This is a transcription (hopefully, a faithful one) of the first chapter of a pamphlet titled The Practice of Confession: Why, What, How by Sibyl Harton (b. 1898), an Anglican author from England. I do not own the rights to this material, but to the best of my understanding the content has passed into the public domain. This is probably the single most powerful piece of writing on sacramental Confession I’ve encountered; so I wanted to make it accessible here:
‘I seem to have been just as good without Confession as I was with it, I think I am as near to God as I used to be, so I do not see any necessity for using the Sacrament of Penance again.’ This statement, often advanced by those who have given up making Confession, merits investigation because it is sometimes true that the Christian who has abandoned the use of this Sacrament does not feel himself to be lacking any essential means of grace. There are several plain reasons why the soul which is in earnest about its religion, about its life with God, cannot afford to jettison or ignore the practice of sacramental Confession.
The primary reason of our religion is the glory of God. The soul does not come to God only to take, to receive from Him, but to give, to give glory to its Creator, its Father, and its Saviour. ‘God made me,’ and what is the immediate response of the Christian? ‘I must worship Him.’ ‘God is my Father,’ and all that means constrains the soul to love Him. ‘God is my Saviour,’ and I bless Him. I must give Him glory, and every time I approach Him in the Sacraments and in the services of the Church, in my prayers and in my pursuit of virtue, I must come in the spirit of giving. ‘All for Thee, nothing for me,’ although it is as true to say, ‘All for me, nothing for Three.’ Think of the majesty of God, that He is what He is, Life, Love, Goodness, Beauty; and the soul is so overwhelmed that words are insufficient to express its attitude, and it can only sum up its adoration and love in the ascription perpetually on the lips of the Church: ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.’ God Himself is His Glory.
But how do we glorify God in our use of Confession?
God is glorified when His perfection is diffused throughout all creation, when His creatures fulfil the purpose of their creation by serving Him in love and happiness. He is glorified in the beauty of nature, of earth and of beast and of bird, in the beauty of the angels and in the beauty of man when he receives and uses the power to become a son of God. He is disglorified (if for the moment a word may be coined) when man falls from beauty, that is, from goodness, from the perfection which should be his. Those separate falls from his true state of fulfilling God’s will, from his condition of happiness, are called sins; and sins obscure the image of God in the soul and limit His perfection, preventing it from diffusing itself through the soul, even as dust settled on a mirror prevents a true reflection, as dust on a window prevents the transmission of light. But by Confession, with its accompanying contrition followed by Absolution, the effects of sin are removed from the soul and the image of God has again the chance to shine forth through the Christian character; again the channels are free for the functioning of the grace of God which is the very life of Christ within the soul: and so God is glorified. Therefore, when we decide not to make use of Confession, we are rejecting a means of giving glory to God.
Again, God is glorified in showing His abundant mercy to sinners, glorified in His attitude of mercy. In the very act of coming to the tribunal of penance where we are given in the priest’s words of Absolution the token, the assurance, of that mercy, we are bearing witness to that particular divine attribute. In Confession God the Son is magnified as His saving power is acknowledged: we not only believe in Jesus as Saviour, we manifest our belief, we prove it to the world, when we come to receive His Absolution.
From its beginning the Bible deals with the fact of sin, and through all its Old Testament story of the education of the Jews as the chosen people of God, sin is shown to be something terrible, to be followed by judgement, but always able to be wiped out by repentance, by atonement; and Confession, which is a normal instinct of the human heart, was recognized and taught by the Mosaic Law as a necessary part of the process of atonement and reconciliation. The continual message of the Jewish prophets was one of repentance, of exhortation to turn away from sin to serve God in righteousness, and that greatest of all prophets, John the Baptist, in his direct preparation for Christ’s advent, was speaking in language familiar and understandable to the Jews when he cried to them to repent; and in going to him for his baptism of repentance they confessed their sins. Their Confession was an indication of their sincere repentance. So the Church of the old covenant prepared the way and dug the ground for the foundations of the Church of Christ. And our Lord from the beginning of his public life claimed power to forgive sins; one of His first clashes with the religious authorities of His day occurred when He gave a man absolution from his sins. The apostolic Epistles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation are full of the forgiveness of sins, and there is complete unanimity between all the writers that forgiveness comes only through the Blood of Jesus shed for us upon the Cross. ‘The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.’ That in Jesus Christ alone we have the forgiveness of our sins is their testimony, and that our reconciliation to God through His death was the purpose of the Incarnation is their consistent teaching. And what the Saviour did for us in His incarnate Body he clearly expected to be continued in His mystical Body, the Church. On the first day of His Resurrection He appeared to the company of His Apostles, gathered together in fear, bewilderment, and unhappiness, and said the momentous words to them: ‘As the Father hath sent Me, even so I send you. Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose soever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them: whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.’ Immediately after His victory over sin and death he comes to assure His Apostles that His power was henceforth transmitted to them for their use in the world; and in the Catholic Church that power has been passed on from the Apostles’ successors to every priest who has been ordained. In laying hands upon the deacon the bishop says, ‘Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest . . . whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained.’ The mind of the Church is very simple and clear concerning the work of a priest.
So when we come to Confession to ask for the remission of our sins, it is to receive the merits of the Cross that we come, to receive on our souls the touch of the Precious Blood, and it is thus an occasion for glorifying and glorying in that life-giving Blood of Christ our god. Bishop Frank Weston spoke of the unforgettable impression made upon him in his youth at a revivalist meeting by the repeated singing: ‘I am washed in the Blood of the Crucified One.’ Such an impression should be ours at each Confession, when we experience that washing.
The Passion of Christ has ever been a most fruitful and beloved devotion of all lovers of God, for they know that in it is shown forth the completeness of God’s love for them, in it is all their hope of salvation. Love of Christ crucified is central to all Christians; and the Sacrament of Penance brings us into a unique relation with Calvary, for we can never be closer to the power of the Cross than during our Absolution. The hatred of sin, the renunciation of sin, which Christ revealed to the world in His sufferings on the Cross passes, if we will, and in some measure, into our souls and there destroys sin and the ground of sin. On the Cross our Lord conquered sin: He re-effects that in the individual soul which comes to Him in penitence. What He once in time did universally, He applies individually at times of our own choosing.
And in acknowledging the divine power of Christ as our Saviour in our use of the Sacrament of Penance we are doing Him homage in a special way, glorifying the Son, which is well-pleasing to the Father Who has given to Him all judgement. The Sacrament is full of God: does it not help us to worship the Holy Trinity when we consider the parts played in it by the Persons thereof? The Father gives the Son the power of judgement and accepts from Him His gift of all whom He has saved, whilst the priest, the transmitter of God’s judgement to the soul, himself received his power through the Holy Spirit. It is as if all the sufferings, merits, blood, love, offered by Jesus for us on the Cross were presented to the Father and applied to our souls by the Holy Spirit in that one moment of Absolution which is a timeless extension of the Cross.
So, the Sacrament of Penance is part of the economy of God, within His plan for the redemption and sanctification of men, that, though I by sin may quench the life of Christ given to me in my Baptism, God has provided for its restoration. This Sacrament is no invention of man not even a wise spiritual practice discovered by man’s inductive powers, but it is the plan of God revealed by the Incarnate Son to His disciples and by the Holy Spirit guiding their successors to all truth. It is here, this Sacrament of Penance, for our use, and it is an awful responsibility to refuse it: is it not a meeting-place, a tryst between God and the soul, a time of exchange of love and glory? If you do not wish to take this opportunity of meeting your Saviour, perhaps it is because you are still far from the commandment to love Him wholly. For Confession is an assured moment of meeting between God and the soul, a single point in time of communion when, if the penitent is in good faith, Christ infuses His divine life; whether there be sensible feeling or not, realization of blessing or not, there is God’s minister to give the assurance of the work of God in the soul. There is a blessed certainty in the words: ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath left power to His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine offences: And by His authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins.’ Our Lord would not have left His power to His Church to be kept unused like some one’s hoard of money hidden in a stocking beneath the mattress; He left it for use, a mighty treasury of invested power to be drawn upon by His needy children. Yet He does not order, ‘You must, as my Child, come to Confession,’ for that is never His way: He leaves that for our own choosing.
But that choice of ours should perhaps be prompted by a greater measure of compulsion than we commonly allow to be right. Membership of any corporate body for any purpose whatsoever implies an agreement with the ideals, aims, and objects of that body and the keeping of certain rules, which may be reduced to a minimum but which are surely necessary to the society’s life. This is true of organizations so varied and on such different levels of value as a tennis-club, a library, a Freemason’s lodge, a medical society; and if a member’s conduct becomes manifestly and flagrantly contrary to the stated purpose or ideal of his society, he is asked either to reform or to leave it. A man’s membership in any society carries with it the responsibility of shaping his life in certain directions in accordance with its laws; as soon as we combine we cease to be able to act solely as individuals, for we become governed by certain external rules to which we must conform or pay the penalties of disobedience. It is of course possible sometimes to become a sleeping member of a society so long as, usually, the annual subscription is paid; but this shows sloth or mental inertia, and is a waste of money.
Now, at our Baptism we became members of the greatest of all societies, the Catholic church of God, which having its Head in heaven has its Body on earth, so that although existing to dispense to us the means of supernatural life, it is organized along lines which are familiar to us in natural life; that is to say, as an organization, albeit of divine origin, it has officers, constitution, laws, and customs to which, by the very fact of membership, we are obliged to conform. As members of this society we do not live our religious lives as individuals, but as sharers of the corporate life; and if a member disobeys the laws, disregards the customs, or ignores the purpose of this society, he is failing in his responsibility to it, he is guilty not simply of private misdemeanours which concern himself and God, but of damages to a corporate body. Therefore to that corporate body he owes apology and amendment.
In these days of many loyalties we are sadly deficient in a strong corporate sense (at least in England where we have not to live in a totalitarian state); and in these days of complicated life and diffused Christianity we have not now the vivid consciousness of the corporate character of the Church which was clearly the possession of the Christians of the first centuries. Then it was fully realized that sin was not a private matter between the soul and God, but that it affected the life of the whole body of Christians, for Confession in the early Church was public, made before the congregation. Some religious revivalists have felt strongly the corporate responsibility concerning sin and have instituted some form of public Confession, as Wesley did in his class meetings, and as the followers of Dr. Buchman practice to-day. But as the Catholic Church grew such a practice of public Confession was found to be not only unpractical but inexpedient, for it was liable to abuse and scandal and did not minister to the growth of spirituality; so in place of it she, by the guiding wisdom of the Holy Spirit, gave to her members the practice of Confession not to the whole congregation but to its representative, its priest. And this aspect of the priest as the representative of the whole society of Christians must not be overlooked or lost beside the concept of him as minister of Christ. In our confession to him we make our apology to our heavenly society for our lowering of its standard and for our breaking of its rules, and as its representative he gives us its penalty, the penance, and assures us that we are worthy to try again to make our lives more conformable to its standards.
In the order for the Visitation of the Sick in the Book of Common Prayer the priest is told to examine the sick person as to his sins and to move him to make Confession of them if he feels his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. Perhaps a reply to the plea for Confession will be: ‘That is suitable and necessary for a person with grave sin upon his conscience, but I am not conscious of anything more than the ordinary and trifling defects common to all of us: there is no need for me to go to Confession.’ Is there really no need, is there really no grave sin, or is that assumption indicative of blindness, of a hard conscience, or of spiritual insensitiveness? For sin, surely, is in one sense relative, as well as being absolute. Some people on account of their upbringing, their circumstances, or their temperaments never know the temptations to or falls into grave moral sins, such as dishonesty, impurity, fierce anger, which are followed by serious effects; but the very factors which prevent these glaring, weighty sins demand from such people a high standard of Christian life and conduct and of intimate relationship with God. It may well be that small defects, little sins, and faults of omission in the lives of the sheltered are as weighty, as hindering, and as dangerous in God’s sight as are grave sins of commission in the lives of those who live in troubled and tempestuous ways: lack of charity, lack of humility may keep one from God as much as theft and drunkenness may keep another, and may need just as deep a contrition for cleansing.
For what is sin but that which hinders the soul from seeing God and from being made one with Christ in love? And so-called little sins, pettinesses, small selfishnesses, dullness, heaviness, and a general feeling of out-of-jointness can do this—the states which are so difficult to cast aside. Every Christian knows those times of sadness when the soul is so weighed down that it has no interest in life, when there is no joy anywhere although neither is there any specific or removable grievance or pain; and the saints know how greatly destructive of the love of and union with God is this condition. The use of Confession is the surest remedy for this unhappy state which is known to us all at some time or other. The opportunity to state the plain fact of our condition, to relate plainly and simply just how we are behaving and how hopeless life seems to be, is exactly what we need on the natural plane and itself provides a partial remedy and brings a certain release, apart from the help of the counsel from the priest; but the healing is completed on the supernatural level by the grace of Absolution which not only removes the guilt but gives positive strength and renewal.
No one can surely ever forget the wonder of the first Confession—or its surprise. We made it expecting to receive peace and comfort, or perhaps we came as a duty, knowing as if by an instinct that ‘it had to be done,’ and so without any expectations. But as Absolution was given the unexpected happened and the indescribable occurred; for far more than a removal of distress and discomfort is the positive glory of joy and strength and life that is given. It is a great experience of the soul, as real and as true as any particular experience of joy in friendship or in nature or in art, and far, far deeper, for it is the direct touch of God upon the soul in supernatural ways. That abounding certainty that all is now well, and better than ever before, can be known at every succeeding Absolution, although it will not, as the soul is led onwards in spiritual ways, always be felt; for the two great and fundamental states that contributed to the depth of that first experience of Confession are present each time we come to the Sacrament, namely, contrition and thanksgiving.
The New Testament begins with S. John the Baptist’s call to repentance, and upon that foundation the kingdom of heaven was laid, which foundation is the true one for every soul which desires that kingdom to be within it. Repentance is a turning-away from sin, a loathing of it and a deep sorrow for it, and to that sorrow we are all called. ‘For these and all my sins I am very sorry’ is an absolutely necessary declaration for each one of us to make, and until such is made our Lord can do no mighty work within us. And the resultant glory of the soul who is very sorry, who repents, is shown to us by our Lord Himself when He said that the penitent by his penitence gives joy to the angels in heaven. Imagine the tremendous wonder of being able to occasion joy to angels; and then realize that the soul does this each time it comes contrite to the feet of God in the Sacrament of Penance.
It is not our business to dwell on the beauty of our souls when they are cleansed by contrition, for we are primarily concerned with the glory of God and the doing of His blessed will, to the advancement of His kingdom; but when once we have had a sight of that beauty we have a powerful drawing to Confession. For contrition is a beautifier: penitence is the great cleanser, the restorer, and penitence must become a habit of the soul. A single outburst of penitence for some sin, for some suddenly revealed and recognized failure in conduct and character, will restore the soul to that measure of union with the life of Christ which by its sin it had lost; but unless the sorrow is maintained the roots of the sin will not be destroyed, and its ugly head may appear again and again with startling frequency.
Continual penitence, the habit of penitence, does not mean that contrition is the dominant state of soul to the exclusion of all else, far from it; it means that underlying our praise and worship and love is an abiding attitude of deep regret for ever offending our Lord God, and a great desire to prove that regret by becoming His more worthy children; and from such an habitual attitude and from it alone springs an ever-deepening, selfless love. When one looks at a delicate piece of illuminated manuscript one may be conscious only of the glory of a particular spot of blue colour and may take pleasure in it without having any idea that its peculiar richness is due to the blue paint being laid over green; the blue alone is seen, but the artist knows that the green is there causing its brilliance. Similarly, the world may see only the love and joy and mercifulness of a good Christian without seeing the underlying attitude of penitence which is the very ground of his soul, known only to God and the angels. And Confession, regular and careful Confession, is not only a guarantee of contrition but also one of the great means for ensuring the growth of this absolutely vital habit of penitence, of this constant state of soul as against merely sporadic acts, and therefore it is one of the foremost means of sanctity. If once we have chosen to follow Christ with devotion, and if once we have been privileged to receive the full teaching of the Catholic Faith, can we refuse to use any aids to holiness appointed by Him Who calls, ‘Be ye perfect’?
It may be objected by some that even after or at a Confession he has no feeling of sorrow, no sensibility of penitence. But contrition is not a matter of tears and sights but of a ‘humble, sweet, and loving conversion to God, true but moderate and unanxious.’ Not any feelings but the turning to God away from sin is the essence of contrition, destroying the attachment of sin, grave or small; and as that turning to God becomes a sure and lasting attachment to Him, so a sorrow for having offended Him and obscured His glory grows in the soul, becoming ever deeper and more settled. And as all our penitence must be in union with our Lord’s sorrow for the sin of the world His interior grief will supply the defects in ours, and only in His perfect penitence can ours come to completion.
It must be stressed that Confession is not for us an end but a means, a means to our personal holiness; when it is regarded as a matter of feelings and, as it sometimes is by the pious, as an end interesting to the ego because it provides an occasion for a soul to talk about itself, it is of no use for conveying grace. And not only is it a means to our holiness, it is an expression of devotion. We love our Lord so much, we are so very sorry that we have grieved Him and caused offence to His Body the Church, that we must say so not only in the depths of our souls but publicly, so that we may be quite sure that we are not deceiving ourselves, either by lack or by super-abundance of feelings, sure that we do not merely think we love Him and think that we are sorry.
Then penitence, this very foundation of Christian life which receives such assistance in the habit of Confession, is always followed by thanksgiving. This is a virtue which is often neglected, and any state which prompts it must be encouraged. To give thanks and to feel truly grateful is, on the natural level, a most expansive and gracious work, enlarging and refining the character. You have only to think of the difference between a reserved, grumbling, and suspicious nature and a warm-hearted, responsive one, and of the reactions of each to life in general, to realize how important thankfulness is in character: how much more this is so on the spiritual level! The penitent on receiving his gifts of forgiveness and restoration to the fullness of life in Christ and His family must needs think somewhat on the mercy of God, the pity of the Father, the Sacrifice of the Son, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, all for him, for his small self; and his immediate response must be thanksgiving, humble, wondering, and adoring gratitude. There are times in life when the penitent can feel nothing of this, but in his will he offers it, for he knows it. Each confession is one more definite moment in the soul’s life which ensures that its whole energy shall be directed to thanking and blessing Jesus as its Saviour: and that act and attitude of thanksgiving is what Father de Osuna calls a spacious place, where in the soul receives the liberty of the sons of God, and a very great grace and spiritual perception.
Spiritual perception: that is exactly what the practice of Confession brings, and knowing this the devil will do what he can to prevent the Christian from making use of such a firm and effective means of grace. The powers of evil are always at work and the general disinclination of a will to use the Sacrament of Penance, even when there exists no personal disbelief in its authority or efficacy, may come from clogging, dirty influence of the devil who knows that his power diminishes at every renewed application of God’s Blood to a soul, knows that there will be less opportunity for him to insert his temptations to pride and self-love as the soul makes use of the sacramental life of Christ. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”; and this is what Confession does, giving us a victory over our sins and our enfeebled selves, renewing our strength in the pursuit of goodness, increasing our interior light, bestowing upon us peace and happiness, and promising our perseverance.
Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift.