“Prop. 3. In the Mass is the lively sacrifice of the Church available," &c. Ridley answers this doctrine-mark well, not the sacrifice of masses, but the sacrifice of the Mass: "I judge it may and ought most worthily to be counted wicked and blasphemous (the very word used in the Thirty-first Article) against the most precious blood of our Saviour, Christ" (p. 206-211). And again—this is very important— showing how they, the Romanists, "avoid" Scripture by subtle shifts... "By the distinction of the bloody and unbloody sacrifice, as though our unbloody sacrifice of the Church were any other than the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, than a commemoration, a showing forth, and a sacramental representation of that one only bloody Sacrifice, offered up once for all" (p. 211).

66

Cranmer also says, Works I., 374: 'I was in divers errors," and amongst them he mentions "the sacrifice propitiatory of the priest in the Mass," not in the masses. So also the Homily for Whit Sunday: "Christ commended to His Church a Sacrament of His body and blood; they have changed it into a Sacrifice for the quick and the dead;" and the Homily concerning the sacrament: "We must then take heed, lest of the memory it be made a sacrifice.”

7.-BISHOP WILBERFORCE AND DR. PUSEY ON PRIVATE CONFESSION.

To show that this view is not confined to any particular school of thought, I quote the opinion of one who may be fairly taken as a representative High Churchman, the late Bishop S. Wilberforce, whose views I learned for the first time after thus writing. Speaking on this subject of private. confession, he says:—

"It is plain, first, that our Church never designed that the

ministers of God's words and sacraments should abdicate that which is amongst the most important functions of their office, the dealings, as ministers of God, with the consciences. of men. Yet, on the other hand, it is equally clear that there is a broad distinction between her intention herein and that of the Church of Rome . . . The object of the Roman Church is to bring the conscience under the power of the priest, to make him the judge to whose sentence it should absolutely defer. The object of our Church is so to awaken, enlighten, and strengthen the conscience that, with the aid. of Holy Scripture and the ordinary public ministrations of God's Word, it may rightly guide the individual soul.

"With these different objects in view, there is between the two systems far more than a mere difference in degree. Every part of the priest's private ministrations with consciences is affected by it. The one is always seeking to subdue, the other to emancipate, the individual conscience. And this difference of object has by degrees greatly affected the statement of doctrine, as well as the administration of dicipline, in the two Communions.

"Thus, it is not merely that private confession is enjoined upon all in the Roman Communion, and only permitted in certain exceptional cases in ours, but that the spiritual aspect of the same act assumes a wholly different character in the two Communions. The teaching of the Church of Rome is that confession to a priest is a direct sacramental ordinance of the Church of Christ; and that, to be duly practised, it must be secret and complete, numbering all remembered sins. So made, it is to be followed by private absolution, which, it is held, conveys a special pardon for the sins so remembered and confessed; and then, consistently with this system of confession, she recommends that every soul should be permanently under the direction of some priest; that this spiritual director should habitually guide those who consult

him; that the conscience should be committed to his keep-ing; this is, in their view, the result to be aimed at . . . It is not difficult to see what must be the effect of such a system. It will lead to many great evils, and amongst them these: When confession to a man is thus enforced, or even encouraged, as a duty, instead of being allowed as a last permission, to which, under peculiar circumstances and as an extreme remedy, the stricken soul, unable to reassure itself,. may have recourse, it will, with many, be used dishonestly.. The habit of withholding the real and deepest sins, consistently with getting through confession, will soon be formed. On the other hand, those who strive to confess all will assuredly be led to weaken the spring of conscience by devolving that determination of what is right, which is its own solemn responsibility, to be discharged under the eye of God and by the light of His Word, to the decision of another for it. The confessor will take the place, first, of Christ, as the receiver of all the secrets of our guilt, and shame, and weakness; and then of the conscience, as the judge, arbiter, and director of our lives.

"Now, in opposition to this system, the Church of England, in exact conformity, as we maintain, with the Word of God and the teaching and the practice of the primitive Church, allows private confession instead of enforcing it, and recommends it only under certain prescribed circumstances and conditions; as a means of restoring health to a sick conscience, instead of treating the habit of confessing as the state of health. She treats it as wise men treat medical aids; as blessed means of renovation, stored, by God's mercy, for their need in times of sickness; but still as not meant for, and not wholly compatible with, a settled habit of strong health; and this difference of view is founded upon a great doctrinal difference as to the place which confession occupies in the new kingdom of Christ. The

Church of England does not treat it as a separate ordinance of Christ, endowed with a special sacramental grace of its own; but she regards it as a permitted opening of grief'; as a 'lightening' of a 'burden'; as in no way bringing any special pardon or absolution to the penitent over and above that which he might equally obtain by general confession to Almighty God, and public absolution in the congregation, but only as a spiritual confidence which might be entrusted to any brother Christian, but which it is most natural and best to commit to the physician of souls, as having more experience of such cases, and as being specially provided by God with grace for their treatment and relief."-Wilberforce's Ordination Addresses, pp. 112-115.

Quite opposed to this view, and to the teaching of the Church of England, are the views of Dr. Pusey, as expressed in his late work on confession, in which he takes the extraordinary position that the declaration in the First Prayer Book (an obsolete and now unauthorized manual) permitting auricular confession is a sufficient justification for its practice in the Church to-day, and the carefully circumscribed absolution in the Visitation of the Sick the formula to be employed in confessing those who are well. One rises from reading this argument of Pusey with the exclamation of Newman, "Truly, this man is haunted by no intellectual perplexities," and with the assertion of Bishop Cleveland Coxe, "Dr. Pusey is out of place in the Church of England." Filled with Romish theories, he casts about, as if in desperation, for any opening or place by which he can graft them on the Church of England. He asks that the Romanizing school "be free to do what we think, before God"; in other words, to propagate the Roman doctrine of confession and absolution because there were certain expressions in the now-abandoned Prayer Book of 1549 which permitted auricular confession. He declares, as his opinion, that the Church of England

commands her priests, in two of her offices, to hear confessions, a statement that is positively misleading, for the permission in the Communion exhortation has nothing to do with confession in the Romish sense that Pusey uses. He takes statements of divines like Usher, Jewel, and White, advocating the scriptural and evangelical theory of confession, as supporting his view, which is scarce distinguishable from the Roman. He quotes such men as Bishops Andrewes and Overall, and Dr. Peter Heylin, as if their views could be authoritative expositions of the teaching of the Church. He takes a quotation of Cranmer, written in the year 1540, to interpret his views in 1550 or 1552, though Cranmer himself acknowledged a change in his views. He quotes from Latimer's sermon on the third Sunday after Epiphany, "and sure it grieveth me much that such confessions are not kept in England," as if Latimer was supporting the Tractarian doctrine; but he omits to state that, in the very sentence before, the good bishop demolishes that very doctrine of priestly absolution which he (Pusey) advocates throughout :

:

But

"Here our Papists make much ado with their auricular confession, proving the same by this place. For they say Christ sent this man unto the priest to fetch there his absolution; and, therefore, we must go also unto the priest, and, after confession, receive absolution of all our sins. yet we must take heed, say they, that we forget nothing; for all those sins that are forgotten may not be forgiven. And so they bind the consciences of men, persuading them that when their sins were all numbered and confessed, it was well. And hereby they took clean away the passion of Christ. For they made this numbering of sins to be a merit; and so they came to all the secrets that were in men's hearts; so that emperor nor king could say or do, nor think anything in his heart, but they knew it; and so applied all the purposes and