"You profess to act in it only as the commissioned ministers of Christ": Bishop Phillpotts' 1842 Visitation Charge and the ministry of private absolution

As part of the series of weekly posts from the responses to Tract XC by Old High bishops in the visitation charges of the early 1840s, today we continue consideration of the charge given in 1842 by Henry Phillpotts (Bishop of Exeter 1831-69). These charges are a rich seam of Old High teaching.  In today's extract Phillpotts addresses a matter which would become a significant point of controversy between Tractarians and Old High: private absolution.

Contrary to what would become the Anglo-catholic imitation of the Roman discipline, Phillpotts maintains the caution and reserve of historic Prayer Book practice: rejecting any notion of a necessity for private absolution; no requirement to catalogue any or all sins; and the efficacy of absolution dependent on being received in faith and penitence. 

Mindful of the divisive controversies which ensued upon the Tractarian and Anglo-catholic promotion of the Roman discipline, Phillpotts' Old High exposition was deeply Hookerian and offered to Victorian Anglicanism a meaningful, unifying alternative. It is a reminder of the wisdom and prudence of the Old High tradition, embodying the Prayer Book's provision in the face of both evangelical denial of the ministry of absolution and extravagant, ahistorical Anglo-catholic claims for this Prayer Book ministry.

It is undeniably your duty to endeavour to bring your people to have that recourse to your private ministry for ghostly counsel and advice - and, when necessary, for that benefit of absolution - to which you are bound to invite them, as often as they are called to the Lord's Table. No sense of your own weakness, or of your own unworthiness, ought to make you afraid or ashamed to exercise the main and distinctive part of the holy office to which you have aspired - absolution, of which the Church tells you that it "hath the promise of forgiveness of sins."  

You pretend not to it of your own power; you profess to act in it only as the commissioned ministers of Christ. Nay, you profess that your commission has not any efficacy, further than as it is exercised in conformity with God's Word, and with the terms of forgiveness there laid down. But you also profess, or ought to profess, that you are ministers empowered by God to pronounce His forgiveness; and that they who seek to you, as ministers of reconciliation with Him, will receive the blessing which He has annexed to your ministry. 

In saying this, I say not that the absolution of the priest is necessary to forgiveness - God forbid! - or that it is more than a mean, which God has been pleased to bless with His especial promise. Neither do I say - God forbid! - that we should demand the particular confession of those sins which the penitent calls upon us to forgive in the name and by the authority of Christ. The only point on which we are to be satisfied is, the penitence and faith of the party; not the nature, much less the particulars, of his sins - unless the communication of these be necessary, and only in the degree in which it shall be necessary, to quiet his conscience and assuage his grief. 

Even the "special confession of his sins," which "the sick person shall be moved to make, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter," ought not to be urged, till his troubled spirit cannot be in any other way duly comforted. And when, "if he humbly and heartily desire it," you proceed to give absolution in the form which the Church hath provided, be careful to teach him that unless he be sincere, unless he have true Christian repentance, the pardon which you pronounce has no promise of being ratified by our Lord .