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Show PROTESTANTS AND CONFESSIONAL A former Cabinet officer the other day in a public pub-lic address said that although he was a strong Protestant Pro-testant he believed in the confessional. He is not the only one outside the church who recognizes the advantages of confession. Frances E. TTillard, the great temperance worker, once said: "I am a Protestant, but there is no blinking this fact: The Catholics are, in this country and in I rJand, ahead of us in social purity. Tou can, take a Protestant family into a London slum and put them into a dirty room on the right-hand top of the stairs, and then put a Catholic family on the other side of the stairs, and you will find after two, three or four years half of the girls of the Protestant family have gone to the bad, and every member of the Catholic family has retained her virtue. "T was astonished when I went to Ireland by j the contrast between that country and our own. I ' heard from Protestant and Catholic, Unionist and Home Buler alike that, although they may he packed together, you will find that they are the most virtuous peasantry in the world. How is that? I tell you it is because the priests have preached sedulously and inculcated in the confessional and in families the duties of parents to children and the duty of young people to each other. In this matter the result is, I say frankly, a moral miracle before which we Protestants have reason to bow our heads in shame." Catholic News. |