THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY ON ABSOLUTION.
THE Bishop of Salisbury, the bishop who described it in his first episcopal charge as a fact of his own (shall we say psychological or physiological?) experience, that since his elevation to the Episcopate he felt the blood of the Apostles beating in his veins, has just been assuring his clergy that they have the power of " binding and loosing, granting and refusing absolution from the bonds of sin," that, in short, they enjoy, as clergymen of the Anglican Church, a" divine commission from the Lord Jesus Christ through His Apostles" giving them this power. That a man who can so far confuse the line between fact and feverish impressions as to testify to his consciousness of an Apostolic circulating system, should make other equally vague and, to our minds, unmeaning statements is not very surprising. What, in fact, could a bishop mean by feeling the blood of the Apostles beating in his veins ? What was the very small modicum of personal experience on which Dr. Hamilton founded this grand metaphorical language? We suppose that in fact his consecration gave him a sensation of feverish elevation of spirits, that, feeling, no doubt very gravely, the sense of responsibility which would attach to his words as a bishop, and feeling very confident in his own powers to use that responsibility with some effect, he described the blending of these two dreamy feelings as a divine assurance that he was to be to his clergy all that the Apostles were to their personal disciples in the early Church. As we said, a man who- would describe such vague feelings in such stilted language is not one from whose mouth the assurance that his clergy had power "to bind and loose from the bonds of sin" can mean very much. One wants in a theologian some trace of evidence that he is a man who realizes both what ' evidence ' means and what his own language means, and the Bishop of Salisbury has given us conclusive proof that he expresses the most worthless mist of thoughts in a still more delusive mist of words. But the rapid growth of the tendency to attach a certain im- portance to the absolution of the clergy, shows that there is more root in this delusion than any authority which such a one as the Bishop of Salisbury could give to it would account for. The Bishop is, in fact, a mere theological straw, showing which way the wind blows. He would not have felt Apostolic blood beating in his veins on his first consecration, or assure his clergy now that they are all Commissioners on a Divine Commission enrolled to absolve and refuse absolution from sin, if there were not in men. some increasing craving for belief in such a divine commission.
For we must say that nothing can be weaker than the ground: for supposing that in the words of Christ, or of any of His Apostles, there is the least evidence of the foundation of any order enjoying such a commission. The power to remit or ,retain sin, whatever it means, is not conferred, but declared by our- Lord as the natural consequence of possessing the Holy Spirit, and appears to means just this,—that whoever has. insight quickened by the Spirit of God will do on earth. that which Heaven will confirm him in doing, and will undo on earth what Heaven will confirm him in undoing. After Peter's confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," our Lord exclaims, "Flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven ;" and then He goes on immediately to assert that the divine inspiration of which Peter has thus given proof is the rock on which the Church shall be built, and that He will give Peter,—evidently by extending that divine gift of insight,—the keys by which to open the eternal world, so that what the Church on earth, carried on in this spirit, does or undoes, shall receive the sanction of God. So, too, in St. John's Gospel, the sentence, " Whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be remitted, and whosesover sins ye retain, they shall be retained," is said in immediate continuation of the previous words, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Without that, the latter sentence would be unmeaning ; and, in conjunction with it, it is said to all equally everywhere who really receive, and so far as they receive, the Holy Spirit. No order of men is created or thought of. The power of discerning sin from holiness is a divine gift in all men to whom it is given at all, and there is not a trace anywhere that any Apostle thought the gift possessed fully by himself, or denied absolutely to any one who shared in any degree the Spirit of Christ. Nothing can prove this more clearly than Peter's hesitating tone when he condemns the Samaritan impostor Simon for wanting to purchase the gift of the Divine Spirit. He does not use the modern sacerdotal language at all, but says, "Repent of this thy wickedness, and pray God if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee, for I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity," not pretending that he could forgive or refuse to forgive, but only that he could discern with more or less clearness the actual and exist- ing condition of the man's heart. What the Apostle claimed was a certain spiritual insight into evil and good, and this was a result of having that share in the Divine Spirit, which all Christians claim to have in some degree. A man without any insight into the spirit of sin and goodness is not a Christian, and a man with such an insight has just as much and just as little power as any priest equally endowed can claim. As for forgiveness, no one can forgive what is not a sin against himself. A good and sensitive-minded man might, with some chance of truth, tell another if he is really penitent or not, that is, if he is really forgiven by God or not,— but it is a mere matter of moral perception, not a question of delegated power of action even in the least degree. You may say with some assurance to a man who really asks you with the desire to know,—'that is remorse which you suffer, not penitence,' or 'that is, as far as I can see, true penitence, and not merely remorse,'— but no being, divine or human, can forgive without repentance, and everybody we must believe has divine grace enough, if he has only human will enough, to repent truly. The Bishop of Salisbury quotes our Church Service as assigning to the clergyman a real absolving power. But he is utterly mistaken. The absolution is only what they call in Parliament a declaratory act. It asserts that God has given "power and commandment to His ministers to declare and pronounce to His people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins." This effects, and pretends to effect, nothing. The clergyman is a mere evangelist in the matter, declaring himself bound, by his belief in God's Word, to assure all who are penitent that by the very fact of that penitence, they are forgiven by God, and absolved from the sin which they had given up. Repentance is the necessary and sufficient condition. The Apostles believed themselves to be able to pronounce with some divine insight on the real state of the hearts of men, but neither St. Paul nor St. Peter ever spoke with more than the hesitating insight of Christian feeling, judging honestly, but not pre- tending to judge perfectly. Even our Lord grounds His saying, "Thy sins are forgiven thee," on the supernatural insight which enabled Him also to say to the paralytic, "Arise, and walk."
This seems to us so clear, that we suppose the wish to believe in a clergy with fall power to absolve, must spring from the difficulty men have in knowing for themselves what the true state of their own hearts is. Our age especially is in a "hope- less tangle" as to all questions of right and wrong, and probably no question is more difficult to decide in a hurry than the true spirit of your own heart. In fact to understand your own spirit is generally a question of time. You can sometimes decide with very great certainty indeed that you are not penitent, but at most remorseful, — that if you could have the chance of sin over again without some unpleasant con- sequence you would do just as before ; but you can seldom decide without a long time to try yourself in, whether you do repent in such a sense that no variation of the circumstances would ever induce you to do the same wrong again,—that you really hate the moral evil, and not merely the results of the moral evil. That is a question of time, and hence we suppose the wish to decide it by the more speedy but very incompetent tribunal of a priesthood. To let a priest qua priest, and not by virtue of any special moral gift, pronounce upon your moral condition, is little better than tossing up a halfpenny to know whether your heart is really right or not. What man of any sense,—even the least modicum of sense,—who knew that the Bishop of Salisbury really testified to his consciousness of having Apostolic blood beating in his veins, — a sentence not only verbally unintelligible, but incapable of con- veying any lucid or coherent judgment,—would accept his abso- lution or his refusal to absolve as weighing even a single scruple either way in the great question whether any heart is right before God or not ? If the clergy wish to be thought able even to pass a useful opinion upon other men's moral condition, they should begin by taking care not to talk utter nonsense as to their own mental condition. That would be something,—not very much,— in their favour.
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