is a type of God’s.  She does not put into her ministers’ lips words of incantation.  He cannot bless whom God has not blessed—­he cannot curse whom God has not cursed.  If the Son of absolution be there, his absolution will rest.  If you have ever tried the slow and apparently hopeless task of ministering to a heart diseased, and binding up the wound that will bleed afresh, to which no assurances can give comfort, because they are not authoritative, it must have crossed your mind that such a power as that which the Church of England claims, if it were believed, is exactly the remedy you want.  You must have felt that even the formula of the Church of Rome would be a blessed power to exercise, could it but once be accepted as a pledge that all the past was obliterated, and that from that moment a free untainted future lay before the soul—­you must have felt that; you must have wished you had dared to say it.  My whole spirit has absolved my erring brother.  Is God less merciful than I?  Can I—­dare I—­say or think it conditionally?  Dare I say, I hope?  May I not, must I not, say, I know God has forgiven you?

Every man whose heart has truly bled over another’s sin, and watched another’s remorse with pangs as sharp as if the crime had been his own, has said it.  Every parent has said it who ever received back a repentant daughter, and opened out for her a new hope for life.  Every mother has said it who ever by her hope against hope for some profligate, protested for a love deeper and wider than that of society.  Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong.  See then, why and how the church absolves.  She only exercises that power which belongs to every son of man.  If society were Christian—­if society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, truly represented the mind of God—­there would be no necessity for a Church to speak; but the absolution of society and the world does not represent by any means God’s forgiveness.  Society absolves those whom God has not absolved—­the proud, the selfish, the strong, the seducer; society refuses return and acceptance to the seduced, the frail, and the sad penitent whom God has accepted; therefore it is necessary that a selected body, through its appointed organs, should do in the name of Man what man, as such, does not.  The Church is the ideal of Humanity.  It represents what God intended man to be—­what man is in God’s sight as beheld in Christ by Him; and the minister of the Church speaks as the representative of that ideal Humanity.  Church absolution is an eternal protest, in the name of God the Absolver, against the false judgments of society.

One thing more.  Beware of making this a dead formula.  If absolution be not a living truth, it becomes a monstrous falsehood; if you take absolution as a mystical gift conveyed to an individual man called a priest, and mysteriously efficacious in his lips, and his alone, you petrify