XXX.

CONFESSION AND PRAYER.

'Confess 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. 17 Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months: 18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.'-JAMES V. 16-18.

THE

HE advice given in the previous verses naturally leads to the recommendation before us,-one calculated in a very high degree to promote the prosperity and happiness of the church. The connecting thought is this: "I have said that Christians when they are sick should summon to their bedsides the elders of the church, and that their united believing prayer will bring down God's blessing in restored health and spiritual comfort. Not merely the official representatives of the church, however, but all the children of God, can help their brethren mightily. Wherefore, Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed!' Our view of the breadth of the reference of the apostle's precept must depend, at least to a certain extent, on the meaning we attach to the clause, 'that ye may be healed;' and at this, therefore, we must look for a moment first. Our first thought naturally is, that the discourse is still of the sick,and we cannot doubt that these are included; yet, considering that we have clearly passed into a new section, and that the brethren are addressed in the most general way, and called on to confess to each other, and pray for each other, without any specification of the sick, it seems to me that we must hold the application of 'healed' to be wider than merely deliverance

from bodily disease. The connection between sin and bodily disease has been already alluded to in the close of the previous paragraph; the conception of sin as a spiritual disease, and of Him who proclaimed Himself to Israel at Marah under the name, 'The Lord that healeth thee,' as the Physician of souls, was familiar to James's readers from Old Testament imagery; and the particular word here employed in the original is often used of spiritual healing. The apostle speaks here, then, I apprehend, of deliverance both spiritual and bodily—the cure of the malady of sin, and of bodily disease where this fruit and image of sin was present. Thus understood, the present section leads most naturally to the last statement in the Epistle, regarding the blessedness of him who 'converteth a sinner from the error of his ways.'

Confession of sin to

"Confess your faults one to another? God is of the essence of true repentance; for a man who will not look up and acknowledge his iniquity manifestly does not clearly see or deeply feel its evil. Only through unreservedness of heart towards God can we enjoy peace with Him. 'If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' 'When I kept silence,' says David, 'my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long: for day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. I acknowledged my sin unto Thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid: I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.' The injunction before us, however, relates to confession to man. Now there is nothing in the general teaching of Scripture, or in the present precept when interpreted reasonably, to assign to this duty anything like the same extent of reference as belongs to confession to God. To Him we are called upon to lay bare our souls absolutely to make penitential acknowledgment of all the sins of which we are conscious, and then, sensible that none can fully understand his errors,' to pray, 'Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.' But there are many sins which it is not merely not needful, but would be positively wrong, to reveal to our

fellow-men. To take but one instance: sins of thought may but for a very short time, and in a very vague form, have been permitted to occupy the mind; and the effort to bring them out before our own minds with the clearness and definiteness needful for our stating them to another, would, in multitudes of cases, do us moral harm, without advantage of any kind. Again, it might often happen that much moral injury might be done to the person who received our confession, by the acknowledgments we made, and this however carefully we might choose our confidant. Indeed, circumstances of various kinds, and connected with offences of all sorts, may often render it in the very highest degree undesirable, or actually sinful, to make them known to our fellow-men.

In considering, then, what classes of 'faults' James has here before his mind, injuries to men first occur to us. To make a frank acknowledgment of having done wrong, when 'a brother hath aught against us,' is one of the plainest duties of the Christian code of morals. Our Lord tells us that a soul unwilling to do this is in a condition in which worship cannot be acceptable to God; and therefore, even if the gift be already before the altar, the man is to 'go his way, first be reconciled to his brother, and then come and offer his gift.' Cases may easily be conceived, too, in which, though an injured person is unconscious of the injury, and ample material reparation may be possible without the accompaniment of confession, yet this also is at the least very desirable. For example, suppose that of two Christian merchants who have business transactions with each other, the one gains an advantage over the other in a way which that other does not know, and can never know, -away perhaps strictly legal, but which afterthought convinces him who pursued it to be inconsistent with the highest morality. He might easily in most cases, without saying anything on the subject, make up to his friend in some subsequent transaction all the loss. And sometimes anything more may not be needed. Yet I can well believe that a confession would often bring more completeness of comfort to the offender, and not a little spiritual benefit to both parties. If the injury that

has been done to a brother has been of a kind to affect his reputation, for instance, if it has consisted in the circulation, whether through carelessness or from some definitely bad motive, of a calumnious report,-it is evident that confession should in such a case not merely be made to the wronged person himself, but published as widely, if possible, as the calumny. This may be very humbling to the offender, but the discipline is salutary, and without such wide confession honourable reparation for the wrong is not made.

But it seems reasonable to take the apostle's recommendation before us as having a wider reference than simply to cases of the kind I have mentioned. There are few greater burdens than the burden of a guilty secret, and the heart that has such feels as if the spiritual weight would be lightened through confession,-the hearer helping to bear it, after a sort. This longing for confession is strikingly illustrated by a tradition which Hood has wrought into a poem of singular power, that Eugene Aram, a murderer of the last century in England, a man of high cultivation, and a teacher by profession, sometimes told his scholars the story of his crime, with all circumstantial details, but under the guise of a dream. Apart, however, from extreme cases like this, there are, no doubt -it may be in the very quietest walks of Christian life—many people of a tender, sensitive temperament, who, yearning for sympathy and guidance, long to speak to a Christian friend of some of their weaknesses and sins. It is true that the only perfect and satisfying sympathy, and the only wholly trustworthy guidance, are those of the Divine Man who 'was made in all things like unto His brethren, that He might be merciful'—'tempted like as we are,' that He might be 'touched with the feeling of our infirmities;' yet at times, particularly times of bodily prostration, in hearts of the class that I have mentioned there comes a weary craving for a visible confidant and adviser. For such a feeling, being not in itself sinful, provision has been made by Christianity, through the brotherly relation of believers to each other. Confess your faults one to another, and' (here comes the corresponding injunction to the Chris

tian friends of penitents) 'pray one for another;' or, as Paul has it, 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.' Where such unburdening of the conscience is resorted to, not in the spirit of religious gossip, but seriously and devoutly, as a help graciously granted by the Saviour to our weakness, not a little comfort and real spiritual benefit may often be obtained through it. From the nature of the case, however, this can only be when confession to brethren is held as a somewhat exceptional procedure, to be adopted occasionally under special pressure of feeling. Whenever it becomes in any way methodized into a system, for periodical observance, then the desire for it, as it seems to me, is certainly a symptom of spiritual disease,-a disease which the supposed remedy will only aggravate. It is manifestly of the highest importance, too, if the present recommendation of our apostle is to be carried out with any real benefit to the penitent, that the burdened heart should select its confidant with very great care. A friend truly pious and affectionate, experienced and discreet, may be of much service; no other can reasonably be expected to be.

This injunction of the Apostle James is the passage of Scripture principally pleaded in support of the Roman Catholic system of private confession of sin to a priest,-which that Church enjoins to be performed periodically, and teaches to be necessary for salvation, and to secure salvation certainly through the absolution given by the priest after full confession. This abominable system is, beyond doubt, and has been all down the generations since it was introduced, more prolific of impurity and hardness of heart, and indeed moral evil of every kind, than anything else in the ecclesiastical arrangements of any religious sect,-probably, one might almost say, than any agency of any kind existing in the world. The Reformers, who knew well the nature and effects of auricular confession, used to call the confessional 'the slaughter-house of consciences.'1 But it is the strongest of all the props of priestly domination over

1 See a note by Dr Cunningham in his edition of Stillingfleet's Doctrines and Practices of the Church of Rome, p. 142.