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.

There is one topic closely connected with those upon which I have been speaking to you for three Sundays, that at this time especially must not be passed over. We hear much of Confession; many questions whether a clergyman of the Church is not bound to encourage and establish the formal practice of it; many debates about the limits within which it is to be exercised; many assertions that there is a demand for it among the laity. We hear vehement denunciations of the least approach to a Confessional; passionate appeals to the experience of other nations against it; a cry that it may be hindered by the arm of the State, if it cannot be checked by an expression of opinion. There is, of course, abundance of frivolous talk on one side or the other, which must be borne as a penance when we cannot avoid it. There are also many earnest feelings and thoughts on both sides: these may, by God’s grace, be separated from the vanity which surrounds them; they may become clear and distinct; at last they may be brought to work in harmony, not in opposition.

I. For us in England it is a helpful circumstance that the controversy turns principally on a single passage in the exhortation to the Communion. I will quote it:—

“And because it is requisite that no man shall come to the Holy Communion but with a full trust in God’s mercy and with a quiet conscience; therefore if there be any of you who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort and counsel, let him come to me or to some discreet and honest minister of God’s word, that by the ministry of God’s word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all scruples and doubtfulness.”

Those who are arguing that the Church of England gives very slight encouragement to the practice of Confession, as it is understood in other countries, naturally dwell on the fact that this is the only staff of their opponents. “Supposing,” they say, “it is to be an institution,—an institution affecting, as it must needs do, the whole life of our society,—would all notice of it have been confined to one of our services,—would it have occurred at the close of an address which is but read occasionally, for which another may be substituted?” They are entitled to any advantage they can derive from this consideration. It is an important one: it ought not to be overlooked. Again it may be said by the same persons, “That neither the word confessional, nor even the word confession, is used in this passage; that there is merely a general direction as to the duty of quieting uneasy or scrupulous consciences; that the minister is spoken of much more as a friendly adviser than as an authoritative spiritual director.” This remark, again, is worthy of all attention, as any exact criticism upon a disputed sentence must needs be.

But there is something to be alleged on the other side. The Communion service is not merely one of our services, but, as I contended last Sunday, the service which gives the force and interpretation to all the rest. It is the centre of a Christian worship: with it all our worship stands or falls. “To connect the Confessional with the Communion”—so the defender of it may speak—“is to give it the highest honour you can give it. To treat it as a preparation for the Communion, is to treat it as the greatest necessity of a Church. We ask no more,—we want it in no other sense, for no other purpose, than that. And if you insist on the absence of the word confession,” they may go on, “how do you account for the presence of another word which is far more offensive to antisacerdotal ears—absolution? Is that a power which can be ascribed to an ordinary friend? Does it not belong emphatically to the priest, as such?”

Allowing all weight to these apparently adverse reflections, I think those who put them forth will agree with me to this extent. They will acknowledge that the English Church—so far as we can gather her judgment from what she has omitted and what she has said—wishes us to derive our idea of the nature of Confession from the nature of Communion. She must mean us to turn away from all other methods of estimating its character, its value, its relation to the Christian life, however plausible; she must wish us steadily to ask ourselves, What is the signification of the Lord’s Supper? How does that signification bear upon the signification, the utility, the necessity of Confession?

II. We have seen that a man may approach the Lord’s table for two most opposite reasons. He may come to it because he thinks that Christ’s death, of which it testifies, will deliver, or may deliver his individual soul from the fate to which his race is doomed. He may come to it, because he desires to lose his individual soul in Christ, to be a partaker of the death which He died for the world, of the Redemption which He obtained for the world. These conceptions of the end for which this ordinance was appointed—of the blessings which it procures—are quite independent of any theories about the nature of the elements and the effect of consecration upon them. A Romanist, a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, may set either of these objects before him, and may reconcile it with his peculiar system. But I cannot help thinking that Romanists or Lutherans or Zwinglians who seek themselves, and not Christ, in the Eucharist, will have no real agreement even with the members of their own sect,—even with those who adopt precisely the same formula with them respecting transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or the memorial character of the feast; and that the Romanists, Lutherans, and Zwinglians who seek Christ there and not themselves, will be essentially one at heart, however widely different may be their statements and their intellectual conceptions.

Most of us, when we are first led to think of the Communion of the Lord’s Supper, and of the duty of receiving it, are greatly confused between these two ends of life. A sense of having neglected our souls, or, as we sometimes express it, our religious interests, is the prominent one in our minds. But that vague general feeling is mingled with the remembrance of distinct acts done long ago, or done recently, which we long to blot out, and which have the stamp of eternity fixed upon them. The thoughts, “God knows that these things have been committed; God knows that I committed them; of me He will require them; in the wide universe I shall be recognized as the author of them; I am certain that I shall;”—these thoughts create a sense of terror which may be strong at one time, weak at any other; which we have a mighty impulse to drown in any sights or sounds of the outer world; which we think we ought to cherish, to deepen, to make enduring. If we had merely those thoughts about the neglect of certain services which it behoved us to perform, we might run at once to the Communion, taking a certain credit to ourselves for repairing a past error, and beginning a new career more respectable in the eyes of religious men, more acceptable to our Judge. The other feelings give an entirely different character to that service: “Will it affect those acts of mine, those past acts? Will it put me in a different position with reference to them? I have heard of a wonderful, unutterable forgiveness; here it seems to be gathered up and expressed. Could I anyhow lay hold of that,—could I make it mine? Could it say to me, ‘Those acts of yours shall not be remembered any more against you’? Would even that do unless it were able to make me something different? But is not this Communion very awful as well as hopeful? For the mere chance of a possible blessing, dare I incur the risk of deepening my evil and my curse? While I am invited, am I not also driven back? While I am bidden to come, for all things are ready, do not I hear that if I come unworthily I may increase my damnation?”

III. Here are materials enough to make the conscience unquiet; and such unquietness, the Church says, it is most desirable should be removed before a man come to the Lord’s Supper. She lays it upon her ministers that they should use all the power and knowledge which have been given them for the purpose of removing it. Supposing, then, a person perplexed in the way I have described, should come to a minister, how may he give evidence of that learning and discretion which are represented as his proper characteristics? First of all, surely, he ought to be clear himself about the purpose for which priests and laymen alike are bidden to eat the bread and drink the wine. Any confusion on this point will make the aid which he affords to the conscience utterly unsatisfactory. If for instance, if he has not settled it 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 meant to lay down a universal maxim, the maxim of those who follow Him, the Gospel maxim,—if he does not see in this Sacrament the exposition and fulfilment of that maxim,—how will he treat his bewildered patient? Let the question proposed to him be simply this, “What can I do to be saved?” he will stumble at the simple answer which St. Paul made to the jailor at Philippi. He will not say boldly, “There is One in Whom you may believe, in Whom you may lose yourself. There is One Who is the same for all; the Lord and Saviour of sinners. To Him you belong. Give yourself to Him.” He will suppose that he must lay down a number of rules as to what a man must do, as to what he must believe, in order to be saved. And so he will frustrate the meaning, he will destroy the simplicity, of that great practical testimony to the Lord’s death which the Communion supplies.

But if the anxiety of the person who is consulting him does not take this direct and comprehensive form,—and we cannot expect that in general it will—if there should be certain special offences, great or little, which weigh down his soul; how will a minister, such as I have imagined, be likely to deal with the case? He will try to ascertain whether the acts which have been committed belong to the class of venial or of deadly sins. He will be aware that this point cannot be exactly settled by the most carefully arranged list, drawn up by the most refined casuists, of the two classes of transgressions. He must inform himself about the state of mind which led to the perpetration of one wrong act or another; he must weigh the amount of temptation. He does not aspire to make more than a very distant approximation to truth on these points; but he may, with the help of his books, directing him in a course of cross-examination, find out something which will assist his judgment. When so much is at stake—in a matter concerning the safety of the soul,—it must surely, he thinks, be his business to search as far as he can, to penetrate into all the closest and darkest passages through which evil has found an entrance. What accidental mischiefs which accompany the means ought not to be risked for the sake of the great, the transcendent result! It may strike him sometimes that among these mischiefs is included the revival of all those thoughts and feelings which prompted the wrong deed,—a return to the foul or revengeful imaginations in which it had its birth. He may have had experience—he has little acquaintance with himself if he has not—of the infinite deceptions which we commit when we try to analyze our own feelings in any bygone transaction, still more when we try to assign our part or another’s part in the guilt of it. But the probability, the almost certainty, of all this impurity, all this falsehood, must be incurred,—the sleeping embers of past evils must be stirred up,—for how can the priest honestly give his absolution if he has not discovered, as well as he can, what is to be absolved?

I wish you to see how easily and naturally an English minister may slide into this course, not from any wrong intention, but from an earnest desire to follow what he supposes is the precept of his Church; not so much from a perverse theory of his own, as from too faithful an adherence to certain notions which have infected the Church generally, and which are perhaps quite as strong in the minds of many who denounce him as in his own. If on these he has grafted a high notion of the priestly authority, let me endeavour to show him how little he can realize that notion, unless he strike into quite a different path from that on which he has entered.

IV. It is clear that his cross-examination has done nothing to fulfil the wishes expressed in our Exhortation. He has not quieted the conscience of the man or woman who has come to him. He has added exceedingly to its disquiet and confusion. It may be it must be—a relief to tell any one of an act or a state of mind which we have kept shut up within us till we can endure the scorching agony of concealment no longer. But the priest, so far as he has tried to exercise his own proper function, has not, thus far, contributed in the very slightest degree to this relief; he has lessened it; he has made the perplexity, the torture, the inward sin, greater and heavier.

“Yes,” it will be said, “but now his turn comes. Now he is to give the absolution which the Church speaks of.” Oh no! Not that absolution! Not actual freedom of conscience! Not the loosing a burden too heavy to be borne. The priest is able to say certain words which betoken that he absolves. He dare not trust those words to do their work. He has himself the feeblest faith in their power. He must help them out by appeals to the senses. He must convey a vague notion to the fancy that he is a very wonderful person. Ultimately he will fall back on a certain theory that he has the right to absolve; that it must belong to him; that it must effect something;—all this because he has a secret conviction that by itself, without this assumption, it does effect nothing. Is this exalting priestly authority? Is this asserting the sacerdotal might? Are you not degrading that authority to the lowest point? Are you not bringing sacerdotal impotence into the fullest manifestation? Are you not making the conscience, which should own its force, cry out with indignation, as soon as it perceives that it has been tampered with, “What art thou?”

There is still another point which I would press on the minister who wishes to prepare penitents for the Communion. Is he preparing them? What are they to seek for there? If he has imparted to them any spiritual gift, it is that gift of which the Eucharist itself testifies. His idea of Absolution is a direct interference with the meaning of the Sacrament; not a theoretical more than a practical interference. The communicants’ sins have been put away by his word. What, then, is that grievous and intolerable weight which they complain of when they kneel? What need have they of the general pardon which the priest announces? What need have they of the comfortable words which Christ speaks to those that are heavy laden? Draw what nice distinctions you please, if you are meeting the consciences of human beings, not a thing which is called the Conscience in books of divinity or casuistry,—this question will force itself upon you, and you cannot evade it.

V. But does not this question also demand an answer from those who think that the Exhortation in our Service has an altogether different force from that which the confessional, ancient or modern, would give it? I think they should be able to give such an answer. I would try, earnestly and humbly—believing that Exhortation to be binding on me, believing that I ought to have complied with it far more than I have done,—to find what the answer is. And first of all, I think we too ought to understand, and continually to remind ourselves, that our offences are deeper in their nature, wider and more serious in their consequences, than any which those who seek relief at our hands can make known to us. Whosesoever offences are venial,—if venial is twisted from its derivation, and made to mean little or insignificant, ours are not. If it be very hard work to ascertain the relative gravity or criminality of other men’s evil deeds and evil states of mind, we may know a little but a little—of the length and breadth of our own. How do we know them? Not because we have been able, by certain processes, to make out what they are, or to work up our minds to some tremendous sense of their hideousness, but because God has not allowed us—much as we have wished it—to remain ignorant of them, because He has not suffered us to quench His light when we have laboured hardest to draw it down into our darkness. If we have any impression about our evil at all, thus, and thus only, have we received the impression. But again; what have we learnt about those evils of ours? Surely we have learnt this—that they come from want of communion with the true and righteous and holy mind of Him in Whom we are living and moving and having our being; that they come from want of communion with the human creatures among whom we are dwelling. We are continually tempted to trace them to some other causes than this; to think that they consist in something else than in the habit of self-pleasing, self-willing, self-seeking; that they issue in something else than a deeper alienation from God and from our fellows. But to this mode of contemplating them we are constantly recalled, first by our ministerial duties themselves, which remind us that we are meant to show forth God’s light to men, and to present the sorrows and sins of men before God; secondly, by this Sacrament, which it is our highest function to administer,—which reminds us by its entire substance, and by all the parts of it, that the mind of God is satisfied only with an entire, voluntary, filial sacrifice, and that this sacrifice is the bond of peace for all, is the deliverance from the sins of the world.

VI. Having this self-knowledge as his starting-point,—having learnt that his self-knowledge becomes a contradiction and a lie unless it begins and terminates in the knowledge of God,—the minister may perhaps meet those who come to lay their griefs before him, with a learning and discretion which are not his own. The sin-sick man, the Church tells him, is to be quieted by being led to a full confidence in God’s mercy; he is to have the benefit of the absolution and godly counsel which he needs; he is to be prepared for coming with a clean heart to the Communion. These are not inconsistent commands to one whose own experience has interpreted them, and who believes that the highest power with which God can endow any human being, is the power of leading his fellow-creatures out of the confusions and malignity of self, into the clear and full revelation of Him Who is perfect Truth and Clearness and Loving-kindness. To quiet the conscience by the exhibition of His mercy, is not to give a man any, the slightest, hope of indulgence for his sin; it is to show him the way out of his sin, whatever it is. It requires therefore no minute sifting of the quality and amount of a past transgression, to know whether or on what conditions it may be forgiven. Nothing is forgiven to the man while he remains shut up in himself; there will be an ever increasing and never terminating consciousness of the past evil, an ever increasing and more interminable consciousness of its perpetuity, as a part of him. There is all forgiveness to the man who accepts the deliverance from self as from a chain which he has forged; who enters into the state of fellowship with God and Man, which is the state which Christ has won for him.

Here is the absolution which a man may give to his fellow, because God has given it to all; an absolution which the conscience is able to recognize as just what it needs, because it is the emancipation from the very load by which it is crushed, and from which it seemed as if there could be no emancipation. Here is not a substitution for the Communion, but a preparation for it, seeing that what the Service tells him is, that there is a new and living way consecrated for him out of his darkness, into the presence of the perfect Light; and seeing that in the Sacrament he is invited to cast off the weight of his evil nature, and to put on Him Whose cross declared Him to be the Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, for us all. He does carry a burden with him to the altar. As a separate creature he will bear it always. What the priest has told him before is, that he is a member of Christ, and may cast it upon Him. What he is told now is, that it has been borne for him and for the whole world, and that he may rise up a new man, capable of denying himself, capable of serving God and serving his fellows, in the strength of Christ’s Spirit. The priest has not assumed the office of Christ, but has led him to Christ.

VII. If this be so, we may cheerfully admit that the Christian Priest may do for a sinner and sufferer what a mere kind friend, who receives his confidence, cannot do equally well. For by his office he testifies of the Universal Sacrifice, of the Universal Fellowship. By his office, therefore, he declares his own personal inefficiency, he directs the individual man to the One Centre, the One Deliverer, the One Mediator. By his office he warns each man that to seek his life anywhere but in the common Lord and Head of Mankind, is to lose it. By his office he declares that they who are ready to die with Christ shall rise with Him.

What motive has one who is privileged to bestow such an absolution as this, to weigh the amount of wrong in this act or person or that,—to weigh them, though he knows that the scales must be uneven and false? He must say to the person who volunteers a confession of any particular offence, “If it is a comfort to you to tell it me, I am willing to hear. If it involves offence to a neighbour, I shall bid you go and make restitution to him before you come to the altar, as our Lord says that you must. If it involves a quarrel with your neighbour, I shall bid you be reconciled to him before you come to the altar. But as for prescribing to you any mode of compensation to God, of reconciliation with God, I will not do it, I dare not do it. He has sent me to say that He has forgiven you for Christ’s sake, and made reconciliation with you. I can only bid you accept that forgiveness and reconciliation; I can only hold out to you and to all this pledge and sign of reconciliation, 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 which belong to that old man—into which you have fallen, by forsaking your proper state as a member of Christ, I will give you no encouragement. Such reminiscences, such confessions, may please the morbid taste of the age; you may trade in them with the caterers for the circulating library. But you shall not bring them to me; you shall not make them a preparation for the Holy Communion; for except it be the study of religious controversies and newspapers, there is no preparation so bad.” Let there be ever so much craving then, as some who seem to know say there is, among a portion of the laity, brought up in an artificial and sickly atmosphere, for these confessions, it is to be discountenanced, not pampered, by the priest. It may have other satisfactions; he has no business to satisfy it; for it will grow 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 that it is the business of sensible and thoughtful men to encourage the middle classes in a blind fury against Confession, and against everything which they denounce under the name of Priestcraft. All classes in the land, the Aristocratical, the Trading, the Professional, the Working, have sins enough to confess before God. It is better that they should be thinking what they have to confess,— what insincerities and hypocrisies towards God, what falsehoods towards their fellowmen,—than that any one of them should be assuming a commission to establish their standard of faith and practice, which will certainly be a very low and evil standard,—in the land. The middle classes, and those in the upper who abetted them, did a very great and noble work in the seventeenth century, while they fought against the tyranny of kings and prelates. But when they obtained the mastery, they established a worse priestcraft than that which they subverted. It is well to be on our guard against a result which will be much worse, because much less sincere, in our day. Establish a middle class ascendency,—a middle class religion,—and the destruction of our old ecclesiastical and civil order is the least part of the evil which will ensue. The people will be trodden down as they have never been trodden down yet; the faith of the land will be a faith which has no interest for them. The Gospel will not be for them, because it will not be for mankind, and they will be left to Atheism. Therefore it is that the members and ministers of the English Church should strive to understand what she does mean and what she does not mean when she speaks of Confession and Absolution; that they should not abuse her words to a false sense; that they should not forget to obey them in the true sense. I believe that in the false sense they will never have any, even the slightest power over the body of our people, whatever attraction they may have for a few of its more refined members. I believe that in the true sense, the body of the people will one day assert them as a message of comfort and blessing to them, and will resolve not to be deprived of them.

IX. Still I should have little confidence in the words of any local Church, however dear and venerable, if I did not think that they echoed the words of that Book which is for the whole Church, which contains its principles and its charter. I have reluctantly delayed so long to speak of the text which I have chosen, and which expresses, it seems to me, the whole doctrine of Confession in its divinest form.

It is part of the address which He Who holds the sharp two-edged sword addresses to the Angel of the Church of Pergamos. He speaks; not the Beloved Disciple. He speaks not to the minister or officer of the Church as if he were separate from it, but as the representative of its character, as answerable for its sins. He commends the minister of this Church, and therefore the Church itself, for fidelity to His name under great temptations to forsake it. He blames the minister of this Church, and therefore the Church itself, for corruptions that had crept into it, and that were threatening its life. Doctrines springing from high spiritual pretensions, and leading to gross immorality, had invaded it. Of these, and of all the evils which they had engendered, the Son of Man calls them to repent. He is fighting against them with the sword out of His mouth. And He promises to him that overcometh that which is dividing and destroying the Church, “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.”

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