intense hour and patient effort this work demands, parents will be abundantly repaid if they succeed.

 

Things Parents Should Do

 

First, there are some things that must be done if you want to reach the great goal in the training of children – for them to love and serve God with a pure heart.

 
1. You must keep your goal constantly before your mind. Look it in the face and firmly determine to accomplish it. Don’t let the seductive charms of the world or the temptations of the devil or the promptings of ease and pleasure turn you aside. Oh, fathers and mothers, you must make up your mind to do or die!

 
2. You must believe in the possibility of success. What you desire has been done with glorious results, and what parents have done before, parents can do again. Don’t be deterred by the failures of others, though such failures are sadly too numerous. Say to yourselves in the face of the breakdowns, “Just because the children of some professing Christians haven’t turned out well – even if some have gone bad altogether – that’s no reason why ours should be lost. God has said, `Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.’ (Proverbs 22 6) We believe Him, and we are going to do the training as well as we can, and trust Him to see to its success.” Have faith in God, and He will come to your assistance.

 
3. Be a holy example. Create and confirm in the hearts of your children the assurance that you yourself are what you want them to become. Practice daily the same unselfish love and righteousness you ask from them. Without this, you will never accomplish the goals you have set your heart on.

 
4. Teach your children what real Christianity is. Make them understand it. Make them admire it. Explain it as soon as they can take it in. Base your teaching on the principles and examples in the Bible, especially in the life and death of the Lord Jesus Christ and the examples of His disciples, but don’t limit it to them.

 
5. Help your children understand that everything you ask from them is right and reasonable. Appeal to their judgment and conscience rather than to their feelings, although you must not neglect their hearts. It is important for them to understand you. Come down to the level of their capacity and intelligence.

 
6. You must make following Christ a part of your everyday life. Your children must feel that you are as religious at home as in meetings, on Mondays as on Sundays, in your work as on your knees. Without always talking at them about it, your faith in God should be the atmosphere of the house, so in that atmosphere they can “live and move and have their being.” (Acts 17:28)

 
7. You need to aim at a distinct experience of conversion in your children. A line divides the righteous from the wicked. God’s own fingers have drawn that line. There is a moment when human beings, adults or children, cease to be the servants of the devil, and become the servants of God. That line and moment may be approached so gradually as to be crossed almost without notice. But with all who become the children of God, that moment does arrive and that line is crossed, and then they pass from darkness to light, from death to life. In other words, they are saved. You must aim at that distinct experience for your children. You must explain to them its nature and necessity as soon as they can understand. Pray for it in your own bedroom, and hand-in-hand with them also. Lead them to expect their own conversion, either at the meetings or at home. By-and-by you will have the joy of knowing the great change has actually taken place, and of hearing them testify to the fact: a joy which is nearer to the joys of the angels than any other that can come to a father’s or mother’s heart.

 
8. You must make your children kind. Don’t allow cruelty of any sort in them. The lack of thought and sympathy for others, which is so painfully visible in the vast majority of people, is nothing more than a result of their early training in this area.

They were practically encouraged – that is, they weren’t corrected – in little acts of unkindness as toddlers. They pinched the kitten, frightened the bird, or threw down their toys for some tired mother or weary servant to pick up. By-and-by they pulled the legs off of spiders, threw rocks at dogs, and went into fits of pleasure in chasing some poor creature found wounded on their way from school. From that it was only a step to sneering at the beggar who asked for a piece of bread, or mocking the poor and the crippled.

And now, they are all around us in their thousands, never having a thought of kindness or a desire to do a kind thing that costs them any trouble or self-denial. Set your face against such things, and against the spirit which makes them possible.

 
9. Do everything you can to promote the health of your children. Their diet and exercise will affect them in adulthood.

 
10. Do all you can for the minds of your children. You want to make them wise and thoughtful. However poor and humble you may be, a simple education is within your reach. See that your children get it, and be sure to take interest yourself in what they learn.

 
11. Strive to make your children good workers. Give them a chance to contribute work around the house, in the garden, or in the workshop – something apart from their studies. Never let them be unoccupied. Keep them working or playing all through their wakeful hours. Idle hands are the devil’s tools.

 
12. Rely on the Holy Spirit to bless all your efforts. You can depend on the promises in Scriptures that He will rejoice to help you.

 
13. Insist on obedience to all you ask. You must have this obedience or all your other efforts will be thrown away. It’s impossible to overestimate its importance. Forming the habit of ready and willing submission to your will prepares them in forming the habit of obedience to God, which is more important than anything else.

Settle it, therefore, from the first vision of your infant child, from the first kiss you impress upon its little cheek, that, before all else, you will create in this young soul the habit of obedience. How do we do this?

 

The Habit Of Obedience

 

1. Begin early. “Unless you get the dye into the wool, it will be hard work to get it into the cloth.” It’s astonishing how soon the infant in its mother’s arms can be taught that it must do her will, and not its own.

  
2. Don’t give too many commands. But take the trouble to make sure they obey your commands, or the commands you permit others to give on your behalf. How often parents tell their children to do this or that, without even waiting to see, or apparently caring, whether their wishes are carried out! This inevitably leads children to think it doesn’t matter whether they obey at all.

 
3. Be careful that every command given is within your child’s ability to carry out. It’s cruel to ask children to do what is beyond their power, and yet, I’m afraid many parents are thoughtlessly addicted to the practice. They would never dream of requiring their children to carry a huge suitcase they couldn’t lift, or read in a language they hadn’t learned – but they will require a little child to sit motionless and silent for an hour; or forbid it crying when it has pain; or insist upon its going to sleep when it is excited – requirements far beyond its ability, if not actually impossible. Be tender and considerate in the commands you give your children.

 
4. Be careful that your orders are good and lawful; otherwise, how can you insist they obey you?

 
5. Be careful that your commands are understood. Some people talk quickly, others don’t take the time to explain their wishes. This is especially important when you ask your children to do something out of the ordinary. In those cases it’s wise to ask “Do you understand me?” particularly if your child shows any hesitancy in obeying you.

 
6. Be sure to show your child, in a way he can understand, your strong disapproval of all disobedience. You cannot pass disobedience by without notice. To do so is one of the surest methods of cursing your child for the present and the future. In a very real sense, you are teaching them what their heavenly Father thinks of disobedience.

 
7. Give suitable punishment to your children when they disobey.It’s not likely that you will be favored with children so truthful and obedient as never to need punishment. Therefore, it’s important that you have the right idea on the subject of punishment.

 

Things Parents Should Not Do

 

1. You must never set things that are earthly and temporary above things that are heavenly and eternal. If you do, you can’t complain if your children grow up to prefer the world and its charms, to following Christ in a life of holiness and self-denial. Don’t ever allow things that produce the impression on your children’s minds that making money or pleasing ungodly people or winning the praise of men or gratifying themselves or anything else of the kind is, or can ever be, of greater value than pleasing God.

 
2. Don’t fool yourself into believing that if your children are left to themselves, they will naturally develop into the godly, holy, self-sacrificing characters you desire – and then be disappointed if they turn out to be little devils, or grow up to be very much like big ones. If children don’t actually bring evil natures into the world with them, they certainly acquire selfish and naughty hearts very soon alter their arrival here. You need to recognize that fact, and to face it with courage and faith, not only for their sakes, but for your own. Remember the terrible condemnation which God pronounced against Eli, the High Priest, in this matter-He said, “I am about to junge his house forever for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons brought a curse on themselves and he did not rebuke them.” (I Samuel 3:13)

 
3. Don’t expect that children who possess any backbone of resolution and energy will be likely to submit their wills, first to their parents and then to God, without a great deal of patient and persevering effort on your part. There will be exceptions to this rule. Samuel seems to have been of strong character, yet he didn’t apparently oppose God’s purpose; Josiah was another, Timothy another. I have known some myself. Be that as it may, if you want all your children for the King, whether their natures are pliable or unyielding, you must expect to take trouble for their salvation, and let nothing keep you from persevering.

 
4. Don’t expect your children to be so naive that they won’t see beneath the cloak of a false Christianity, especially if they find it in their own home. And don’t think that after they discover its unreality, they won’t despise it. Don’t be surprised if when they see such hypocrisy, they make it an excuse for neglecting, if not positively disbelieving, in Christ altogether.

 
5. Don’t expect your children to be any better in character and conduct than the example set before them – by you, by their own friends, or by those they spend time with. If you allow them to associate with halfhearted church goers, with worldly Pharisees, or backsliders, then don’t be surprised if they are cursed by those examples, and driven from God and true Christianity. Children are likely to suffer more harm by staying one day in the house of some make-believe follower of Christ than they would spending a month in a tavern, where they’d be on their guard because they knew the devil reigned there.

 
6. Don’t contaminate the love of beauty, which exists in the hearts of all children, through the destructive vice of vanity. You will do this if you give them a taste for expensive clothes, fancy hair styles, and wearing all kinds of other adornments. And if you fill them with the childish conceit that they have prettier faces or figures than others around them, don’t wonder if they should, in later years, be drawn into the world by the attractions of its fashions and empty show.

 
7. Don’t fill your children’s minds with the idea of their supposed superiority, mental or otherwise, over their friends, schoolmates, and others around them, and then be surprised when they go out into life as unhappy slaves of an ambition to climb above everyone else, which will alone be enough to destroy all their real peace of mind.

 
8. Don’t allow your boys to think that they’re more important or of greater value than their sisters, and then be surprised if they grow up to look down on and domineer over women generally, and to treat their own mother or their wives as if they belonged to an inferior race. This false idea of superiority, if planted in a boy’s heart, will in later life produce the spirit of real tyranny.

 
9. Don’t instill, or allow anybody else to instill into the hearts of your girls the idea that marriage is the chief end of life. If you do, don’t be surprised if they get engaged to the first empty, useless fool they come across.

 
10. Don’t pamper or spoil your children, making them whiny or complaining, and then be surprised if they grow up to be a nuisance to themselves and a torment to everybody around them unless they’re allowed to have their own way, or continuously waited upon and amused. (Proverbs 29:15)

 
11. Don’t encourage selfishness in your children. In their infancy, children are ordinarily carried away by the desire for self-gratification. Your first business is to lead them in the opposite direction, to make them forget and deny themselves and delight in serving others.

 
12. Parents shouldn’t discuss or argue about the conduct or character of their children while in the children’s presence, and then be surprised if they take sides with the father or mother, depending on whose ideas are the most favorable to their selfishness.

 
13. Don’t make favorites among your children, and then be surprised that those who are not the chosen ones should grow up with a sense of injustice festering in their hearts, which will very likely make them forget all the love you have ever given them.

 
14. Don’t let your children have their own way or give them what they want merely for the sake of peace, or any other reason whatever, when it’s opposed to your own judgment of what is best for them. If you do, you can’t be surprised when they argue with you, contradict you to your face, ridicule your wishes and opinions behind your back, and at last (to your

shame and their own undoing) disregard you altogether. Never forget that it’s written of your Savior Himself, that in His childhood “He continued in subjection to them” – His parents. (Luke 2:51)

 

---

 

This article was adapted from chapters 22 and 23 of “Love, Marriage, and Home” by William Booth, published in 1902:

 

<blockquote

Punishing Your Child

 
1. Before punishing a child, be sure he is guilty of the deed. Nothing can be more painful to the parent or more harmful to a child than discovering that a punishment was not deserved.

 
2. Also, before punishing, be sure that the deed was done deliberately. If the child wasn’t aware he was doing wrong, or didn’t intend to do the deed, then it was an accident, in which case punishment is not deserved.

 
3. If you’re satisfied that they deserve punishing, do it right away. The sooner the penalty follows the misdeed, the more effective it will be.

 
4. The punishment given must be, as nearly as possible, the kind that will produce repentance. Two goals should be before every parent in carrying out this painful task:

• When you punish your child, your aim should be to bring him to repentance. You want him to realize his naughtiness, to see that wrongdoing makes misery, to be sorry for his sin, and to decide that he will never do the evil thing again.
• When he does a wrong thing, his conscience will tell him that he ought to suffer for it. When a painful punishment is the natural out come of wrong conduct, then wrong-doing and suffering will be closely associated in his heart. You should strengthen that conviction, so that in later life he will know that if he lives and dies in sin, hell will be his rightful end.

5. Punishment, painful so that it will be remembered, should be as short as the offense requires. This is in favor of the occasional use of the rod. A gentle spanking will be remembered, but will not unnecessarily prolong the suffering. (Proverbs 23:13-14)

 
6. Be careful that you never harm your child’s health. It’s possible to damage a child for a lifetime by too severe or long-lasting pain. However naughty, disobedient, or cruel children may act, justice must always be tempered with mercy.

 
7. When telling your child to obey you, avoid drawn out conflicts. From some strange motive, there is occasionally a blank refusal by a child to obey a direct command. If he doesn’t obey you in a reasonable amount of time, an immediate spanking is the best thing. The unfortunate course adopted by many parents is to try to force the child to obey, no matter how long it takes, and under such circumstances a regular battle between the wills of the parent and the child is a common experience.

 

William Booth (1829-912) founded The Salvation Army with his wife Catherine in 1865, in their home country of England. As a zealous evangelist, his passion for the lost was especially for those who were outcasts of the established church. His whole life can be summed up in his own words, “Go for souls, and go for the worst!”

 

Even though William and Catherine were heavily involved in evangelism and helping the poor, they never forgot the importance of training up their own eight children in the ways of the Lord. The children learned early in life that they were expected to obey their parents and that life was no game. One son said, “None of us grew up slackers; none of us played with life.” While the Booth home was well disciplined, it was also affectionate, and in the early days William was often found wrestling the children on their floor, or letting the little girls play with his hair as he read a book. Emma, speaking about her mother said, “She was the light of our lives, the inspiration of our childhood, the ideal of our ambitions, the repository of our confidences, the guardian angel of our souls, and the beacon of our lives as we sailed earth’s sea towards the same William and Catherine Booth dedicated their children to the same work God called them to – loving a lost and hurting world to Jesus. They were not disappointed by the results. All their children were workers in God’s Kingdom, taking the Gospel to many nations including India, France, Switzerland, and the United States.

 

---

Auricular Confession And Popish Nunneries

By Converted Priest William Hogan, 1854

 

Detailing the crimes and immorality of “celibate” priests and nuns and
exposing the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in denouncing abortion

 

If I can satisfy Americans that Auricular Confession is dangerous to their liberties; if I can show them that it is the source and fountain of many, if not all, those treasons, debaucheries, and other evils, which are now flooding this country, I shall feel that I have done an acceptable work, and some service to the State. I fear, however, that I shall fail in this; not because what I state is not true, and even admitted to be so, but because Americans seem determined, I would almost say fated – to political and moral destruction.
 
For twenty years I have warned them of approaching danger, but their politicians were deaf, and their Protestant theologians remained religiously coiled up in fancied security, overrating their own powers and undervaluing that of Papists. Even though they see and feel, and often blush at the logical triumph, which popish controversialists have gained, and are gaining over them in every intellectual combat in which they engage; yet such is their love of ease or love of money, or something else, that they cannot be roused until the enemy falls upon them with an annihilating force.
 
It is painful to me to see this indifference upon their part. They are better able than I am to contend with Papists. They possess more talents, and have more friends than I have to sustain them. This is the land of their birth. It is not mine, but not the less dear to me. The religion of this country is the religion of their forefathers, and of the Bible; it is peculiarly their duty to defend both.
 
Every crime, as I have stated before, which the Romish church sanctions, and almost all the immoralities of its members, either originate in or have some connection with Auricular Confession; and in order to explain this to my readers, it will be necessary for me to go back and state the causes which first induced me to doubt the infallibility of the Romish church.
 
I have often been asked the following question: Why did you leave the Roman Catholic church? Before I answer this question, I may well exclaim, in the language of the ancient poet, omitting only one word, “Oh! nefandum, jubes, renovare dolorem.” But however painful the relation may be; however offensive to the ears of the virtuous and chaste; however disgusting to the pious and moral portion of our community; however at variance with the elegances and formalities of private life; however heavily such a narrative may fall upon Roman priests and bishops, and disreputable it may be to nuns and Nunneries, I will answer the above question, so often and so frankly put to me by many even my personal friends.
 
Several causes have contributed to induce me to doubt the infallibility of the Popish church, and to renounce its ministry altogether. Among the first was the following: When quite young and but just emerging from childhood, I became acquainted with a Protestant family living in the neighborhood of my birthplace. It consisted of a mother (a widow lady) and three interesting children, two sons and one daughter.
 
The mother was a widow, a lady of great beauty and rare accomplishments. The husband, who had but recently died, one of the many victims of what is falsely called honor, left her, as he found her, in the possession of a large fortune, and, as far as worldly goods could make her so, in the enjoyment of perfect happiness. But his premature death threw a gloom over her future life, which neither riches nor wealth, nor all worldly comforts combined together, could effectually dissipate. Her only pleasure seemed to be placed in that of her children.
 
They appeared – and I believe they really were – the centre and circumference of her earthly happiness. In the course of time the sons grew up, and their guardian purchased for both, in compliance with their wishes, and to gratify their youthful ambition, commissions in the army.
 
The parting of these children, the breaking up of this fond trio of brothers and sister, was to the widowed mother another source of grief, and tended to concentrate more closely all the fond affections of the mother upon her daughter. She became the joy of her heart. Her education while a child was an object of great solicitude, and having a fortune at command, no expense was spared to render it suitable for that station in life, in which her high connections entitled her to move when she should become of age.
 
The whole family were members of the Protestant church, as the Episcopal church is called in that country. As soon as the sons left home to join their respective regiments, which were then on the continent, the mother and daughter were alone, so much so, that the fond mother soon discovered that her too great affection for her child and the indulgence given to her were rather impeding than otherwise her education.
 
She accordingly determined to remove her governess, who up to this period was her sole instructress, under the watchful eye of the fond and accomplished mother herself and send her to a fashionable school for young ladies. There was then in the neighborhood, only about twenty miles from this family, a nunnery of the order of Jesuits. To this nunnery was attached a school superintended by nuns of the order. The school was one of the most fashionable in the country.
 
The nuns who presided over it, were said to be the most accomplished teachers in Europe. The expenses of an education in it were extravagantly high, but not beyond the reach of wealth and fashion. The mother, though a Protestant, and strict and conscientious in the discharge of all the duties of her church, and not without a struggle in parting with her child and consigning her to the charge of Jesuits, yielded in this case to the malign influence of fashion, as many a fond mother does even in this our own land of equal rights and far-famed, though mock equity, sent her beautiful daughter, her earthly idol, to the school of. these nuns. Let the result speak for itself.
 
Up to the departure of the sons for the army, and this daughter for the nunnery, I had been ever from my infancy acquainted with this family, and had for them the highest respect and warmest attachment: the elder brother was about my own age and only a few years between the eldest and the youngest child.
 
Soon after the daughter was sent to school, I entered the College of Maynooth as a theological student and in due time was ordained a Roman Catholic priest by particular dispensation being two years under the canonical age. An interval of some years passed before I had an opportunity of meeting my young friend again; our interview was under peculiar circumstances. I was ordained a Romish priest, and located where she happened to be on a visit. There was a large party given at which, among many others, I happened to be present; and the meeting with my friend and interchanging the usual courtesies upon such occasions, she – sportively as I then imagined – asked me whether I would preach her reception sermon, as she intended on becoming a nun and taking the white veil. Not even dreaming of such an event, I replied in the affirmative.
 
I heard no more of the affair for about two months, when I received a note from her designating the chapel, the day and the hour she expected me to preach. I was then but a short time in the ministry, but sufficiently long to know that up to the hour of my commencing to read Popish theology, especially that of Dens and Antoine de Peccatis, I knew nothing of the iniquities taught and practiced by Romish priests and bishops.

At the receipt of my friend’s note, a cold chill crept over me; I anticipated, I feared, I trembled, I felt there must be foul play somewhere. However, I went according to promise, preached her reception sermon at the request of the young lady, and with the special approbation of the Bishop whom I had to consult on such occasions.
 
The concourse of people that assembled on this occasion was very great. The interest created by the apparent voluntary retirement from the world of one so young, so wealthy and so beautiful, was intense, and accordingly the chapel in which I preached was filled to overflowing with the nobility and fashionables of that section of the country. Many and large were the tears which were shed, when this beautiful young lady cut off her rich and flowing tresses of hair.
 
Having no clerical connection with the convent in which she was immured, I had not seen her for three months following. At the expiration of that time, one of the lay sisters of the convent delivered to me a note. I knew it contained something startling.
 
These lay sisters among Jesuits, are spies belonging to that order, but are sometimes bribed by the nuns for certain purposes. As soon as I reached my apartments, I found that my young friend expressed a wish to see me on something important. I, of course, lost no time in calling on her, and being a priest, I was immediately admitted; but never have I forgot, nor can I forget, the melancholy picture of lost beauty and fallen humanity, which met my astonished gaze in the person of my once-beautiful and virtuous friend.
 
I had been then about eighteen months a Romish priest, and was not without some knowledge of their profligate lives; and therefore I was the better prepared for and could more easily anticipate what was to come. After such preliminary conversation as may be expected upon occasions of this kind the young lady spoke to me to the following effect, if not literally so. I say literally, because so deep and strong, and lasting was the impression made upon my mind, that I believe I have not forgotten one letter of her words…. “I sent for you, my friend to see you once more before my death. I have insulted my God and disgraced my family; I am in the family way and I must die.”
 
After a good deal of conversation which it is needless to repeat, I discovered from her confession the parent of this pregnancy and the mother abbess of the convent had advised her to take medicine which would effect abortion: but that she knew from the lay Sister who delivered me the note, and who was a confidential servant in the convent, that the medicine which the mother abbess would give her should contain poison, and that the procuring abortion was a mere pretext.
 
I gave her such advice as I could in the capacity of a Romish priest. I advised her to send for the bishop and consult him. “I cannot do it,” said she. “My destroyer is my confessor.” I was silent. I had no more to say. I was bound by oath to be true to him. In vain did the noble sentiment even of the Pagan occur to me; a sentiment sanctioned almost by inspiration itself. It fled from my mind as smoke before the wind. I was one of the priests of the infallible church, and what was honor, what was honesty to me, where the honor of that infallible church was concerned?
 
They were of no account; not worthy the consideration of a Romish priest for a second. The almost heavenly sentiment of the noble Pagan, “Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,” let justice be done even if the heavens were to fall, fled from my mind. I retired, leaving my friend to her fate, but promising, at her request, to return in a fortnight.
 
According to promise, I did return in a fortnight, but the foul deed was done. She was no more. The cold clay contained in its dread embrace all that now remained of that being, which, but a few months before, lived, and moved in all the beauty and symmetry of proportion; and that soul, once pure and spotless as the dew-drop of heaven, ere its contact with the impurities of earth, which a fond mother confided to the care of Jesuit nuns, had been driven in its guilt and pollution into the presence of a just but merciful God. All, all, the work of Jesuits and Nuns! This was the first check my Popish enthusiasm met with; and now for the first time did a doubt of the infallibility of the church of Rome enter my mind. After witnessing these events I could not help asking myself, can a church which sanctions and countenances such flagitious iniquities as I have just witnessed be a Christian church? Can a body of men, who individually practice such deeds of blood, treachery and crime as those which I have seen, be, collectively, infallible?
 
Are these the men whom the Saviour commissioned, in a particular manner, to preach the gospel to every creature? Are these the men, as a body, with whom he promised to be always, even to the consummation of the world? Are these the men who collectively constitute an infallible church? If so, unprofitable indeed has been my life. It is high time to come out from among them; and if I cannot live the life of luxury and ease, of sin and crime which a Romish priest can live, let me, at least, live that of an honorable man, and a useful member of society.
 
Europe is not the only portion of the world that contains legalized Sodoms. Its people are not the only people that support them. Its lawgivers are not the only men, nor its lawmakers the only ones, that make laws for them and give them charters. Its people are not the only people who contribute their time, their lands, their moneys, and who take almost from the necessaries of life, to support monk houses and nunneries, Jesuits and Dominicans. No, no. The new world, the new people, if I may say so, who boast of being the most enlightened people on the face of the earth -these are the people who, ill proportion to their number, contribute most to the support of Popish brothels, modestly called nunneries.
 
But it will be said that the young lady to whom I have alluded, has given no evidence of her being virtuous. As far as you tell us, she has made no resistance, and it is scarcely possible that one whom you have placed upon so high a prominence of virtue, could have so suddenly fallen into the depths of vice. This is all very plausible, and naturally to be expected from those who know nothing of auricular confession, a Popish institution, one of the most ingenious devices ever invented by the great enemy of man for the destruction of the human soul.
 
I am personally acquainted with several respectable Protestant Americans, both male and female, whose ideas of confession in the Romish church have often amused me, though not unaccompanied with feelings of grief and sorrow, at their unacquaintance with this, what may be called man-trap, or rather woman-trap in the Romish church.
 
American Protestants suppose that Popish confession means little more than that public confession of sin, which is made in all Protestant churches, or that which we individually make to Almighty God in our private chambers. Such may well inquire how this apparent sudden fall could have taken place. These inquiries will cease when I state that the young lady became a convert to Popery and give my readers some idea of what auricular confession is, and how it is, made. Every Roman Catholic believes that priests have power to forgive sins, by virtue of which power any crime, however heinous may be remitted. But in order to effect this the sinner must confess to a priest each and every sin, whether of thought, word or deed, with all the circumstances leading to it, or following from it; and every priest who hears confessions, is allowed to put such questions as he pleases to his penitent, whether male or female, and he or she is bound to answer under pain of eternal damnation.
 
It is very difficult, I admit, to suppose that this daughter of a virtuous mother, and that mother a Protestant too, brought up in the elegances of life, from her birth, breathing in no other atmosphere than that of the purest domestic morality, should be precipitated, in the short space of a year or two, from a state of unsullied virtue and innocence, to the veriest depth of crime; and it is a melancholy reflection to suppose a state of society, in which, by any combination of human events, the fond mother of a virtuous child could be made the instrument of that child’s ruin. Such an event is scarcely possible in the eyes of Protestant Americans, and I feel a pride in believing, from my acquaintance with many of them, that if American mothers were aware of the existence of a society among them, whose object was to demoralize their children, shut out from them the noonday light of the gospel, and ultimately decoy them into the lecherous embraces of Romish priests and Jesuits; they would, to a woman, rise in their appropriate strength, and deliver our land from those legalized Sodoms called nunneries.

I will here take the liberty of showing them how the young friend to whom I have alluded, was debauched. The nunnery to which she was sent, as I have heretofore stated, had attached to it a fashionable school; all nunneries have such. The nuns who instruct in those schools in Europe, are generally advanced in years, descendants from the first families, and highly accomplished. Most, if not all of them, at an early period of life met with some disappointment or other. One perhaps was the daughter of some decayed noble family, reduced by political revolutions to comparative poverty, and now having nothing but the pride of birth, retired to a convent. She could not work, and she would not beg.
 
Another, perhaps, was disappointed in love; the companion of her own choice was refused to her by some unfeeling, aristocratic parent. No alternative was left but to unite her young person with the remains of some broken-down debauchee of the nobility. She prefers going into a convent with such means as she had in her own right. Another, perhaps, like my young friend, and thus is the case with most of them, was seduced by some profligate priest while at school, degraded in her own eyes, unfitted even in her own mind to become the companion of an honorable man seeing no alternative but death or dishonor, she goes into a convent.
 
These ladies, when properly disciplined by Jesuits and priests, become the best teachers. But before they are allowed to teach, there is no art, no craft, no species of cunning, no refinement in private personal indulgences, or no modes or means of seduction, in which they are not thoroughly initiated; and I may say with safety, and from my own personal knowledge through the confessional, that there is scarcely one of them who has not been herself debauched by her confessor.
 
The reader will understand that every nun has a confessor; and here I may as well add, for the truth must be told at once, that every confessor has a concubine, and there are very few of them who have not several. Let any American mother imagine her young daughter among these semi-reverend crones, called nuns, and she will have no difficulty in seeing the possibility of her immediate ruin.
 
When your daughter comes among those women, they pretend to be the happiest set of beings upon earth. They would not exchange their situation for any other this side of heaven. They will pray. So do the devils. They will sing. So will the devils, for aught I know. Their language, their acts, their gestures, their whole conduct while in presence of the scholars, or their visitors, is irreproachable.
 
The mother abbess, or superior of the convent, who invariably is the deepest in sin of the whole, and who, from her age and long practice, is almost constitutionally a hypocrite, appears in public the most meek, the most bland, the most courteous, and the most humble Christian.
 
She is peculiarly attentive to those who have any money in their own right: she tells them they are beautiful, fascinating, that they look like angels, that this world is not a fit residence for them, that they are too good for it, that they ought to become nuns, in order to fit them for a higher and better station in heaven. Nothing more is necessary than to become a Roman Catholic and go to confession. Such is the apparent happiness, cheerfulness, and unalloyed beatitudes of the nuns, that strangers are pleased with them. They invariably make a favorable impression on the minds of their visitors. The inference is that they must be truly pious and really virtuous.
 
But to return to the causes which induced me to leave the Romish church. The young lady of whom I have spoken in a previous page, was sent to school, as I have stated, to a Popish nunnery. She was a Protestant when she entered; so are many young ladies in this country when they enter similar schools. The nuns immediately set about her conversion. The process by which such things are done is sometimes slow, but always sure.
 
It is often tedious, but never fails; though the knowledge European Protestants have of such institutions, renders the process of conversion more tedious than in this land of freedom and Popish humbuggery. The work of her conversion proceeded with the usual success, until she finally joined the Romish church. The next step, in such cases, is to choose a confessor. This is done for the young convert by the mother abbess of the nuns; and now commences the ruin of the soul and the body of the hitherto guileless, guiltless scholar, and convert from Protestant heresy.
 
She goes to confession; and recollect, American reader, that what I here state is “Mutata fabuta de te ipso narratur.” Every word of what I am about to state is applicable to you. This confession is, literally speaking, nothing but a systematic preparation for her ruin. It is said that there is, among the creeping things of this earth, a certain noxious and destructive animal, called Anaconda. It is recorded of this animal, foul, filthy and ugly as he is, that when he is hungry, and seizes upon an object which he desires to destroy and subsequently devour, he takes it with him carefully to his den, or place of retreat. There, at his ease, unseen and alone with his prey, he is said to cover it over with slime, and then and there swallow it.

 

 

Let me give American Protestant mothers just a twilight glance at the questions which a Romish priest puts to those females, who go to confession to him, and they will bear in mind that there is no poetry in what I say. It contains no undulations of a roving fancy; there is nothing dreaming, nothing imaginative about it; it is only a part of a drama in which I have acted myself.
 
The following is as fair a sketch as I can, with due regard to decency, give of the questions which a Romish priest puts to a young female, who goes to confession to him. It is, however, but a very brief synopsis. But first let the reader figure to himself, or herself, a young lady, between the age of from twelve to twenty, on her knees, with her lips nearly close pressed to the cheeks of the priest, who, in all probability, is not over twenty-five or thirty years old-for here it is worthy of remark, that these young priests are extremely zealous in the discharge of their sacerdotal duties, especially in hearing confessions, which all Roman Catholics are bound to make under pain of eternal damnation. When priest and penitent are placed in the above attitude, let us suppose the following conversation taking place between them, and unless my readers are more dull of apprehension than I am willing to believe, they will have some idea of the beauties of Popery.

 

Confessor: What sins have you committed?
Penitent: I don’t know any, sir.

 

Confession: Are you sure you did nothing wrong? Examine yourself well.
Penitent: Yes, I do recollect that I did wrong I made faces at school at Lucy A.

 

Confessor: Nothing else?
Penitent: Yes; I told mother that I hated Lucy A. and that she was an ugly thing.

 

Confessor: (Scarcely able to suppress a smile in finding the girl perfectly innocent.)Have you had any immodest thoughts?
Penitent: What is that, sir?

 

Confessor: Have you not been thinking about men?
Penitent: Why, yes, sir.

 

Confessor: Are you fond of any of them?
Penitent: Why, yes; I like cousin A. or R. greatly.

 

Confessor: Did you ever like to sleep with him?
Penitent: Oh, no.

 

Confessor: How long did these thoughts about men continue?
Penitent: Not very long.

 

Confessor: Had you these thoughts by day, or by night?

 

In this strain does this reptile confessor proceed, till his now half-gained prey is filled with ideas to which she has been hitherto a stranger. He tells her that she must come tomorrow. She accordingly comes and he gives a twist to the screw, which he has now firmly fixed on the soul and body of his penitent.
 
Day after day, week after week, and, month after month does this this hapless girl come to confession. Until this wretch has worked up her passion to a tension almost snapping, and then becomes his easy prey.
 
They even go further; they perpetrate the grossest outrages upon every law, moral and civil, in utter defiance of American jurisprudence. They keep their nunneries, or rather seraglios, in the very midst of them, surround them with ramparts, and not only deny to their civil magistrates the right of entrance, but defy them to do so.
 
This every American citizen knows to be a fact; at least, it is known in the city of Boston, where I now write. No one was admitted within the walls of the Ursuline convent, which an indignant populace reduced to ashes, without special permission from the mother abbess, allowing the nuns within to assume the appearance of decency and propriety before they showed themselves, however flagrant their conduct might have been.
 
Time was given to them and to the priests to assume their usual sanctimonious appearance; but then all the cells were never seen at the same time. Many were reserved for hidden and criminal purposes, and when some of those nuns were apparently cheerful and happy, leaving on the visitor’s mind an impression that nothing but happiness reigned throughout the whole nunnery, there were probably some of them, unseen and unheard by strangers, writhing in the agonies of childbirth. This is no fancy sketch. Read Llorenti’s History of the Inquisition, and you will find that the picture I give is far short of the reality.
 
Such was the profligacy of friars and nuns, as Llorenti informs us, in the fifteenth century, that the Pope, from very shame, had to take notice of it. He had to invest the inquisition with special power to take cognizance of the matter. The inquisitors, in obedience to orders from their sovereign Pope, entered immediately upon the discharge of their duties. They issued, through their immediate superior, a general order, commanding all women, nuns and lay sisters, married women and single women, without regard to age, station in life, or any other circumstance, to appear before them and give information, if any they had, against all priests, Jesuits, monks, friars and confessors.
 
The Pope was not fully aware of what he did, when he granted the aforesaid power to the inquisition. He supposed that the licentiousness of his priests did not extend beyond women of ill fame; but his holiness was mistaken, as he subsequently discovered. All were obliged to obey the summons of the inquisition. Disobedience was heresy – it was death.
 
The number who made their appearance, to ledge information against the priests and confessors, in the single city of Seville, in Spain, was so great that the taking of depositions occupied twenty notaries for thirty days. The inquisitors, worn out with fatigue, determined on taking a recess, and having done so, they reassembled and devoted thirty days more to the same purpose; but the depositions continued to increase so fast, that they saw no use in continuing them, and they finally resolved to adjourn and quash the inquiry.
 
The city of Seville was found to be one vast area of pollution. But Americans will still say, this occurred in the fifteenth century; no such thing can take place now.
 
The whole social system is different now from what it was then. I tell you again, Americans, that you are mistaken in your inference. Priests, nuns and confessors are the same now that they were then, all over the world.
 
Many of you have visited Paris, and do you not there see, at the present day, a hospital attached to every nunnery in the city. The same is to be seen in Madrid and the principal cities of Spain. I have seen them myself in Mexico, and in the city of Dublin, Ireland. And what is the object of those hospitals? It is chiefly to provide for the illicit offspring of priests and nuns, and such other unmarried females as the priests can seduce through the confessional. But it will be said, there are no hospitals attached to nunneries in this country.
 
True, there are not, but of my own knowledge and from my own experience through the confessional, that it would be well if there were; there would be fewer abortions, there would be fewer infants strangled and murdered. It is not generally known to Americans, that the crime of procuring abortion, a crime which our laws pronounce to be felony, is a common every day crime in Popish nunneries. It is not known to Americans, but let it henceforth be known to them, that strangling and putting to death infants is common in nunneries throughout this country.
 
It is not known that this is done systematically and methodically, according to Popish instruction. The modus operandi is this. The infallible church teaches that without baptism even infants cannot go to heaven. The holy church, not caring much how the aforesaid infants may come into this world, but that they should go from it according to the ritual of the Church, insists that the infant shall be baptized. This being done, and its soul thus fitted for heaven, the mother abbess gently takes between her holy fingers the nostrils of the infant, and in the name of the infallible church consigns it to the care of the Almighty; and I beg here to state, from my own knowledge through the confessional, that the father is, in nearly all cases, the individual who baptizes it.
 
Virtuous ladies, into whose hands this book may fall, will exclaim that this is impossible. If even nuns had witnessed such things, however depraved they may be, they would fly from such scenes; or at all events, no nun, who has ever been once guilty of such crimes, would commit them a second time. Here, again, we see how little Americans know of Popery; and of the practices of its priests and nuns.