bidden throughout the whole Western Church, Catholic and Protestant alike. Daily Communion, universal in the primitive Church, has for the vast majority of Christians been discontinued both in East and West. Evening Communion, the original time of the ordinance, has been forbidden by the Roman Church. Solitary Communion has been forbidden in the English Church. Death-bed Communion has been forbidden in the Scottish Church. It is difficult to imagine changes, short of total abolition, more sweeping than these. But yet they were induced by the repugnance of the higher instinct of Christendom to see its most sacred ceremony degraded into a charm. It is possible that the metaphors of the Bible on this subject shall be felt to have been so misused and distorted that they also shall pass into the same abeyance as has already overtaken some expressions which formerly were no less dear to pious hearts than these. The use of the language of the Canticles, such as was familiar to St. Bernard and Samuel Rutherford, has become impossible, and many terms used in St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans and Galatians on Predestination and Justification are now but very rarely heard in ordinary pulpits. But, whatever betide, it is alike the duty and the hope, whether of those who fondly cling to these forms or words, or of those who think, perhaps too boldly, that they can dispense with them, to keep steadily in view the moral realities, for the sake of which alone (if Christianity be the universal religion) such forms exist, and which will survive the disappearance even of the most venerable ordinances, even of the most sacred phrases.

CHAPTER VII.

ABSOLUTION.

It is well known that in certain parts of Christendom, and in certain sections of the English Church, considerable importance is attached to the words which appear in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, as justifying the paramount duty of all Christians to confess their sins to presbyters, who have received episcopal ordination, and the exclusive right of presbyters, so appointed, to absolve them.

It is not here intended to enter on the various objections raised on moral grounds to this theory. But it may be useful to show the original meaning of the words, and then trace their subsequent history. It will be then seen that, whatever other grounds there may be for the doctrine or practice in question, these passages have either no relation to it, or that whatever relation they have is the exact contradiction of the theory in question. The texts are (in English) as follows:

The address to Peter (Matt. xvi. 19): "Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

The address to the disciples (Matt. xviii. 18): "Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

The address to the disciples (John xx. 23): "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained."

We will first take the two passages in the Gospel of St. Matthew. For the purposes of this argument the words addressed to St. Peter need not be distinguished from the words addressed to the disciples, as they are in each case identically the same.1

Binding and

I. The phrase "binding" and "loosing" meant, in the language of the Jewish schools, declaring what is right and what is wrong. If any Master, or Rabbi, loosing. or Judge, declared a thing to be right or true, he was said to have loosed it; if he declared a thing to be wrong or false, he was said to have bound it. That this is the original meaning of the words has been set at rest beyond possibility of question since the decisive quotations given by the most learned Hebrew scholars of the seventeenth century. The meaning, therefore, of the expressions, as addressed to the first disciples, was that, humble as they seemed to be, yet, by virtue of the new spiritual life and new spiritual insight which Christ brought into the world, their decisions in cases of right and wrong would be invested with all and more than all the authority which had belonged before to the Masters of the Jewish Assemblies, to the Rulers and Teachers of the Synagogues. It was the same promise as was expressed in substance in those other well-known passages: "It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of My Father which speaketh in you." "He that is spiritual judgeth all things." "Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things, and need not that any one should teach you." "The Comforter shall lead you into all truth."

The sense thus given is as adequate to the occasion as

1 For their peculiar meaning as addressed to St. Peter, it may be permitted to refer to a volume published many years ago, entitled Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, pp. 127-34.

2 "Hebrew and Talmudical Exercitations upon the Evangelist St. Matthew (xvi. 19). By John Lightfoot, D. D." Works, vol. ii. pp. 206-7.

it is certainly true. In the new crisis through which the world was to pass, they — the despised scholars of a despised Master-were to declare what was changeable and what was unchangeable, what was eternal, what was transitory, what was worthy of approval, and what was worthy of condemnation. They were to declare the innocence of a thousand customs of the Gentile world, which their Jewish countrymen had believed to be sinful; they were to declare the exceeding sinfulness of a thousand acts which both Jews and Pagans had believed to be virtuous or indifferent. They were empowered to announce with unswerving confidence the paramount importance of charity, and the supreme preciousness of truth. They were empowered to denounce with unsparing condemnation the meanness of selfishness, the sacrilege of impurity, the misery of self-deceit, the impiety of uncharitableness. And what the first generation of Christians, to whom these words were addressed, thus decided, has on the whole been ratified in heaven — has on the whole been ratified by the voice of Providence in the subsequent history of mankind. By this discernment of good and evil the Apostolic writers became the lawgivers of the civilized world. Eighteen hundred years have passed, and their judgments in all essential points have never been reversed.

The authority or the accuracy of portions of the New Testament on this or that point is often disputed. The grammar, the arguments, the history of the authors of the Gospels and Epistles can often be questioned. But that which must govern us all — their declaration of the moral standard of mankind, the ideal they have placed before us of that which is to guide our conduct which is, after all, as has been said by Matthew Arnold, three fourths of human life has hardly been questioned at all by the intelligent and upright part of mankind. The

condemnation of sins, the commendation of graces, in St. Matthew's description of the Beatitudes, in St. Luke's description of the Prodigal Son, in St. John's description of the conversation with the woman of Samaria, in St. Peter's declaration that in every land "he that worketh righteousness (of whatever creed or race) is accepted of God," in St. Paul's description of charity, in St. James's description of pure religion have commanded the entire assent of the world, of Bolingbroke and Voltaire no less than of Thomas à Kempis and Wesley, because these moral judgments bear on their face that stamp of the divine, the superhuman, the truly supernatural, which critical inquiry cannot touch, which human wisdom and human folly alike, whilst they may be unwilling or unable to fulfil the precepts, yet cannot deny. This is the original meaning in which the judgments of the first Christians in regard to sin and virtue were ratified in heaven. It is necessary to insist on this point in order to show that an amply sufficient force and solemnity is inherent in the proper meaning of the words, without resorting to fictitious modes of aggrandizing them in directions for which they were not intended.

The signification of the phrase in John xx. 23, translated in the Authorized Version "remitting and retaining sins," is not equally clear. The words used.

Remitting

and retain

ing sins.

(ἀφιέναι, ἔφεσις) do not of necessity mean the declaration of the innocence or lawfulness of any particular act; still less does the corresponding phrase (KраTELv) necessarily mean the declaration of its unlawfulness. It may be that the words rendered "remit sin" are (as in Mark i. 4; Luke iii. 3) equivalent to the abolition or dismissal of sin, and it would be the natural meaning of the word rendered "retain sin" that it should signify, as in all the other passages of the New Testament where it occurs, "to control," "conquer," "subdue sin." In that