CARDINAL NEWMAN ON SOLACE OF CONFESSION.

New Zealand Tablet, 1 August 1918, Page 45

CARDINAL NEWMAN ON SOLACE OF CONFESSION.

Cardinal Newman speaks as follows of confession and its effect on the penitent: How many are the souls in distress, anxiety, or loneliness, whose one need is to find a being to whom they can pour out their feelings unheard by the world ! Tell them out they must. They cannot tell them out. to those whom they see every hour. They want to (ell them and not to tell them; and they want to tell them out, yet be as if they be not told : they wish to tell them to one who is strong enough to bear them, yet not too strong to despise them they wish to' tell them to one who can at once advise and can sympathise with them. They wish to relieve themselves of a load, to gain a solace, to receive the assurance that there is one who thinks of them and one to whom in thought they can recur, to whom they can betake themselves, if necessary, from time to time, while they are in the world. How many a Protestant heart would leap at the news of such a benefit, putting aside all distinct ideas of a sacramental ordinance, or of a grant of pardon and the conveyance of grace! If there is a heavenly idea in the Catholic Church, looking at it simply as an idea, surely, next after the Blessed Sacrament, Confession is such. And such is it ever found, in fact, the very act of kneeling, the low and contrite voice, the sign of the cross hanging, so to say, over the head bowed low, and the words of peace and blessing. Qh, what a soothing charm is there, which the world can neither give nor take away ! Oh, what piercing, heart-subduing tranquillity, provoking tears °f jP}b are poured almost substantially and physically upon the soul, the oil of gladness, as Scripture calls it, when the penitent at length rises, the God reconciled to him, his sins rolled away forever! This is confession as it is in fact.