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The "high and solemn office" of pronouncing the Absolution

If the priest feels the high and solemn office with which he is invested, the goodness of God in granting pardon to repentant sinners, and the gracious promise of divine assistance to enable us to perform our part of the Christian Covenant, he will, I think, speak the Absolution with a dignity be coming his sacred embassy, tempered however with a humility befitting the frail condition of an earthly messenger even of the Almighty Himself.

From Henry Handley Norris, a leading figure in the Hackney Phalanx, A Manual for the Parish Priest (1815).  Norris is here addressing "reading the service of the Church", referring to Mattins and Evensong. 

The significance of this extract concerning what the BCP terms "The Absolution or Remission of sins" is that it demonstrates the efficacy which the High Church tradition ascribed to the Absolution at Mattins and Evensong, a teaching undermined - if not denied - by the later Tractarian teaching tying ministerial absolution to private confession and the particular form of absolution associated with it. 

By contrast, High Church teaching ensures that the gift and grace of absolution is available not just to a numerically very small spiritual elite of Anglicans who avail of private confession, but to all those who gather for Mattins and Evensong and share in the General Confession "with a pure heart and humble voice".

Comments

  1. Gareth Hughes23 August 2019 at 12:49

    I find this absolution odd. The purposeful clause doesn't direct the absolution to the people as 'you' but to 'them that truly repent &c.' Also the verbs are indicative rather than subjunctive, almost suggesting that it's in God's habit to pardon and absolve rather than performing it here and now. Then it goes off into its cohortative Wherefore with the kind of stuff one beseeches before one's absolved. So odd! Or so think I!

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    Replies
    1. laudable Practice4 September 2019 at 17:23

      Gareth, many thanks for your comment and apologies for the delay in publishing it. Needless, I do disagree! The opening of the Absolution rightly grounds the act in the grace and mercy of God. From this flows the act of ministerial absolution. The centre of this Absolution is the proclamation "He pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent", with the repetition - "pardoneth and absolveth" - emphasising the gift. Finally, there is the petition for fruits of "true repentance", "that the rest of our life may be pure and holy". This is a quite beautiful enactment of the doctrine of repentance.

      Brian.

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