GOD teaches Christians in His word to confess their sins, both to Himself and, when they have wronged anyone, to one another also. Confession is a Christian’s duty and privilege, and brings rich blessings with it. A believer may live a dull and a sunless life for years together, because he has not confessed some sin or other to God. Such an one is living at a spiritual distance from God, in the same way that a child, who had hidden his evil conduct from his father, would be living at a moral distance from him. Unconfessed sin lying upon the soul is a weight, hindering the Christian’s race, and keeping the Christian in a worldly state. We are not now speaking of the unconverted man, but when a sinner is turned to God from his sins, he is real about his sins, he does not try to cover them up, he confesses them to God.
We must not confound God’s ways with His children and His ways with sinners. In His ways with His enemies, “God commends His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us... for when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son.” (Rom. 5:8-108But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 9Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. 10For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. (Romans 5:8‑10)). In His ways with His children, God tells us, “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” (1 John 1:9; 2:19If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)
1My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: (1 John 2:1)). Christ is the Saviour for sinners. He is also the Comforter or Advocate with the Father for believers who sin. A sinner in his sins, and a sinning child of God are very different in relation to God. The great principle of confessing our sins to God is before us in these words, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
When a sinner trusts in Christ’s death, God pardons him and forgives him—hence such an one is a justified person; once he was ungodly, but, believing, he is justified from all things, he is a child of God. If he sins he needs a Father’s forgiveness.
Our present remarks are directed to the children of God, and of all such it is written, “Your sins are forgiven you for His name’s sake.” (1 John 2:1212I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake. (1 John 2:12)). They are of God’s family, and are brought into relation with God, but many a child of God sins, and, alas, does so often willfully. Now, confession of our sins to God is the condition upon which the child of God obtains forgiveness of the special sin he may have committed. An unforgiven child is still a child, but he is not in the enjoyment of his parent’s love. The child of God who does not confess his sins to God has his sin hindering his communion with his Father.
Self-judgment leads to confession, and confession meets with God’s forgiveness. Heart to heart work with God is the secret of the prosperity of the inner life of the believer. God is light, He has made us the children of light; therefore, all that is of darkness should be separated from. Our remarks do not suggest morbid sensitiveness, and looking into self, but simple and childlike openness with God, whose perfect love casts out our sinful fear, for fear has torment.
When a child of God is in a truly gracious state of soul in the presence of his God and Father, he will find it comparatively easy to humbly own the sin with which he has been overtaken. That sin will grieve him, because it is a dishonor to his Father, and he will seek with all his heart to have it all out with God.
Where such a spirit towards God prevails in us, it becomes simple for us to confess our faults one to another. (James 5:1616Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. (James 5:16)). A Christian, who is genuinely in God’s presence, values the truth more than his own name, and pride is the secret cause why we do not confess our faults one to another. The only way to heal a wound our tongue has inflicted is to use our tongue in confessing the wrong done to the one we have so wounded. Christians, who are living as children of God, will be in a measure confidants one of another, and therefore confession will be natural to them. If we had grieved our best friend, we should not rest until we had put the matter right, our love to our friend would be the impetus to our owning the wrong we had done him.
The gracious ministry of this mutual confession is too little regarded, and, perhaps the lack of it, may be one cause for the terrible distortion of the Bible truth of confession which exists in the confessional.
How the confessional can be tolerated by those who hold God’s word in their hands is hard to comprehend; nay, how such an institution as the confessional can exist in Christian lands is a marvel. It is due to two elements, which prevail in human nature—one being that, notwithstanding man’s pride, it is part of his religious nature to like to have some superior person over his soul; the other being that, with all man’s faith in a superior man forgiving sins, there is not faith in God to believe what He says as to His forgiveness of sins.
The slavery of giving oneself over in spiritual matters to another, is very agreeable bondage to persons, who do not know they are made free by the Son of God. Evidently, if souls were open with God, and spoke to Him, as to their Father, and to Jesus as their Friend, they would not wish for a superior person over them, nor could they tolerate the sinful slavery of having a man come between their souls and the Lord. If the weak in the faith appreciate superiors, the superiors enjoy their superiority—yes, and use it also, as the most Protestant of Protestant communities do at times too plainly witness. These superiors will have to be ashamed of their priest-like ways in the Day of Judgment, for their Lord has said, “One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.” (Matt. 23:88But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. (Matthew 23:8)).
The whole system of placing the soul under a man, whether out of, or, in Rome, is opposed to the Scriptures, and, just in proportion as it exists, so does Christian liberty not exist. True Christianity brings a man to God, and makes him the bond slave of Jesus Christ, and allows not for a moment that any creature should come between his soul and God, or that he should be a bondsman to any, save the Lord who bought him with His blood.
The rapid growth in our land of the confessional is too terrible evidence of the unbelief of men in God’s forgiveness of our sins. If He has absolved us, we do not want a priest to absolve us. If He, for the glory of His Son, has done this work for us by virtue of Christ’s merit, the absolution of the priest is but contempt upon God Himself.
We once asked an Anglican confessor how it would fare with him should he die before twelve that night. After some fencing, and then saying, it was not a question he was accustomed to have put to him, he confessed he was by no means assured whither his soul would go if God called it away there and then! In our last number we recorded a similar confession from a priest of Rome. What is the use of such people? “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” (Matt. 15:1414Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. (Matthew 15:14)).
The main spiritual object of the confessional is to keep souls at a distance from God—to hinder them confessing to God. Let anyone be enticed into the confessional, and thenceforward he, or she, is the slave of the confessor, who becomes a veil to obstruct the person coming to him from God’s presence. Pour the confessions of your sins against God into the ear of a man, and so long as you do so, God will be to you a God afar off. Make your prayer into the heart of your confessor, and there will your prayer remain buried, for “there is one ... Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Tim. 2:55For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; (1 Timothy 2:5)).
If the uselessness of the confessional, were all to be said against it, that were enough to call for protest, for Protestantism, but the system destroys purity and holiness, and corrupts the moral being of those who yield themselves to it. In their efforts to reach the mysteries of a heart, and to command the soul, the priests ask such abominable questions, and insinuate such atrocious suggestions, that any publisher in this land who dared to make them public would be exposed to legal proceedings. Shall anyone be impious enough to affirm that iniquity proceeds from God, or be bold enough to declare that such corrupters of morals are the servants of Him, who is light, and in whom there is no darkness at all?
Our forefathers arose against the priests of old, and we will give a few testimonies of those, who in our own day, have escaped the snare, to show that the same dark spirit that prevailed in the confessional prevails in it still.
“Day after day, I knelt at the feet of that man, answering questions and listening to admonitions calculated to bow my very soul in the dust.... Oh! how can the judgment be so perverted, as to call such pollution purity?... Once, my confessor had been unexpectedly called away—I went to the church porch for air while awaiting his return.... He came, with his unchanged smile and broad gaze, to summon me back to my terrible task.
“I was desired to repeat over again what had most harrowed my feelings... when I was told, in the most merciless manner... that the repetition would only serve to humble me. I leaned against the confessional for support but, by promptings and suggestions, he at length gained his point.”
Some while afterward, this lady was walking with a mother of a family, whom she describes “as pure in heart as in life,” and whom she had seen in long converse with the priest referred to. “I looked at her in wonder,” she writes. “What would I have given to have thrown myself on her maternal bosom, and to have asked, ‘Do you, can you, know of these things? And, if so, will you bring up your children to be exposed to such horrors’”?
Another thus gives her witness. Driven to desperation by the corruptness of her confessor, she determined to escape from her convent. “My soul abhorred the priests—they were vipers; I condemned the sisters and the convent as all defilement; I could not remain there longer; the very thought was unendurable! I would fly—escape—but where? And would not my soul be damned eternally if I abandoned my vocation? Ah! and would it not be also damned if I remained in the convent? If so, I would rather be damned out of the convent than in it.”
We add a third testimony, that of one who was for many years a priest. “I am now,” says he, “seventy-six years old, and in a short time I shall be in my grave. I shall have to give an account of what I now say. Well, it is in the presence of my great Judge, with my tomb before my eyes, that I declare to the world that few—yes, very few—priests escape from falling into the pit of the most horrible depravity that the world has ever known,” and he declared this to be wrought through the confessional!
He tells us how that one night he was called to confess a dying priest, whose cry was, “Oh, my God, my God, what will become of me? I am dying; and I am lost!” “It was indeed an awful thing.” he adds, “to see that old sinner wringing his hands, and rolling on his bed as if he had been on burning coals, with all the marks of the most frightful despair on his face, crying, ‘I am lost! Oh! my God, I am lost!’”
The despair of this priest arose from the incredible sins arising out of the confessional: sins which he had committed, and the horrors of which filled his soul with the terrors of hell.
Where the slavery of the confessional exists, liberty before God is utterly impossible—nay, more, the liberty of a wife or daughter with a husband or parent is gone, for a third person has intervened, and to him is committed the secrets of the heart. “Look at that man, that priest, who at the very time he is telling us his kingdom is above, has adroitly secured for himself the reality of the earth beneath. He lets you go, as you please, in search of unknown worlds; but he himself seizes on the present one; your own world, poor dreamer! that which you loved, the nest where you hoped to come back and be cherished. Accuse no one but yourself; it is your own fault.”
“Really to reign, is to reign over a soul. What are all the thrones in comparison to this kingly sway?... The priest has a great advantage which no one else possesses. His business is with a soul which gives itself up of its own accord.”
Beware, lest you surrender your individual responsibility to God to any human being. To God you must give an account—to Him, in the great day that is coming, you must unveil yourself, your most secret thoughts, your whispers, your deeds. How shall you stand then? Even as you stand before God in this life, absolved or not absolved by Him, pardoned or not pardoned. Oh! trust the pitiful love of the Saviour, confess to Him, tell Him all, and, showing you His wounds, He shall show you the cost of your salvation, and bid you go in peace, and be free.