"The rack of consciences": Taylor against Pusey on private confession

If other sins come back into your mind afterwards, which you would have confessed had you remembered them, they should be confessed afterwards, because the forgiveness is conditional upon the completeness of the Confession. Completeness implies that there should be care and faithfulness in discovering sins, and that nothing so discovered should be held back - Pusey, Hints for a First Confession (1851).

Pusey's advice highlights how the later Tractarian practice of private confession and absolution radically departed from Caroline and Old High Church practice and teaching.  Taylor exemplifies the Caroline understanding which shaped the Old High Church tradition.  While accepting that private confession and absolution can be "and a good instance, instrument, and ministry of repentance, and may serve many good ends in the church, and to the souls of needing persons", Taylor is robust in his rejection of the Tridentine understanding - taken up by Pusey - that private confession and absolution required extensive examination of conscience ("all that upon strict enquiry we can remember") and the enumeration of all sins to the priest.

The emphasis on the examination of conscience he terms a "very great evil":

There is yet another very great evil that attends upon the Roman way of auricular confession; and that is, an eternal scruple of conscience, which to the timorous and to the melancholy, to the pious and considering and zealous, is almost unavoidable ... there can be no peace (because there can be no certain rule given) concerning the examination of our consciences; for who can say he hath done it sufficiently, or who knows what is sufficient; and yet if it be not sufficient, then the sins which are forgotten by carelessness, and not called to mind by sufficient diligence, are not pardoned, and then the penitent hath had much trouble to no purpose.

He is no less robust in his critique of what Pusey describes as the need for the "completeness" of the confession:

to exact an enumeration of all our sins in all cases, and of all persons; to clog it with so many questions and innumerable inextricable difficulties, and all this, besides the evil manage and conduct of it; is the rack of consciences, the slavery of the church.

Taylor also counsels against the confession of some sins:

let it be considered that there being some things which S. Paul says are not to be so much as named amongst Christians, it must needs look undecently that all men and all women should come and make the priest’s ears a common-shoar [sewer] to empty all their filthiness

This has significance because it goes to the heart of Taylor's rejection of a supposed need for "completeness" in confession:

True it is that a physician must see and handle the impurest ulcers; but it is because the cure does not depend upon the patient but upon the physician, who by general advertisement cannot cure the patient, unless he had an universal medicine: which the priest hath; the medicine of repentance, which can indifferently cure all sins, whether the priest know them or no. And therefore all this filthy communication is therefore intolerable because it is not necessary.

Here, then, is a vital contrast between Taylor and Pusey regarding the practice of and teaching upon private confession and absolution.  For Taylor, the ministry of private confession and absolution as "the Church of England ... practises it" is a means of granting assurance of forgiveness to the penitent who is particularly burdened.  It requires no searching self-examination, for the sin in question means that the individual, in the words of the Prayer Book, "cannot quieten his conscience".  It requires no enumeration of all sins, because this infringes Christian liberty and disorders the doctrine of repentance as it offers no "truer judgment of the penitent's repentance and disposition to amendment" than can be expressed by a "general profession of his true and deep contrition".  And its use must be governed by "a prudential consideration" which avoids and guards against "its evil appendages". 

(All Taylor quotes are from The Second Part of a Dissuasive from Popery, Book I, Section XI 'Auricular Confession Imposed Without Authority from God'.)