Prejudice or ignorance can alone construe such an inestimable
treasure, which brings peace of conscience and heavenly consolation,
into "making the priest the keeper of a man's conscience, and the
destroyer of man's spiritual liberty and of his responsibility to his
Creator."

How different are the opinions of thoughtful men, concerning this
Tribunal of Penance, will be seen from the following: One is a
Frenchman, who, unhappily, apostatized from the Catholic Church; the
second is a distinguished German philosopher, who lived and died a
Protestant; the third is one of the profoundest thinkers of our day,
who, born in the Episcopal Church in England, served her some forty
years, and then left her to enter the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman
Church.

The first of these--Voltaire--thus writes:

"The enemies of the Roman Church, who have assailed the salutary
institution of confession, appear to have removed the strongest
restraint which can be put upon secret crimes. The sages of antiquity
themselves felt the importance of it."[61]

The second--Leibnitz--in his "System of Theology" says:

"The institution of sacramental confession is assuredly worthy of the
divine wisdom, and, of all the doctrines of religion, it is the most
admirable and the most beautiful. It was admired by the Chinese and
the inhabitants of Japan. The necessity of confessing sin is
sufficient to preserve from it those who still preserve their modesty;