"Branch," surely for they might as well say that a heap of sand is a solid rock as that the doctrines of that Church, or its doctrinal interpretations of Scripture, cohere into one solid whole. They do not mean themselves alone; and, for reasons already given, if they mean themselves and us conjointly, they mean a chimera, a mere creature of a mystified imagination, and speak like him who "openeth his mouth in vain, and multiplieth words without knowledge." In the course of the essay there are several excellent, and, indeed, unanswerable, replies to a number of popular Protestant objections against the Catholic doctrine of confession and priestly absolution. But when our essayists come to show that this doctrine is recognized by the Church of England, and brand the contrary assertion of Mr. Canon Boyd as a piece of amazing audacity (p. 30), they fling themselves on the horns of a dilemma, from which escape is impossible. We entirely agree in the following statement of Mr. Boyd (p. 32):-" Judged, not by isolated passages, but by its whole tenor, we are surely justified in affirming that our Liturgy knows nothing of the power of authoritative Absolution." It is perfectly clear to us that the Protestant interpretation, put by him on the "isolated passages" is, in substance at least, that adopted by every Bishop in the Established Church, by every minister and layman, with the exception of a number so insignificant, that the entire withdrawal of them, in a single day and in one mass, from that communion, would make hardly any, if any, appreciable change in its condition. An event so sudden and startling would, indeed, make a considerable noise: leaders and paragraphs in all the newspapers; but in a month or two the whole occurrence would be forgotten by the general public. Let us, however, concede that the Catholic doctrine of confession and absolution is, and for the last three centuries has been, recognized by the Established Church; and see the fearful condition in which she is thereby placed, during the whole course of these three centuries. She recognizes the doctrine to be divine, and therefore must recognize the use and application of it as salutary. And yet up to the rise of the Tractarian party, less than forty years ago, was there a single parish in all England or Ireland in which the doctrine was reduced to practice? We believe, not one. Was there a single minister, in either country, who announced to his congregation the duty or the utility, or even the lawfulness, of having recourse to confession and absolution; or a single member of any congregation who had recourse thereto? We believe, not one. Is there at the present moment a single parish, in either country, in which the practice of confession can be truly said to be a prevailing one-prevailing, we mean, among regular church-going and religious-minded people; in whom alone we, of course, should fairly look for it, or expect to find it? We believe, not one. How many parishes are there in which the practice exists at all, even among the select few? Such has been the condition of the Established Church for so many centuries: such is her condition at the present day. Such has been her condition from that very period when she took to herself the new title of " Reformed." That is to say, before that period she not only recognized a doctrine, according to which there has been established by God a most efficacious means at once for the remission of sin, and the prevention of sin; but she acted upon the doctrine; and that great means of recovering and preserving the life of grace was, everywhere throughout her fold and every day, resorted to and applied. Since that period she has, indeed, according to our authors, recognized the doctrine; but it has all this time remained a dead letter in the volume of her Liturgy-dead as the mighty men of old, barren as the barren fig-tree, buried deep in earth as the hidden talent. Whisper it in her ear, and it is echoed back in a volley of laughter, or a hiss of scorn: try to realize it before her eyes, and she calls on her wise men and her strong men to take it out of her sight. And this is a reformation-a renewal of strength and beauty! Then was Samson renewed in his strength and beauty when he lay, shorn of his seven locks, blind and bound in chains in the prison of Gaza. Let us for a moment change pictures, and turn from the Church where the doctrine is recognized but not practised, to the Church where it is both recognized and practised. One of the popular Protestant objections, above alluded to, against confession is thus put by our essayists (p. 37): "The confessional has a demoralizing effect on penitent and confessor." We give their answer for sake of the extract contained in it; which, though doubtless familiar to many of our readers, may be unknown to many more. It is as follows: This I emphatically deny. But into this objection I will not enter, as it will probably be considered in another tract. Let me quote, however, the testimony of a Protestant to the benefits of the Confessional in Ireland. Dr. Forbes, in his "Memorandums made in Ireland in the Autumn of 1852," says, "At any rate the result of my inquiries is, that-whether right or wrong in a theological or rational point of view-this instrument of Confession is, among the Irish of the humbler classes, a direct preservative against certain forms of immorality at least" (vol. ii. p. 81). "Among other charges preferred against Confession, in Ireland and elsewhere, is the facility it affords for corrupting the female mind, and of its actually leading to such corruption. . . . So far from such corruption resulting from the Confessional, it is the general belief in Ireland-a belief expressed to me by many trustworthy men in all parts of the country, and by Protestants as well as Catholics-that the singular purity of female life among the lower classes there is, in a considerable degree, dependent on this very circumstance" (p. 83). "With a view of testing, as far as was practicable, the truth of the theory respecting the influence of Confession on this branch of morals, I have obtained, through the courtesy of the Poor Law Commissioners, a return of the number of legitimate and illegitimate children in the workhouses of each of the four provinces of Ireland, on a particular day, viz., the 27th November, 1852. It is curious to mark how strikingly the results there conveyed correspond with the Confession theory; the proportion of illegitimate children coinciding almost exactly with the relative proportions of the two religions in each province; being large where the Protestant element is large, and small where it is small, &c." (p. 245). The powerful and efficacious influence of confession in preventing sin and reclaiming from sin, especially that sin The sin of all most sure to blight, is not merely a theological dogma, or a theological conclusion to be reasoned out. It is a fact. Nor is it a fact local, or occasional, or obscure, or discoverable only by a few select witnesses, however respectable and weighty. It is a fact, plain, tangible, world-wide, and ages-long; existing wherever a Catholic congregation exists on the face of the earth; everywhere witnessed, through every day that dawns and declines, through every generation that comes and goes, by every priest who sits in the tribunal of confession, by every penitent who kneels there; witnessed by millions on millions of every clime, of every race, of every profession, of every state and condition and line of life, from the king on his throne to the beggar in the street, from the polished courtier to the reclaimed savage, from the learned theologian and philosopher to the unlettered clown; witnessed by married and unmarried, by rich and poor; by the father and mother of many children; by their daughter, a girl at school; by their daughter, about to become a bride; by their daughter, a cloistered nun; by their son, a Zouave in the army; by their son, a student at college; by their son, practising at the bar; by their son, a judge on the bench; by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland; by the convict under sentence of death; by the soldier, on the eve of battle; by the evicted peasant, about to leave the land of his fathers for ever; by the youth who has preserved his baptismal innocence; by the youth who has sadly lost it; by the matured man, after years of dissipation; by the hoary sinner, on his dying bed. Of the millions who, in every quarter of the Catholic world, are every day of every year crowding round the confessional, is there one who, going there with a sincere heart and upright intention, does not feel on leaving it that he has received a new principle of life, a new strength to fight the good fight, a new love of holiness, an odour of paradise scenting his soul, his youth renewed like the eagle's? He may fall again, as many do-that is poor human nature; but well he knows, as all who have tried know well, that his only hope of rising again is in returning again to drink of the invigorating waters of that sacred fountain. Is there any other fact, has there ever been any other fact, on the face of God's earth, attested by such a body of such witnesses, primary witnesses, who themselves have felt, and seen, and known, stretching out from land to land, from generation to generation? Yet there ever has been, as there ever will be, that infinite number of fools, of whom the wise man speaks, and who have ears and hear not, who have eyes and see not. Where these things are is surely the city on the mountain, the city of God. Here surely is fulfilled, though it is but part of the fulfilment of, the prophecy of old :-"O poor little one, tossed with tempest, without all comfort, behold I will lay thy stones in order, and will lay thy foundations with sapphires, and I will make thy bulwarks of jasper, and thy gates of graven stones, and all thy borders of desirable stones. All thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children." Ay, and the children of that Church who frequent this holy institution, this the great means of sanctification entrusted to her, feel that very peace, that peace of God which surpasseth all understanding, that peace which the world can neither give nor take away, and feel it in the deepest depths of the soul. Ask them, you who are not of them, and with one voice they will tell you it is so. Then, "Why stand you here all the day idle? Go you also into My vineyard." For ourselves, no need to express our pain, in seeing so many tender loving hearts still left in the wild, outside the pale of that vineyard which is the chosen care of the Almighty and all merciful Lord; while there needs only a single step to place them within it-a pain multiplied a thousand fold to those who have among them friends, dear as their own souls by the ties of nature and by innumerable memories of days, when both were as yet walking, side by side, in that path which by His infinite mercy has led themselves within its gate. How and why these things are, will in many respects never be explained to us, so long as we remain in that land in which we see only through a glass dimly. But as long as we can believe that men are really in good faith (and this, without presuming to judge of individuals one way or the other, we do believe of the school, at large), so long we may retain our conviction, that as a school, even their unconscious errors are being used by our all-merciful Father, for the good of our beloved country. On more than one previous occasion, we have followed out this line of thought; and our readers will quite understand that we should greatly regret any event which made the existence of the Ritualist school in the national establishment an impossibility, or which made it impossible that any man in good faith should continue to belong to it. For a moment many persons, among whom we were not numbered, thought that this would be the effect of the late judgment of the Judicial Committee of Privy Council. The most fair and religiously conducted of Protestant newspapers, the representative of the more religious section of what is called the Broad party-the Spectator-wrote, the day after the judgment,― "Taken in connection with the decisions of the same Court on questions of doctrine, its tendency will be this-to cut off all those escape-valves for the transubstantionist vein of thought in the Church, which (what we should call) superstitious gestures, rites, and attitudes, have hitherto afforded. The celebrant of the Eucharist in the English Church is now forbidden to mark by any outward sign any strong divergence of belief on this head, from the ordinary Protestant belief of which he may be conscious. We think it evident, that the effect will be to shut the safety-valve by which our Romanising priests, in the usual spirit of English compromise, have hitherto got rid of their own self-dissatisfaction at being associated with such an ancient set of heretics. Now that, if they obey the laws, they will be obliged to become undistinguishable from the crowd of mere Protestants; will they be able to bear their situation? The most earnest and heartily convinced among them, we imagine, can scarcely be content to acquiesce in the impoverished worship to which they are now consigned. We suspect the judgment will drive a good many, and a good many of the best among the ritualist priests, into another communion." To a certain extent the writer regretted this. He regretted that "in great towns where churches of all sorts are open to believers of all sorts; men who have hitherto sincerely believed themselves Anglicans should no longer be able to |