Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/131

 there is only one way of obtaining forgiveness—by absolution, after full confession. This argument is strengthened by another powerful one from tradition, from the fact that, in the fourth century, the Church claimed, against the Novatians, the power of absolving from all sins; but what was meant in the fourth century by confession and absolution is not quite clear even to Catholic theologians, and an outsider may be excused for not seeing the force of the argument.

The fact is that, when the Church first began (in the thirteenth century) to talk about the obligation of confession, it had not the same rationalistic spirit to face which it has to-day. It found that a practice had somehow developed amongst the faithful which could be utilised as a most powerful lever, and it proceeded to make the practice obligatory: the newly founded religious orders were administering their spiritual narcotics to humanity, and the law was accepted with docility. Hence, in our own days, when the Church must provide a more rational basis for its tenets and institutions, the search for proofs of the divine institution of the practice is found to be more than usually difficult to the expert interpreters of the Church of Rome.

Apart, however, from its feeble dogmatic defence it is usual for preachers and writers to expatiate upon the moral advantages of the practice; sermons on the subject are conspicuously frequent, for it is well known that many Anglicans are deterred by it from