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The good Father having probed the wounds of his Conscience, and brought him to a due sense of his Sins, applyed the healing remedy of Absolution, on the Penitent's declaring himself reconciled to the Church of Rome.

I say, Dick, lend me three sovs., just to buy a new suit at the slop-shop." "Well, brother-in-law," said Dick, "I don't see any harm in that. I'll go and fetch them for you." What does this sensible Dick do but go up-stairs to Phoebe, and say, "He wants three pounds to buy a suit; am I to lend it him?" Phoebe was shaking and patting her penitent's pillow. She dropped it on the bed in dismay.

No: the longing of Christ to get the wanderer into his bosom again, for the satisfaction of his own soul, is the sweetest ingredient in the cup of a returning penitent's joy.

When the ten lepers were cleansed, and one returned to lavish love on his healer, that healer, while he enjoyed the single penitent's devotion, permitted a sigh to escape his lips, articulated in the sad pensive question, "Where are the nine?" I love the Lord for uttering that complaint. It proves to me that he counts it no intrusion when we burst in upon him with our glad thanksgiving.

Situated as she was, a Protestant without herself suspecting it, and that in the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church; a devout reader of the Bible, and one who valued the ministrations of priests as advisers and "confessors," rather than as transacting the penitent's own work for him, her superior intelligence, and her happy art of carrying conviction to the listeners, raised the jealousy of the clergy, just as her pure life was a silent rebuke to all lax livers, whether monk, nun, or priest.

He was baptized on his sickbed it was an affecting scene a sense of the presence of the Lord was felt on the occasion by all present, by the peace and grace that accompanied the administration of the ordinance. The answer to the sick penitent's fervent prayer, seemed like that given to the poor repenting thief on the cross when he cried, "Lord remember me" it was immediate.

I will set her a penance, for she has not behaved well; then I shall see if she wishes to please me. To-morrow will be a day of observance, and there will be early mass in the church. Tell Magdalena, Te filo, that she must come to mass and carry a penitent's candle. Let her be in the front row of the women.

Through it, too, you go free from your studies and tasks. I have considered the proper punishment. It is this: you are to put on to-day the penitent's woollen gown; you are to kneel during dinner-time at the door of the dining-room, where all may see your disgrace and take warning therefrom; you are to eat your dinner on your knees.

To me they do seem fairly to bear the broad and single conclusion that the spirits of the saved do enter at death into a state of conscious presence with their Saviour, and therefore of joy and felicity. But beyond this we have no firm ground for going. It is of more practical worth to note that the penitent's vague prayer is answered, and over-answered.

It was the priest, as we have seen, who instructed the individual to pronounce the magic formulas that would be appropriate to his case; and just as in the incantation texts the priest accompanied the recitation of the formulas with an appeal of his own, so in the penitential psalms, he stood at the penitent's side, instructing him what to say, and emphasizing the confessions of the penitent by an assurance to the deity of the sincerity of the penitent, coupled with a fervent request that the prayer for 'appeasement, which involved all that we mean by forgiveness, be graciously answered.