Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Oct 25, 1906

THE pastor of a Universalist church in Allegheny, Pa., recently astonished his hearers by commending the confessional as an aid to Christian living. He said:—

Nothing will so aid the individual in attempting to live Christianity as the fixed determination and habit of confessing sin. . . . In the Roman Catholic Church confession is made a strict religious duty. . . . In the Roman Catholic Church the communicant is expected to make admission or acknowledgment to the priest—to own a fault or a crime, to make known one's wrong-doing. I am persuaded that if this practise was taught and observed in our Protestant churches, there would be less immorality among the ministers and church-members.

Auricular confession was unknown in the early church, and was not established as an essential part of church discipline until the fourth Lateran Council, A. D. 1215. It came in through the development of the great apostasy, in which man was put in the place of God, and the requirements of man were substituted for the requirements of God as the means of salvation. Christ and the apostles taught no such thing as confession to a man, and no such practise was established in the churches which they founded. It is a part of that system by which ecclesiastics obtain and maintain power over the laity. Protestantism was a protest against this power of man over man, and taught that forgiveness of sins came through faith in Christ without the intervention of pope or priest. The history of those Catholic countries where the confessional has been established for centuries is a sufficient answer to the claim that the confessional is a check upon immorality. But the suggestion of this professed Protestant minister is an indication of the present tendency toward Rome. True Protestants will repudiate any such suggestion.