344 The Faith of Our Fathers and irregular mode of life. But they are commonly sins of frailty, [365] and these are not the persons that are accustomed to approach the confessional. If they did their lives would be very different from what they are. The best of us, alas! are not what we ought to be, considering the graces we receive. But if you seek for canting hypocrites, or colossal defaulters, or perpetrators of well-laid schemes of forgery, or of systematic licentiousness, or of premeditated violence, you will seek for such in vain among those who frequent the confessional. There is another objection which it is difficult to kill. It dies hard and, like Banquo's ghost, it will not down. If you drive it from the city, it will fly to the town. If you expel it from the town, it will take refuge in the village. If you eject it from the village, it will hide itself like some noxious animal, in some desert place until it makes its rounds again. I allude to the charge that a price has to be paid for remitting sins. "You have only (say these slanderers) to pay a certain toll at the confessional gate, and you can pass the biggest load of sin." It is hard to treat these objections seriously. I have been hearing confessions for fifty years, and of all who have come to me, not one has had the sense of duty to offer me any compensation for absolving them, and this is true of every Priest with whom I have been acquainted. The truth is, the Priest who would solicit a fee for absolution knows that he would be guilty of simony, and would be liable to suspension. But we are told that confession is an intolerable yoke, that it makes its votaries the slaves of the Priests. Before answering this objection, let me call your attention to the inconsistency of our adversaries, who blow hot and cold in the same breath. They denounce confession as being too hard [366] a remedy for sin and condemn it, at the same time, as being a smooth road to heaven. In one sentence they style it a bed of roses; in the next a bed of thorns.