RITUALISM.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1899, Page 2 (Supplement)

RITUALISM.

SERIOUS SCHISMS IN THE CHURCIi.

VIEWEf OF DR. KENNION, DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY AND OTHERS.

(From Our London Correspondent.)

LONDON, March 10.

The optimistic assurances of the Archbishop of Sydney that Ritualism will never make much headway in the Australian colonies seem to have greatly comforted the organs of the Evangelical party, who were really afraid that 'the terrible canker of the English Church Union' might have 'undermined the Establishment abroad as it has, alas! at home.' Clergymen of every variety are now hard at it wrangling, with the spite ful vituperation which a religious quar. rcl seems invariably to beget, over the confessional. Now, confession, especially secret confession, is naturally repugnant to all robust Protestants. At the same time, most of us know cases where it has effected astonishing results. The late Bishop Wilberforce used to say that private confession was. a very useful medicine but a very dangerous food. -In other words, he deprecated its constant use while approving of it in cases' where it might rouse people to a sense of their clanger. Dr. Kennion (who is understood to be the anonymous bishop examined in Monday's 'Daily News') expresses himself similarly. He says:—

'Just as the wrong people are teetotalers, so many of the wrong people go to habitual confession. Pious, godly women are led by unwise priests to constant use of a remedy which would often be of immense advantage to their husbands or sons committing a breach of the Seventh Commandment.'

'But,' his lordship went on after enlarging on this point, 'what I want to accentuate is that when people talk of the evils of private confession that is not what they mean. Every religious body in some form or other more or less practises confession. What people really dislike is absolution. It is as well that this matter should be faced. The bishop in ordaining priests—what a pity, by the way, it is that so few of the laity, are present at ordinations—says to each of them: "Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained." '

Absolution, in short, is part of an English priest's! vocation, and however much bishops may object to see it misused they cannot stop it. Neither can they nor anybody (according to this anonymous prelate) crush the confessional. He says:— 'It cannnot be too soon clearly understood that while ritual may be regulated by law, it is impossible to prevent the hearing of confessions and the granting of absolution so long" as penitents desire it. Suppose an Act of Parliament passed— of .course, without an alteration of the Prayer Book it would be impossible-^ making it a penal offence for a beneficed or licensed clergyman to hear confessions, what would happen? There would be a number of unattached and unpaid clergy, who would act as confessors, and no one could complain. I know that the recent, agitation, so far from checking private confession, has considerably increased its use. As one therefore keenly alive to the great dangers, personal, domestic, national, and ecclesiastical, of its exaggerated use, T see with th edeepest regret that extreme Protestants are by their violent opposition to its legitimate use greatly increasing the evil and preventing the only method of keeping it within due bounds— viz., the paternal advice and personal influence -of the bishops.'

His lordship illustrates the effect of opposition on the sacerdotal extremist with the following story:—'A bishop spent two days not long ago at a country vicarage imploring a very excellent clergyman, •who received many confessions, not to disturb the minds of his rural parishioners by constantly preaching on the.mattor. He succeeded as he thought. The clergyman drove him to the station, bought 'The Times,' went home, and wrote to him that after reading one of Sir William Harcourt's letters he must withdraw his submission, as he thought his diocesan was acting from external pressure. 1

WHAT DAVID CHRISTIE i MURRAY

THINKS.

As the views of Mr David Christie Murray are, I understand, valued in Australia, you may like to know what line he is taking in the confessional controversy. Well, first of all Mr Murray holds —as I imagine most sensible persons dothat the obvious course for the upholders of secret confession and other extreme High Church practices is to quit the establishment.

'The one plain way, which everybody sees except the Ritualists themselves, would be for those who approve of a practice which is not permitted by the" laws of the institution to which they belong to retire from that institution. They are wholly welcome to a community of their own, and to such practices and beliefs as are imposed upon them by conscience. But they are not welcome in their present place, and, if they could but see it, they are doing their best to bring about their own ears the edifice which now shelters them.'

Quite so; that is common sense. But the interest of Mr Murray's striking article in Saturday's 'Morning' lay in his contention that for confession to be desirable or even possible you must have a celibate clergy. Most Protestants argue from an exactly opposite standpoint, avowing that (man being mortal) a celibate clergy largely increases the risks of confession. Mr Christie Murray, however, puts the matter as follows:—

The Catholic priest is a celibate, and by the training no less than by the precept of his life js remote from sexual influences. The splendid self abnegation which enables the Roman Catholic priesthood to maintain its sacred vows is one of the loftier facts of life which cannot be denied, and any breach of the convention into which the priest has entered is so rare as to excite amazement. But on the side of the English cleric there is no such convention, there is no understanding, when a young man is ordained as deacon, that he shall forever forego the hopes of paternity or the joys of the family life. To him the companionship and entire ownership of a woman is a completely lawful object of desire. Marriage is legitimately within his view. And this being so, he cannot conceivably be a fit repository for the entire confidences of young and ardent women. Whether it is, under the circumstances, a becoming thing tfor a woman to lay her wnole soul bare to the eyes of a man may be left, if you please, an open question. The Roman Church, in condemning its officers to a perfect asceticism in that one respect, in robbing them of their right to the joys of fatherhood and home, may have been guilty of a giant blunder, but at least it has done something to explain Jts attitude towards auricular confession, and to justify, its existence, (There is no such.

justification conceivable in the case of a non-celibate cleric. The fact that scandal of an open sort has never attached itself to any member of the Ritualistic body in the Church of England makes ' little difference to the other ract, that the act of feminine confession to a non-celibate is, in itself, ascandal, a thing naked in its own immodesty, and repugnant to the feeling of all right minded people. There is no attack made here upon the muorals or the intention of the Ritualistic clergy, the great majority of whom are without doubt men of saintly and self denying lives. But the least concession that any man can make to mere decency is that before he receives one female penitent he should have made an unbreakable and irrevocable vow to celibacy. It has been the unsexing of the Roman priest, and that alone, which has made the Confessional a tolerable thing in Catholic countries throughout the long centuries in which it has been practised.'