attempt to bind the two together they might as well try to bind together with a postage stamp two masses of wall which are falling in opposite directions. But what philosophers cannot do to the satisfaction of the intellect, the mass of mankind does in obedience to the instinctive practical reason. It unites the free and the necessary in a synthesis, the truth of which it attests from generation to generation by its love, by its blood, by its tears, by its joys, by its sorrows, and by its prayers. The great truth which philosophers must learn is this-that the synthesis is one which can never be intellectually justified by analysis. In other words, life in its totality is incomprehensible. The method which explains one part, leaves another part unexplained. Philosophy is a coat which we can button over our stomachs only by leaving a broken seam at our backs. We can know something, or much, of many portions of existence; but by no intellectual device can we fit the portions together. Our intellect may be compared to a locomotive on a pair of rails, which for a certain distance each way run parallel, and on which the locomotive can travel; but which in either direction when a certain point is passed, begin to diverge like two sides of a triangle, stretching away to some infinitely distant base, and on which the wheels of the engine cannot travel any longer. Let us take as our guide any method or philosophy we like-materialistic, idealistic, theistic, deistic, or pantheistic, our experience will be the same. We shall be brought into a region not only of unknowable things, but of contradictory thoughts and principles. Let Edipus go out of any one of the seven gates of Thebes, and the same Sphinx will be there, staggering him with the same riddle; and not all the Mr. Wards or Mr. Munsterbergs in the world would be able to give him a hint of how the riddle is to be answered.

W. H. MALLOCK.

ORDINATION OF PRIESTS IN THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND

UNDER the existing law a bishop of the Established Church is compelled to address the following words separately and individually to each person whom he admits to Priest's Orders: 'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained.'

The use of these words is accompanied by every circumstance of solemn ceremonial which can enhance and emphasise their importance. They are, in truth, the culminating point of the whole Ordination Service.

Not only the Bishop, but every priest present, lays his hands upon the head of each candidate as he kneels before the Bishop while these words are being addressed to him. No words in the whole service are more weighty than these; to none is greater solemnity attached by the accompanying highly suggestive ceremonial. What are these words? Whence are they derived, and by what authority have they been introduced into our Ordinal? They have one excellent characteristic-they are perfectly plain and their meaning is unmistakable.

By them each priest is endowed individually, as far as words can do it, with a power to forgive and to retain' sins. 'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained.' Whence are they derived? They have been described as an 'adaptation' of words addressed by Christ to His disciples. They contain, in truth, a misquotation of Christ's words, involving not merely a verbal inaccuracy, but also a change of meaning so essential that it vitally affects the authority and the status of those who are ordained.

The misquotation is the substitution of the singular for the plural in such a way that a saying addressed by Christ generally to His disciples, as the body representing and governing the early Christian Church, Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained,' is now put into the mouth of a Bishop, who is compelled, at a most solemn moment in the Ordination Service, to apply it individually to

one young clergyman after another-men, for the most part, with but very little experience of life, who probably have been only a few months in their profession, and who come to ordination at an age when their minds are as wax to receive and as marble to retain religious impressions which are stamped with the authority of the Church.

Whatever attempts may have been made in the study to refine away a clear and obvious meaning, who can wonder if, in the cathedral on his ordination day, surrounded by every circumstance of solemn ceremonial, as he kneels to receive from his Father in God the Great Commission,' a young man feels an overwhelming sense of the power, as well as of the responsibility, conferred by the words' Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained'? And if the tendency of his mind has, by early training and by instinctive reasoning, been in the direction of a High Church conception of the position and authority of an Anglican priest, he will sympathise enthusiastically with the late Canon Pusey, who, in a letter on Ordination and Confession addressed to the Times in November 1866, said: 'So long as these words of our Lord, "Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven," are repeated over us when we are ordained, so long there will be confession in the Church of England.'

It is simply impossible to imagine that any fair-minded bishop, after ordaining a priest in this form, could punish him if he honestly endeavours to put in practice, by means of the Confessional, the powers and responsibilities conferred upon him at ordination by the bishop himself. And if the newly ordained priest thinks at all about the matter he may consider, as apparently Canon Pusey did, that the misquotation is so trifling that it may be ignored, and that what were not the words of our Lord may be cited as if they were, in defence of the use of the Confessional in the Church of England.

If anyone is to be punished, it ought, in common justice, to be the man who, having received these powers, systematically neglects to use them. And if there is one person on whom lies the responsibility of inflicting this punishment, it is the bishop who has endowed his clergy personally and individually with the powers in question.

And considering that it is the laity, not the clergy, who are mainly and directly responsible for the law of the land, it is the height of absurdity and injustice for laymen to band themselves together to try to induce bishops to punish their clergy for obeying a law which they dislike, instead of setting themselves to work to get the law changed-which, in such a case as this, would be, no doubt, a very difficult matter.

But, whether difficult or not, it has the advantage of being an honest and straightforward way of dealing with it, and this, in itself,

when once the necessity for a change in the Ordination Service is recognised, will attract English laymen generally, and make it easier to bring the change about than by any other means less honest and less direct. For in such a case as this, the one and only chance of a reform is by an appeal to men who absolutely refuse to regard the question from any narrow or sectarian point of view, men who believe that the highest form of practical religion demands an absolute allegiance to the common principles of fair dealing, which everyone can understand and appreciate.

Not many Englishmen attend Ordination Services. Very few have the least idea that any such words as those quoted are used, and only a small fraction of those who do know it realise the misquotation attaching to them. To the minds of the vast majority of English Churchmen and Churchwomen anything in the nature of an endowment of priests individually with a power to forgive or to ' retain' sins is in direct opposition to the teaching of the New Testament, and of the Prayer Book as they understand it.

As long as there was a general non-observance in practice of the doctrine implied in these words, the strong religious sense which forms so large a part of the manhood of England acting as a safeguard against the mischief of the misquotation, things might be allowed to go on, under a weak, and perhaps cowardly, observance of the convenient maxim, 'quieta non movere.' But when the 'quieta' of an earlier and more indifferent period have departed, and a large and influential section is teaching and practising a fulfilment of these words in forms of confession and absolution undistinguishable from those of Romish custom-then, for the sake of the reverence due to Him whose words have been misquoted and misapplied, and also for the sake of honesty in our controversial dealings with those from whom we differ, the demand arises that the misquotation which has already caused so much mischief, and will cause infinitely more, should be removed from our Prayer Book.

It is to no purpose that the unanimous decision of the bishops has been given against what is called 'compulsory confession.' When once a penitent really believes that a priest can forgive' or 'retain' sins, from that moment confession becomes compulsory.

The desire for confession becomes in itself a compulsion born of the fear that, without it, absolution will be withheld.

When every member of the priesthood is endowed with an authority so absolute, no room is left for voluntary confession.' Compulsory confession accompanies priestly absolution as the shadow the substance, and a very dark shadow it has often been. And this commission, which every priest receives on his ordination from the bishop, is of a double kind. He has the power, not only to forgive, but to retain' sins, that is, as generally understood, to refuse for

giveness. And he receives this power without any rule whatever being laid down for his guidance, how or when he shall exercise it.

The clergy accept, as part of their commission, the message of Divine forgiveness of which a world weary of repeated failure needs to be constantly reminded.

It is impossible for the mind to conceive of two things more utterly opposed to each other than the forgiveness of sins by God and their retention by man; and, before we accept the claim of any human authority to refuse forgiveness, we have the right to ask whence it is derived, on what foundation it rests, and, in so far as it is based upon one or two passages in the New Testament, whether the words used in the original have been translated into English so as to convey their true meaning.

In the twenty-third verse of the twentieth chapter of St. John there is a translation of a very remarkable kind. The Greek word translated 'retain' (whosesoever sins ye 'retain ') is Kрaтnтε. After careful inquiry, it appears that this word throughout the whole of Greek literature, including the New Testament, has probably never been rendered into English, except in this single passage, by a word implying a refusal to forgive.

Moreover, it is only by the substitution of the singular for the plural, the individual priest to whom Christ did not refer, for the governing body to whom He did, that this unique translation of the word is requisite, or indeed admissible. In every other passage of the New Testament where the word xρaтéw occurs the usual meaning is given to it of subduing, conquering, or controlling, a meaning which is applicable to the representative governing body of the Christian community, but is obviously inapplicable to the individual priest.

So far, therefore, as this passage is concerned, it appears that the doctrine of the individual priestly authority to refuse forgiveness of sins, as taught in our Ordination Service, rests on a misquotation of our Lord's words, helped out by a unique interpretation of a wellknown Greek word.

Cases may be quoted from the New Testament, few and far between, where a culprit has gone to his death condemned and apparently unforgiven; but who would dare to assert that the general teaching of the New Testament is such as to warrant, or permit, a power to refuse the forgiveness of sins being entrusted individually to young men who are ordained priests? Such an idea is abhorrent to most minds, as an outrage of faith, hope, and charity.

Inquiry has been made, and we believe it is true to state, that in no formulary now in use in any part of the Christian Church, except in the Church of England Service for the Ordination of Priests, and in the Pontificale Romanum, is the use of this misquotation enforced. In the Ordinal of the Episcopal Church of the United States, copied