In my time I had been confided to the religious instruction of a good old infirm clergyman, who had been confessor of the family for many years.  The “Catechism,” a “Paraphrase” of it, and the “Scheme of Salvation,” I had at my finger’s ends:  I lacked not one of the strongly proving biblical texts, but from all this I reaped no fruit; for, as they assured me that the honest old man arranged his chief examimation according to an old set form, I lost all pleasure and inclination for the business, spent the last week in all sorts of diversions, laid in my hat the loose leaves borrowed from an older friend, who had gotten them from the clergyman, and unfeelingly and senselessly read aloud all that I should have known how to utter with feeling and conviction.

But I found my good intention and my aspirations in this important matter still more paralyzed by a dry, spiritless routine, when I was now to approach the confessional.  I was indeed conscious of having many failings, but no great faults; and that very consciousness diminished them, since it directed me to the moral strength which lay within me, and which, with resolution and perseverance, was at last to become master over the old Adam.  We were taught that we were much better than the Catholics for the very reason, that we were not obliged to confess any thing in particular in the confessional,—­nay, that this would not be at all proper, even if we wished to do it.  I did not like this at all; for I had the strangest religious doubts, which I would readily have had cleared up on such an occasion.  Now, as this was not to be done, I composed a confession for myself, which, while it well expressed my state of mind, was to confess to an intelligent man, in general terms, that which I was forbidden to tell him in detail.  But when I entered the old choir of the Barefoot Friars, when I approached the strange latticed closets in which the reverend gentlemen used to be found for that purpose, when the sexton opened the door for me, when I now saw myself shut up in the narrow place face to face with my spiritual grandsire, and he bade me welcome with his weak, nasal voice, all the light of my mind and heart was extinguished at once, the well-conned confession-speech would not cross my lips:  in my embarrassment I opened the book I had in my hand, and read from it the first short form I saw, which was so general, that anybody might have spoken it with quite a safe conscience.  I received absolution, and withdrew neither warm nor cold; went the next day with my parents to the Table of the Lord, and, for a few days, behaved myself as was becoming after so holy an act.