'Nothing can be more prudent than this reserve': Phillpotts' rejection of auricular confession

In a series of letters published in 1825, Henry Phillpotts - standing in the Old High tradition, a rector in the Diocese of Durham, soon to be appointed Dean of Chester and, in 1830, Bishop of Exeter - engaged with a Roman Catholic apologist, Charles Butler. The ninth letter addressed the matter of 'Confession and Absolution in the Church of Rome', including a 'Statement of Doctrine and Practice of the Church of England on these points'. 

Phillpotts noted that Butler had mischievously and inaccurately used the two references to private confession in the Book of the Common Prayer. There was, Phillpotts declared with right and proper confidence, no comparison between Roman Catholic teaching on the Sacrament of Penance and the Prayer Book's pastoral provision in the Exhortation in the Holy Communion:

You know that auricular confession is, with you, an essential part of a Sacrament, which, as you value your soul's salvation, you must perform. You also know, that, with us, the same Confession is not at all required as a necessary service, not as a part of repentance, not even of discipline: that it is merely a matter recommended to those sinners whose troubled conscience admits not of being quieted by self-examination however close and searching, nor any other instruction however diligent; that he only who "requireth further comfort or counsel," after all that he can do for himself, is invited to repair "to some discreet and learned Minister of God's word, and open his grief; that by the Ministry of God's holy word he may receive the benefit of absolution together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness."

Likewise, Phillpotts states that the second reference, in the Visitation of the Sick, also has no comparison to Roman Catholic practice and teaching. In this office, a "special confession" is also only for those "troubled with any weighty matter", and it is to be turned only if the minister's counsel to the sick person has not brought sufficient comfort:

If from the sick man's answers to his enquiries, he find him in a state of penitence and peace, his business is completed; he is not authorized, he is by implication forbidden, to move him to any further disclosure: and in this case (as it will be necessary to bear in mind) no absolution is pronounced, evidently because particular absolution is to be given in our Church only to those whose minds cannot be quieted without such especial application to them of God's general promises.

This, Phillpotts emphasises, reveals the wise caution with which the Church of England rightly approached private confession:

so little is our Church inclined to encourage its Ministers in prying into the secrets of their penitents, that it enjoins every other step to be previously taken, before the last measure of particular confession be proposed.

'Prying into the secrets' of the penitent's heart was not, as Church of England divines had insisted over centuries, a spiritually safe place for either minister or penitent. As such, private confession of a "weighty matter" that burdens the conscience - note, not a confession of all sins - is a pastoral 'backstop', a means of quieting the conscience and providing the penitent heart of the assurance of forgiveness: 

Now, as nothing can be more prudent than this reserve and backwardness in inviting to secret confession, when the end of our ministry can be obtained without it, so nothing certainly can be more necessary to the due discharge of the commission we have received, as Christ's Ministers, Christ's Ambassadors, appointed and empowered to reconcile sinful man to God, than that, when all other instruction and means have failed, we should then require of those for whom we are to give account, that they enable us to know more clearly of their state; that they tell us specially what it is that weighs them down, and deprives them of that most important grace and duty, Christian hope.

It was prudent reserve and caution regarding the ministry of private confession and absolution that the Tractarians abandoned, in their failed attempt to persuade Anglicans that private confession should be a normative feature of Anglican life. This Tractarian endeavour explains why Phillpotts - then Bishop of Exeter - separately reprinted in 1848 this ninth letter from his exchanges with Butler, because the Tractarians were misinterpreting the Prayer Book's provisions in precisely the same manner as had the Roman Catholic apologist whom Phillpotts had addressed two decades earlier.