The Eucharist Considered in its Relation to Confession and Absolution

“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”—Revelation ii. 17.

The passage: To the one who overcomes, Christ says he will give some of the hidden manna to eat, and a white stone with a new name written on it, which no one knows except the one who receives it.

There is one topic closely tied to what I have been speaking about for three Sundays that must not be passed over now. We hear much about Confession: whether a clergyman is bound to establish the formal practice, where its limits lie, and whether the laity demand it. We also hear fierce denunciations of anything resembling a Confessional, appeals to the experience of other nations against it, and a cry that the State should stop it if opinion cannot. There is plenty of frivolous talk on both sides, which must be borne as a penance. But there are also earnest thoughts and feelings on both sides. By God’s grace these may be separated from the vanity around them, become clear, and work in harmony rather than opposition.

I. It helps us in England that the controversy turns mainly on one passage in the exhortation to the Communion. It says that no one should come to the Communion without full trust in God’s mercy and a quiet conscience. So if anyone cannot quiet his conscience by the exhortation and wants further comfort and counsel, he is to go to the priest, or to some discreet and honest minister of God’s word, and receive absolution together with ghostly counsel, so that his conscience may be quieted and his scruples removed.

Those who argue that the Church of England gives little encouragement to Confession as practised abroad naturally stress that this is the only support their opponents have. If Confession were an institution affecting the whole life of society, they ask, would it be mentioned only in one service, at the close of an address that is read occasionally and may be replaced by another? They also point out that neither “confessional” nor even “confession” appears here. There is only a general direction about quieting scrupulous consciences, and the minister is spoken of more as a friendly adviser than as an authoritative director. Both points deserve attention, as any exact criticism of a disputed sentence does.

But something can be said on the other side. The Communion is not merely one of our services but, as I argued last Sunday, the service that gives force and meaning to all the rest. A defender of Confession may say that to connect it with the Communion is to give it the highest honour, and to treat it as a preparation for the Communion is to treat it as the greatest necessity of a Church. He asks no more than that. And if you insist that the word “confession” is absent, he may ask how you account for the presence of a word far more offensive to anti-priestly ears, “absolution.” Can that power be ascribed to an ordinary friend? Does it not belong to the priest as such?

Granting all weight to these opposing reflections, I think both sides will agree on this much. The English Church, so far as we can judge from what she has said and omitted, wants us to take our idea of Confession from the nature of Communion. She must mean us to set aside every other way of judging its character, value, and place in the Christian life, however plausible. We are steadily to ask: what does the Lord’s Supper signify, and how does that bear on the meaning, usefulness, and necessity of Confession?

II. We have seen that a man may approach the Lord’s table for two opposite reasons. He may come because he thinks Christ’s death, to which it testifies, will or may deliver his individual soul from the fate his race is doomed to. Or he may come because he wants to lose his individual soul in Christ, sharing the death Christ died for the world and the Redemption He won for the world. These two aims are independent of any theory about the elements and the effect of consecration. A Romanist, a Lutheran, or a Zwinglian may hold either, and reconcile it with his system. But I think Romanists, Lutherans, or Zwinglians who seek themselves in the Eucharist, not Christ, will not truly agree even with members of their own sect who use the same formula about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or the memorial feast. And those who seek Christ there, not themselves, will be one at heart however different their statements.

Most of us, when we first think about the Communion and the duty of receiving it, are confused between these two aims. The prominent feeling is that we have neglected our souls, or our “religious interests.” But this vague feeling is mixed with the memory of particular acts, long past or recent, that we long to blot out and that have the stamp of eternity on them. The thoughts are: God knows these things were done; God knows I did them; He will require them of me; the whole universe will recognize me as their author. These thoughts create a terror that is strong at one time and weak at another, that we are strongly inclined to drown in outward sights and sounds, and that we think we ought nevertheless to cherish and deepen. If we had only those thoughts, about neglected duties, we might run to the Communion at once, taking credit for repairing a past error and beginning a career more respectable to religious men and more acceptable to our Judge. The other feelings give the service a very different character. Will it affect those past acts, or change my position toward them? I have heard of a wonderful, unutterable forgiveness, and here it seems gathered up and expressed; could I lay hold of it and make it mine? Could it tell me those acts will no longer be remembered against me? Would even that be enough unless it made me different? And is not this Communion awful as well as hopeful? For a mere chance of blessing, dare I risk deepening my evil and my curse? I am invited, yet driven back; bidden to come because all is ready, yet told that if I come unworthily I may increase my damnation.

III. Here is material enough to make the conscience unquiet, and the Church says such unquietness should be removed before a man comes to the Lord’s Supper. She lays it on her ministers to use all their power and knowledge to remove it. Suppose a person so perplexed comes to a minister: how may he show the learning and discretion the Church ascribes to him? First, he must be clear himself about the purpose for which priests and laymen alike are bidden to eat the bread and drink the wine. Any confusion there will make his help to the conscience wholly unsatisfactory. Suppose he has not settled in his mind that when our Lord said, “He that saveth his life shall lose it; he that loseth it for My sake shall find it,” He laid down a universal maxim, the Gospel maxim of His followers, and suppose he does not see this Sacrament as its exposition and fulfilment. How will he treat his bewildered patient? Given the plain question “What can I do to be saved?”, he will stumble at St. Paul’s simple answer to the jailor at Philippi. He will not boldly say: there is One in Whom you may believe and lose yourself, the same for all, the Lord and Saviour of sinners; you belong to Him, so give yourself to Him. He will think he must lay down rules about what a man must do and believe in order to be saved. So he will spoil the simplicity of the great practical testimony to the Lord’s death that the Communion supplies.

But the person’s anxiety may not take this direct and comprehensive form, and generally we cannot expect it to. Suppose certain offences, great or small, weigh on his soul. How will such a minister deal with that? He will try to learn whether the acts belong to the venial or the deadly class of sins. He knows no list drawn up by the most refined casuists can settle this exactly. He must inquire into the state of mind that led to each wrong act and weigh the temptation. He does not hope to do more than approximate the truth, but with his books guiding a course of cross-examination he may find something to help his judgment. Where the safety of the soul is at stake, he thinks, he must search as far as he can, into the closest and darkest passages through which evil entered. What incidental harms of the method should not be risked for so great a result? It may strike him that one such harm is reviving the very thoughts and feelings that prompted the wrong, a return to the foul or revengeful imaginations in which it was born. He knows, if he knows himself at all, how endlessly we deceive ourselves when we analyze our feelings in a past event, and still more when we assign our share or another’s in the guilt. But all this impurity and falsehood, he concludes, must be risked, and the sleeping embers of past evil stirred up. How can the priest honestly absolve if he has not found out, as well as he can, what is to be absolved?

I want you to see how easily and naturally an English minister may slide into this course. He does not do so from a wrong intention, but from an earnest wish to follow what he takes to be his Church’s precept. It comes less from a perverse theory of his own than from too faithful adherence to notions that have infected the Church generally, and that are perhaps as strong in many who denounce him as in him. If he has added to these a high notion of priestly authority, let me try to show him how little he can realize it unless he takes a quite different path.

IV. His cross-examination clearly does nothing to fulfil the wish expressed in our Exhortation. He has not quieted the conscience of the man or woman who came to him, but has greatly added to its disquiet and confusion. It may be, it must be, a relief to tell someone an act or state of mind we have kept shut up until we can no longer bear the scorching agony of concealment. But the priest, as far as he has exercised his own proper function, has contributed nothing to that relief. He has lessened it, and made the perplexity, the torture, and the inward sin heavier.

“Yes,” it will be said, “but now comes his turn to give the absolution the Church speaks of.” Oh no! Not that absolution. Not real freedom of conscience, the loosing of a burden too heavy to bear. The priest can say words that signify absolving, but he dare not trust them to do their work. His own faith in their power is feeblest. He must help them with appeals to the senses and convey to the imagination that he is a very wonderful person. Finally he falls back on a theory that he has the right to absolve, that it must belong to him and must effect something. He does this because he secretly believes that without that assumption it effects nothing. Is this exalting priestly authority? Is it not degrading it to the lowest point and showing priestly impotence in full? Does it not make the conscience, which should own that authority’s force, cry out indignantly, once it perceives it has been tampered with, “What art thou?”

I would press one more point on the minister who wants to prepare penitents for the Communion. Is he preparing them? What are they to seek there? If he has given them any spiritual gift, it is the very gift the Eucharist itself testifies to. His idea of Absolution directly interferes with the meaning of the Sacrament, practically as much as theoretically. If the communicants’ sins have been put away by his word, what is the grievous weight they complain of when they kneel? What need have they of the general pardon the priest announces, or of the comfortable words Christ speaks to the heavy laden? Draw what fine distinctions you please; if you are dealing with the consciences of real human beings, and not with “the Conscience” of the divinity and casuistry books, this question will force itself on you and you cannot evade it.

V. But does this question not also demand an answer from those who think the Exhortation in our Service has a quite different force from what the confessional, ancient or modern, would give it? I think they should be able to answer it. Believing the Exhortation binds me, and that I ought to have complied with it far more than I have, I would try earnestly and humbly to find the answer. First, I think we too should understand, and keep reminding ourselves, that our offences are deeper in nature and wider and more serious in consequence than any that those who seek relief from us can disclose. If “venial” is twisted from its derivation to mean little or insignificant, ours are not venial. If it is very hard to judge the gravity of other men’s evil deeds and states of mind, we know a little, but only a little, of the length and breadth of our own. How do we know them? Not because we have worked out what they are, or worked ourselves up to a tremendous sense of their hideousness, but because God has not let us remain ignorant of them, and has not let us quench His light even when we laboured hardest to draw it into our darkness. If we have any impression of our evil at all, we have received it in that way and no other. And what have we learnt about our evils? Surely that they come from lack of communion with the true, righteous, and holy mind of Him in Whom we live and move and have our being, and from lack of communion with the human creatures among whom we live. We are constantly tempted to trace them to other causes, to think they consist in something other than the habit of self-pleasing, self-willing, self-seeking, and issue in something other than deeper alienation from God and our fellows. But we are constantly recalled to this view, first by our ministerial duties, which remind us that we are to show God’s light to men and present men’s sorrows and sins before God; and second by this Sacrament, our highest function to administer, which reminds us in its whole substance that God’s mind is satisfied only with an entire, voluntary, filial sacrifice, and that this sacrifice is the bond of peace for all and the deliverance from the sins of the world.

VI. With this self-knowledge as his starting-point, having learnt that it becomes a contradiction and a lie unless it begins and ends in the knowledge of God, the minister may meet those who bring him their griefs with a learning and discretion not his own. The Church tells him the sin-sick man is to be quieted by being led to full confidence in God’s mercy, given the absolution and godly counsel he needs, and prepared to come with a clean heart to the Communion. These are not inconsistent commands to one whose own experience has interpreted them, and who believes the highest power God can give a human being is that of leading his fellows out of the confusion and malignity of self into the clear and full revelation of Him Who is perfect Truth and Loving-kindness. To quiet the conscience by showing God’s mercy is not to give a man the slightest hope of indulgence for his sin; it is to show him the way out of it, whatever it is. So no minute sifting of a past transgression is needed to know whether or on what conditions it may be forgiven. Nothing is forgiven to a man while he stays shut up in himself; he will have an ever-increasing consciousness of the past evil, and of its permanence as part of him. All is forgiven to the man who accepts deliverance from self, as from a chain he forged, and enters the fellowship with God and man that Christ has won for him.

Here is the absolution one man may give another because God has given it to all. The conscience can recognize it as just what it needs, because it frees him from the very load that crushed him and from which there seemed no freedom. It does not replace the Communion but prepares for it. The Service tells him a new and living way has been consecrated for him out of his darkness into the presence of perfect Light, and in the Sacrament he is invited to throw off the weight of his evil nature and put on Him Whose cross declared Him our Wisdom, Righteousness, and Sanctification. He does carry a burden to the altar, and as a separate creature he will always bear it. What the priest told him before is that he is a member of Christ and may cast it on Him. What he is told now is that it has been borne for him and for the whole world, and that he may rise a new man, able to deny himself and serve God and his fellows in the strength of Christ’s Spirit. The priest has not taken Christ’s office but has led him to Christ.

VII. If this is so, we may gladly admit that the Christian Priest can do for a sinner what a merely kind friend who receives his confidence cannot do as well. By his office he testifies to the Universal Sacrifice and the Universal Fellowship. So he declares his own personal inefficiency and directs the individual to the One Centre, Deliverer, and Mediator. He warns each man that to seek his life anywhere but in the common Lord and Head of mankind is to lose it, and declares that those ready to die with Christ shall rise with Him.

What motive has one privileged to give such an absolution to weigh the wrong in this act or person or that, when he knows the scales must be uneven and false? He must tell anyone who volunteers a confession: “If it comforts you to tell me, I am willing to hear. If it wronged a neighbour, I will tell you to make restitution before you come to the altar, as our Lord says you must. If it involves a quarrel with a neighbour, I will tell you to be reconciled first. But I will not, I dare not, prescribe any compensation to God or reconciliation with God. He has sent me to say that He has forgiven you for Christ’s sake and made reconciliation. I can only bid you accept that, and hold out to you and to all this pledge and sign that you may cast away the sinful old man and be clothed with the true humanity of Jesus Christ, for which you were created. If you wish to revive the evil thoughts and conditions of that old man, into which you fell by forsaking your place as a member of Christ, I will give no encouragement. Such reminiscences and confessions may suit the morbid taste of the age, and you may trade in them with the caterers for the circulating library. But you shall not bring them to me or make them a preparation for Holy Communion; except for the study of religious controversies and newspapers, there is no worse preparation.” However great the craving for such confessions among a portion of the laity brought up in an artificial and sickly atmosphere, as some who seem to know say it is, the priest should discourage it, not pamper it. Others may satisfy it; he has no business to, for it grows by what it feeds on, and the next generation will be feebler and more corrupt than ours.

VIII. At the same time, I do not think sensible and thoughtful men should encourage the middle classes in a blind fury against Confession and everything they denounce as Priestcraft. All classes, the aristocratic, trading, professional, and working, have sins enough to confess before God. It is better that they think about what they have to confess, what insincerity and hypocrisy toward God and falsehood toward their fellows, than that any one of them assume a commission to set the land’s standard of faith and practice, which would certainly be a low and evil one. The middle classes, and those in the upper who abetted them, did a great and noble work in the seventeenth century in fighting the tyranny of kings and prelates. But when they won the mastery they set up a worse priestcraft than the one they overthrew. We should guard against a result much worse, because much less sincere, in our day. Establish a middle-class ascendency and a middle-class religion, and the destruction of our old ecclesiastical and civil order is the least of the evils. The people will be trodden down as never before, the faith of the land will be one that has no interest for them, and the Gospel will not be for them because it will not be for mankind, so they will be left to Atheism. Therefore members and ministers of the English Church should strive to understand what she does and does not mean by Confession and Absolution, not abuse her words to a false sense and not neglect to obey them in the true sense. I believe that in the false sense they will never have the slightest power over the body of our people, whatever attraction they hold for a few of its more refined members. In the true sense, I believe the body of the people will one day claim them as a message of comfort and blessing, and resolve not to be deprived of them.

IX. Still, I would have little confidence in the words of any local Church, however dear and venerable, if I did not think they echoed the Book that belongs to the whole Church and contains its principles and charter. I have reluctantly delayed so long in speaking of my text, which seems to me to express the whole doctrine of Confession in its divinest form.

It is part of the address of Him Who holds the sharp two-edged sword to the Angel of the Church of Pergamos. He speaks, not the Beloved Disciple. He speaks to the minister not as separate from the Church but as the representative of its character, answerable for its sins. He commends the minister, and so the Church, for fidelity to His name under great temptation to forsake it. He blames the minister, and so the Church, for corruptions that had crept in and threatened its life: doctrines springing from high spiritual pretensions and leading to gross immorality. The Son of Man calls them to repent of these and of all the evils they had bred, and He fights against them with the sword from His mouth. To him who overcomes this thing that is dividing and destroying the Church, He promises, “I will give to him of the hidden manna; and I will give to him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”

No one has ever doubted that the white stone is the verdict of acquittal, the absolution of heart and conscience. What I want you to notice is: (1) this is the gift of the Son of Man; (2) it is a gift to a body; (3) it is connected with the hidden manna, the bread of life the Father gives from Heaven; (4) it is assured to each man who overcomes, by faith and confidence in the Head of the body, an infection to which all its members are liable; (5) though each may possess it, he does not hold it in his old name, for a new Name is written on it; (6) this forgiveness is nonetheless not something others can be told of: “no man knoweth but he who receiveth it.” The more these particulars are meditated on, the more light I think they will throw on this most practical and often most embarrassing subject. So far as we believe Christ is really in the midst of us, the Source of our union and life; so far as we believe He speaks to us not as separate beings but as parts of a Divine Society, each responsible for the acts of the others and affected by their evils; so far as we own one common food for our spirits, which is the very body and blood Christ gave for the life of the world; so far as we are conscious of a power constantly striving to overcome us and that must be overcome by Christ’s power; so far as we understand that all our forgiveness and better state comes in His name and not our own; so far as we own absolution as a gift to praise God for through all ages, yet a hidden gift, not palpable to the senses or to be boasted of before others, which vanishes when we try to reduce it to possession or proclaim it to the world, and which is an infinite blessing only while we refer it to the infinite God: so far as we hold these convictions, Confession will change from the hardest of duties into the most joyful of privileges, Absolution will become the setting free of the whole man from unutterable bondage, and our Eucharist will be a true Communion with Angels and Archangels around the Throne, because it is a Communion with Him Who sits on the Throne and with the Lamb, Who lives for ever and ever.