the channel through which men were to be brought into spiritual relations with Himself, and founded a society for the purpose of preaching His Gospel and administering His Sacraments to the human race till the end of the Christian dispensation.

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CHAPTER VII

AURICULAR CONFESSION

I COME now to the thorny subject of Auricular Confession, on which I believe the hatred and passion of militant Protestantism is so concentrated that, if that stumbling block could be removed, the opposition even to advanced Ritualism would be half disarmed. Now I believe, for my part, that the confessional is, under certain circumstances, liable to abuse and danger, and ought, under all circumstances, to be hedged round by judicious precautions. I shall indicate some of these further on. But I must begin with some preliminary observations for the sake of clearing the ground and getting rid of some fallacies.

It is popularly supposed that the clergy have a craving for hearing confessions. There are upwards of twenty-three thousand clergy in the Church of England, and that there should be a few morbidly constituted men among so many is possible. But that the mass of the clergy, or even a fraction of the High Church party, should desire to hear confessions, or would consent to hear them except from a stern sense of painful duty, is to me incredible.

Even if a man were so abnormally constituted, and had so little sense of the responsibility and sacredness of his office, as to wish to hear confessions from a motive of curiosity, he would surely soon have a surfeit of it. I am inclined to think that most men would, as a mere matter of choice, as soon be surgeons to a leprous hospital as habitual confessors. Human nature is, in some aspects of it, a weird mystery. The corruption of the best' is proverbially the worst' kind of corruption. The brutes live according to their nature, and in their free wild state enjoy life. Man violates the laws of his nature and is capable of falling far below the brutes. And this tendency increases and takes new shapes under a highly developed civilisation, and among all classes. To many a clergyman, I doubt not, the confessional has been a frightful revelation of the cancerous ramifications of sin, sometimes under a fair exterior. That any considerable number of men would volunteer in such work except from an imperative feeling of duty I do not believe. I believe, moreover, that the increase of confession in the Church of England has come from the laity rather than from the clergy. Perhaps I may, without impertinence, give my own experience. I have never invited any one to confess to me except in the ordinary course of reading the exhortation in the Communion Service, and I have, in the whole course of my ministerial career, received the confessions of just three persons. These I received reluctantly and unavoidably. But many persons have asked me to

receive their confessions. It is a task from which I have always shrunk; and as nearly the whole of my ministerial life has been spent in London, I have been able to avail myself of the alternative offered in the Prayer Book by sending those who came to me to some other discreet and learned minister of God's Word.' But if I had been an incumbent where this alternative was not possible, I should certainly feel bound to hear the confessions of all who came to me, much as I should dislike it. I do not think that an incumbent has any choice in such cases. I read some time ago a speech made at a Protestant meeting by the Vicar of a parish in a large town in the North. He denounced confession. and illustrated his own practice by a story. A man called upon him one day, he said, and astonished him by asking him to hear his confession. As soon as he recovered his self-possession he said to his visitor, 'Get thee behind me, Satan,' and dismissed him. And that Vicar was cheered. Now it does seem to me a little hard that God's minister should on Sunday invite to confession any one whose conscience is troubled, and then on Monday tell him to go to the Devil for being such a fool as to accept the invitation.

How did the Vicar know that the parishioner whom he repulsed so rudely had not then arrived at a critical point in the development of his character, when the unburdening of his conscience and the counsel and advice of his spiritual pastor might have made all the difference between ruin and salvation?

Is it not a frightful responsibility to turn away any one who comes to seek comfort in the way which the Church has provided?

Another common fallacy is that the confessor worms out family secrets, and thus sows the seeds of dissension between husbands and wives, parents and children. The fact, I believe, is that no names are allowed to be mentioned in confession. I find this rule laid down in manuals for confessors both in the Roman and Anglican Churches, and I believe the rule is universal. In his speech in the House of Commons at the opening of Parliament this session, Mr. Samuel Smith denounced a book ('The Priest's Prayer Book') which he evidently had not read, for he made a ridiculous quotation which is not in the book, and which must have been supplied to him by some one on whom he relied too implicitly. In that book there are Notes on Confession' for the guidance of such clergy as hear confessions. I quote the following:

He [the confessor] is to interrupt in any of the following cases: (1) if the penitent import the name of any person into his confession-he is there to confess his own sins, not another's; (2) if he begins making excuses for himself; (3) if he be prolix, or wandering from the point; (4) if he be coarse.

Again:

As a general rule he is to avoid questioning the penitent (except in case of absolute necessity), and especially as to kinds of sin to which he has made no reference in his confession.