because the true priest loves the sinner even more than he hates
the sin; it is best to be utterly sincere with him, because he
loves sincerity even more than unstained virtue; and one can
confess to him one's desires for good with as little false shame as
one can confess one's hankering after evil. Perhaps in one respect
the man is more fitted to be a confessor than a woman, because he
has a deeper experience of the ardour and the pleasure of
temptation; and yet the deeper tenderness of the woman gives her a
sympathy for the tempted, which is not even communicated by a wider
experience of sin.

Perhaps there is nothing that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of
God more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has
ever conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no
doubt the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the
growing influence in the world of the feminine element; and yet the
conception of God as masculine is in itself a limitation of His
infinite perfection. That we should carry our conception of sex
into the infinite is perhaps a mere failure of imagination, and if
we could divest ourselves of a thought which possibly has no
reality in it, we should perhaps grow to feel that the true
priesthood of life could be exercised as well by women as by men,
or even better. The true principle is that all those who are set
free by a natural grace, a divine instinct, from grosser
temptations, and whose freedom leads them not to a cold self-
sufficiency, to a contempt for what is weaker, but to an ardent
desire to save, to renew, to upraise, are the natural priests or
priestesses of the world; for the only way in which the priest can
stand between man and God is, when smaller and more hampered
natures realize that he has a divine freedom and compassion