The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-02 00:00:00

946 THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF CONFESSION. COMMON sense has not, we verily believe, a more desperate antagonist than the heat of theological controversy. Was ever trumpery equal to that elicited by the Commissioners who sat on the Boyn-hill case with all the gravity of men exer cising judicial authority by delegation from a successor of the Apostles ? On the foreground of the stage, in this inte resting drama, appears—as prima donna, 'shall we say, or as corpus delicti ?—a married woman of eleven years matrimonial standing, the mother of eight children ; who by her own showing cohabited at one period of her life with two men at once, her lawful husband being one of the two, and who, with regard to one of her children, at least, not only cannot take upon her self to decide to which of those two the honour of paternity belongs, but declines to state whether others besides them might not have as fair a claim. This woman, it appears, is, notwith standing the somewhat startling character of her antecedents, of so innocent a turn of mind that she has absolutely no idea what such terms as "fornication" or "adultery" can possibly mean ; and, what is still more wonderful, not only has her intellect remained in this state of charming innocence of the meaning of naughty words, but her feelings have retained so delicate a sense of all but virgin modesty, that any allu sion to the sins prohibited by the Seventh Com mandment is most distressing to her, in fact, to use her own phraseology, quite upsets her." Here is a study, if ever there was one, for psycho logists The cure of this innocent, sensitive soul, it seems, devolved in due course of time upon a clergyman endowed with a scrupulous conscience, quite as extraordinary in its way as is the inno cence and modesty of his fur parishioner. He has scanned the field, and scrutinized the extent and the limits, of his clerical duty with an excess of conscientiousness with which, It is to be hoped, not many of his brethren are chargeable. On a former occasion he found himself utterly unable to thank Heaven for the happy delivery of her Majesty, because the form of words for doing so, though prepared by the Archbishops and Bishops, according to immemorial custom, had reached him through the profane hands of the printer to the Privy Council. On his entrance upon his new charge, his attention appears to have been specially attracted towards the directions con tained in the Prayer-book for dealing with sick parishioners. He finds that he is called upon to " examine them whether they repent them truly " of their sins," and, further, to "move them to " make a special confession of their sins, if they " feel their conscience troubled with any weighty " matter." From these general directions he infers that an exact performance of his duty in this respect requires him to provide himself with a "systematic course" of questioning. Full of the symmetry of his "systematic course," he proceeds to catechise his frail female parish ioner as to the strict propriety of her feelings towards the other sex, and deems it necessary to apprise her of the sinfulness of a wanton eye. Her notorious antecedents might, we should think, have justified some pretty strong admo nitions, without any technical discussion on the nature or the degrees of the sin in question, but our precise Curate felt it his duty to proceed secundum artem. Unluckily for him, there are two kinds of Gospel within the district of Boyn-hill. While he himself is a tolerably fair representative of the one sort, we find the other personified in a zealous and energetic lady of the genus somewhat un gallantly designated "busybodies." With that singular keenness of olfactory which religious partizans have in common with bloodhounds, she scents the heterodox tendencies of the over precise Curate afar off, and she follows the trail with an eagerness worthy of a better cause. Having extracted from the pattern of female sensibility on whom the Curate had practised his " systematic course " such a version of his cate chetical exercise on the Seventh Commandment as suited her peculiar views of that branch of the pastoral office—and, truth to say, she could have found little difficulty in doing se, as her informant eeetued as willing to share her favours between Vuseyite and Evangelical, as she had formerly done between ARNOLD and Krunits,—the self constituted guardian of the faith of the parish THE PRESS, OCTOBER 2, 1858. took upon herself:to do a small stroke of Epis copal work on her own hook. She convened not only the Curate but his Rector before her own self, in a species of private parochial visita tion, in the course of which it is clear from her own account that she applied the screw of the Confessional to the offending Curate with quite as much stringency as he himself' had applied it to the victim of his " systematic course." His denial of the grosser and more offensive parts of her version of his proceedings she treated with an incredulity becoming her religious zeal, and his attempts to refer her to the Book of Common Prayer as the rule of his conduct she encountered with that lofty scorn for what may be said on the other side of the question, which is the not un usual accompaniment of strong convictions. One more actor in this strange business de serves to be singled out from the general crowd of witnesses and tale-bearers—the clerical neigh bour of the offending curate. In the plenitude of that peculiar Corm of " brotherly love" which we regret to see so frequently displayed by the clergy towards one another, he rushed to the assistance of the female quasi-Bishop of Boyn hill, and used his best endeavours to denounce his brother's alleged delinquency to the bishop of the diocese, as well as to blazon it abroad in the public prints. To crown all, the indelicacy of the questions put and pressed by counsel on both sides in a crowded court, before a mixed audience, casts every possible indiscretion of which the over precise Curate may have been guilty, altogether into the shade; and the mixture of hardihood and levity with which they are answered by the -" injured female" gives the lie direct to the no tion of any outrage having been committed upon her delicate sense of feminine modesty. Looking at the whole story in its exquisite and complicated absurdity—which, were the subject less grave, would be supremely ridiculous—we own to a feeling of deep humiliation that such a case as this should be exhibited to the world as a spe - cimen of religious earnestness on either side of the question. For the unseemliness of this exhibition the Bishop who instituted the inquiry is certainly not responsible. His Lordship appears from the first to have formed a pretty correct estimate of the me rits of the case; but as the impartiality of his judg ment was called in question, he did wisely in letting the matter take its course even to this lame and pitiful conclusion. Indeed, we cannot help think ing that it would have been well if his brother of LONDON had, in the somewhat similar case brought under his notice, acted with like impar tiality. Meanwhile, it is quite clear that neither the condemnation of the Rev. Mr. POOLE, nor the acquittal of the Rev. Mr. WEST, will settle the question in dispute, or put an end to the con troversy carried on with such painful asperity. And yet a few grains of common sense, mixed with a few grains of chazity, might suffice to set the matter at rest. That our Church contemplates the receiving of special confession of sins by her ministers as a remedy for consciences unusually troubled or burdened with any extraordinary weight of guilt, cannot, in the face of divers passages in her Prayer-book, be honestly denied. As to the question whether those di rections and counsels be in accordance with the teaching of Holy Scripture, we own that we would rather trust to the sober piety of the com pilers of the Book of Common Prayer than to the hotheaded religionism of our own day. On the other hand, it appears to us equally unde niable that nothing can be further from the in tention, or more inconsistent with the spirit, of the I'rayer-book, than the establishment of a spiritual tyranny over men's consciences, in the shape of a regular system of habitual confession to a priest, enjoined upon, or recommended to, all, as an ordinary means of grace. That the general rules of our Church on this s u bj ec t are liable to abuse in the hands of indiscreet or dis honest men, is doubtless true; but that is no argument against the soundness of those rules : it is the common fate of all rules, even of those laid down by inspired lips and pens. Read with an unprejudiced mind and an honest purpose to apply them to the business in hand, the cure of souls, those rules are not only per fectly intelligible, but marvellously adapted to the condition and the wants of human nature. To affirm that everybody is competent to understand and to manage his own spiritual state, ;and that recourse to a spiritual adviser in cases of difficulty is a mere invention of przestcraft, is as absurd as it would be to contend tha , t rt l ) aw im an ag d in : On . Physic are utterly useless for the management of property or of bodily health, and are a mere device for sup.. porting two pr Assions. the other hand, that the spiritual discipline of a man's soul cannot be carried on without the interven• tiou of a priest, and of a system of confession, is aq preposterous as it would be for a man never to eat a meal without directions from his doctor, nor to venture upon purchasing a suit o f c l othes, or hiring a shoe-boy, without the professional assistance of an attorney. Let not the clergy turn their office of spiritual guides and counsellors into a system of pedantic ecclesiastical domination, and let not the laity allow themselves to be frightened by the bugbear of Auricular Confession into an unreasoning hostility to what is, after all , in every limn of religion and school of theology, an important feature of the ministerial functioK This, it appears to us, is the conclusion to which common sense points; and if the humiliating result of the Boyn-hill investigation shall be the means of directing public opinion into this train of thought and feeling, even that lamentabl e ilk. play of unchristian animosity in the cause of religion will not have been without its use. DWELLINGSeviIs ls of our social E coTditi l o t a have St sc the begun to attract public attention, the efforts of philanthropists have been divided between two classes of remedies. Of these, the one deals with the results, with the evil fruit when it drops from the stem in full ripeness, and, strewed copiously over the surface of society, proves at once offensive and noxious; the other deals with the causes which produce those results, the evil root from which the evil fruit has grown, and by eradicating the former seeks to arrest, and even tually to prevent, the continued growth of the latter. There can be but one opinion as to the comparative merit and efficacy of those two classes of remedies, and of the two systems of social amelioration by which they are respectively suggested and employed. No one can deny that " prevention is better than cure." Unhappily, however, society has scarcely had the oppor tunity of deliberating to which of the two systems it would give the preference. It was the accumulation of evil results that aroused the mind and awakened the conscience of the public to the fact that there was something amiss in the social state of large masses of our population. It was by social nuisances, some of them of the most intolerable character, that philanthropy was called into action. And the natural consequence of this was the creation of a vast corrective machinery to meet the pressure of the most urgent evils which obtruded themselves upon the eye. Union workhouses and model prisons, re formatories and penitentiaries, hospitals and lunatic asylums, multiplied upon us, at an enor mous cost of public money, and by great and laudable efforts of private charity. With all this no fault is to be found. It was the natural course of things. The corruption of the blood was not suspected till the body was covered with sores, and these had to be attended to in the first instance. But a continuance of the most careful poulticing will do little good, unless the blood can be purified, and the forma tion of fresh ulcers prevented. After expending no end of money and social science upon such institutions as those above named, our next effort must be to render them useless, or, since we cannot hope for that, to diminish the pressure of candidates upon them. To this, which is un doubtedly the more rational as well as the only really efficacious way of dealing with our social evils, we have been gradually feeling our way. But in this direction we have yet much to learn; and on reviewing what has been done in the way of applying preventives, we are obliged to confess that, considering the character which we claim, and in many respects deserve, of being an emi nently practical people, we have proved ourselves sad bunglers. The first glimmering of the preventive system was more than half a mistake. "Do you wish to improve the masses ? Do you wish to keep them from falling into habits of vice and crime, 0 . preserve them from all the miseries, moral, mental, and physical, consequent upon the forma tion of evil habits ? There is but one way to set about it. You must educate them. Knowledge were is power." The suggestion took. Schools , set up in all directions; the demand for teaeners