the true priest loves the sinner even more than he hates the sin; it is best to be utterly sincere with him, because he loves sincerity even more than unstained virtue; and one can confess to him one’s desires for good with as little false shame as one can confess one’s hankering after evil.  Perhaps in one respect the man is more fitted to be a confessor than a woman, because he has a deeper experience of the ardour and the pleasure of temptation; and yet the deeper tenderness of the woman gives her a sympathy for the tempted, which is not even communicated by a wider experience of sin.

Perhaps there is nothing that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of God more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has ever conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no doubt the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the growing influence in the world of the feminine element; and yet the conception of God as masculine is in itself a limitation of His infinite perfection.  That we should carry our conception of sex into the infinite is perhaps a mere failure of imagination, and if we could divest ourselves of a thought which possibly has no reality in it, we should perhaps grow to feel that the true priesthood of life could be exercised as well by women as by men, or even better.  The true principle is that all those who are set free by a natural grace, a divine instinct, from grosser temptations, and whose freedom leads them not to a cold self-sufficiency, to a contempt for what is weaker, but to an ardent desire to save, to renew, to upraise, are the natural priests or priestesses of the world; for the only way in which the priest can stand between man and God is, when smaller and more hampered natures realize that he has a divine freedom and compassion conferred upon him, which sets him above themselves; when they can feel that in religion it is better to agree with the saints than to differ from them; when they can see that there are certain people whose religious intuitions can be trusted, because they are wider and deeper than the narrower intuitions of more elementary natures.

The priest, then, that I would recognize is not the celebrator of lonely and forlorn mysteries, the proprietor of divine blessings, the posturer in solemn ceremonies, but the man or woman of candid gaze, of fearless heart, of deep compassion, of infinite concern.  It is these qualities which, if they are there, lend to rite and solemnity a holiness and a significance which they cannot win from antiquity or tradition.  Such priests as these are the interpreters of the Divine will, the channels of Divine grace; and the hope of the race lies in the fact that such men and women are sent into the world, and go in and out among us, more than in all the stately organizations, the mysterious secrets, the splendid shrines, devised by the art of man to make fences about the healing spring; shrines where, though sound and colour may lavish their rich hues, their moving tones, yet the raiment of the priest may hide a proud and greedy heart, and the very altar may be cold.