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Once a week, at the least, every brother had to attend the private confessional. All his sins, without exception, had then to be revealed, if he wished to obtain for them forgiveness. Luther endeavoured to unbosom to his father-confessor all he had done from his youth up; but this was too much even for the priest.
He wanted to walk that he might better think. What crude and wanton irony there was in his situation! To have been made father-confessor to a murderer, he well on towards a judgeship! With his contempt for the kind of weakness which landed men in such abysses, he felt it all so sordid, so "impossible," that he could hardly bring his mind to bear on it at all.
The proposal being embraced, he, as usual, handed her into the street, and took all opportunities of promoting his suit; but they were attended so closely by her father-confessor, that he foresaw it would be impracticable to accomplish his aim without the connivance of that ecclesiastic.
For only by honest purity, and moral courage superior to that of the many, is that dangerous post earned; and women will listen to the man who will tell them the truth, however sternly; and will bow, as before a guardian angel, to the strong insight of him whom they have once learned to trust. But it is a dangerous office, after all, for layman as well as for priest, that of father-confessor.
I determined to devote myself to the great work of the one church universal; and for this purpose, to give myself wholly up to the study of the Evangelists and the Fathers. I retired to the Benedictine cloister of Saint Paul in the valley of Lavant. The father-confessor in the nunnery of Laak, where I then lived, strengthened me in this resolve.
But she was known to her father-confessor, to her news-agent, and later to her son, as Valerie de la Motte Scott, for though no longer entitled to bear the latter name, she had tacitly allowed it to cling to her. Now as to how the boy discovered the secret that was designed to be concealed from him.
Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the “breaking” of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor.
When I consider his mental output, his abundant labors as father-confessor to a countless host, his pains and persecutions and imprisonments, I can not but think he received some of the powers of his optimistic endurance from contemplations such as he counsels in his incomparable book.
Living with Cousin Frank is like living under a waterfall; and Jack is beginning to have his own plans, and doesn't want anyone to share them. Well, you amaze me! I suppose you get a good deal of practice in these things, and become a kind of amateur father-confessor. I think of you at Cambridge as setting the lives of young men spinning like little tops small human teetotums.
Now she knows of your deep sorrow, and she sends me, the father-confessor of her convent, to comfort you, but at the same time to warn you; for, as she affirms, and as I am also inclined to think, many strange and heavy trials lie before you."
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