SOME SPECIAL POINTS IN

THE REFORMATION CONTROVERSY

I

THE GOSPEL AND THE REMISSION OF SINS

"And when He had said this He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained."-St. John xx. 22, 23.

Upon the interpretation and application of these words depends the decision between two conceptions of the office of the Christian ministry and two ideals of the Christian life. On the one hand they have been so interpreted as to apply only to the Apostles and their successors in the ministry, and as giving them special authority to convey to men the forgiveness of their sins by personal absolution. It is held by those who maintain this view, to

put the claim at the lowest, that, although sins may be and are forgiven without such personal absolution, yet that, if men and women desire to be assured of the forgiveness of their sins, the ordinary course, and the best course, for them to take, is to confess them to one who holds a commission for that purpose derived from the Apostles. But it naturally follows that, if forgiveness is to be conveyed by this personal assurance, the priest who is to pronounce the absolution must be informed, by confession, of the nature of the sins of which he is to declare the forgiveness; and thus the peace of mind of every man and woman is rendered practically dependent upon continual confession of all sins to the priest, and the reception of the priest's absolution.

This system, of course, reaches its full development in the Roman Church, which presents the most complete form of what is described as the sacerdotal system, the system, that is, in which the spiritual welfare of men, for time and for eternity, is rendered dependent in the main on a priestly order, for the purpose of absolution. The history of Europe for the centuries which immediately preceded the

Reformation offers the fullest illustration of the practical working of such a system. The key to that history is that men were under an apprehension, even where it did not amount to a belief, that their ultimate welfare and salvation depended in some manner upon the authoritative action of the Pope and the clergy; and they could not therefore make up their minds to act in defiance of them. Europe was groaning under acknowledged evils, not only in the State but in the Church; the cry for generations had been for reform of the Church" in head and members; " Council after Council was called together to provide an answer to that cry; but whenever the question came to the point of action, when— if anything effectual was to be done it was necessary to override the authority of the Clergy, the strongest laymen and the ablest kings were checked, in the presence of the mysterious powers which the Pope and his Clergy might be supposed to possess over their spiritual fate. Numbers of men might in their hearts disbelieve those powers; but, to use a memorable phrase, they felt it was "not so certain that there was nothing in it," and

they could not face all that might be meant by a papal excommunication. That menace, moreover, was not merely that of a general censure and denunciation; but, through the power of absolution believed to reside in every priest, it extended to the daily experience of every man and woman; and the fear of passing out of this world without that absolution, without the last Sacraments of the Church, maintained for the Church and the clergy an indefinable supremacy over the mass of

mankind.

It may be briefly recalled how this supremacy was broken, and how the consciences of men were emancipated. It was in the first instance brought home to Luther, from his experience as a parish priest, how grievously the exercise of this priestly power of absolution obscured to simple souls the deep gravity of sin, and the profound nature of true absolution. found that in practice it operated, to a grievous extent, to shelter men and women from that direct contact with God Himself, which alone could make them duly sensible of the depth of their evil on the one hand, and of the profound and blessed nature of God's forgiveness, and

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God's justification, on the other. Given, perhaps, an ideal priest, this consequence might be avoided, at least in great degree. But taking human nature as it is, and consequently taking any priesthood as it must be on the average, the temptation is to grant absolution too lightly, to be satisfied with imperfect and formal confessions, and thus to give men and women a sense of assurance in a most imperfect state of repentance, and to let them rest in a peace which is not real peace. The remedy was found in directing them beyond the priest, to the great Judge to Whom it was the office of the priest to bear witness, to bid them examine their consciences as in His sight, to seek for the help of His Spirit to convince them of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, to induce them to realize, in solemn prayer and self-examination, the operation of His penetrating eye and His strict judgment; and it then became necessary for them to go beyond the priest once more, for the assurance of God's forgiveness, and for peace to their consciences. If the Spirit of God brought home to their hearts the conviction of their sin and evil, that Spirit also, acting through the word of Christ