ught in the minds
of Episcopalians on both sides of the Atlantic? The Oxford movement of
some forty-five years ago turned men's minds to the early history of
the Church: and, finding confession and absolution then to be the
ordinary and necessary conditions for reconciliation with God, the
practice was introduced, but without seeing the important truth that,
besides valid ordination, there is needed jurisdiction from the
Church, so as to make absolution of avail.

This new school of religions opinion among Anglican and Protestant
Episcopalians contributes its share of testimony to uphold what the
Church of God has always taught, namely, that over and above having a
genuine supernatural sorrow for sin, there is ordinarily required on
the part of the sinner confession of sin, followed by the judicial
absolution of God's minister, approved and commissioned by the Church,
who alone possesses the power of the keys to remit or retain sin, and
who has therefore the sole right to approve and authorize confessors.

* * * * *

The constant practice of the Roman Church; the belief and practice of
the earliest schismatics; the existence of the Penitential Canons; the
statements of the Fathers, representatives of all Christian lands in
the first five centuries, when Latins and Greeks were in the
"Undivided Church"; the discovery made by High Churchmen in our day:
render, separately and cumulatively, evidence to the belief in
"Confession and Absolution" which no reasonable man can or ought to
reject. It is plain that had so painful a task as the confessing of
sin to man not been of Apostolic origin, assuredly its introduction to
the Christian Church would have caused the bitterest struggle, and the
date of such a movement would have been indelibly impressed on the
page of history. But no such strife is recorded.

Well, therefore, did the Church, assembled in General Council at
Trent, having first taught and defined the nature of contrition or
repentance, sum up the question of confession: "It is certain that, in
the Church, nothing else is required of penitents but that, after each
has examined himself diligently, and searched all the folds and
recesses of his conscience, he confess those sins by which he shall
remember that he has mortally offended his Lord and God; whilst the
other sins, which do not occur to him after diligent thought, are
understood to be included, as a whole, in that same confe