authoritative, it must have crossed your mind that such a power as
that which the Church of England claims, if it were believed, is
exactly the remedy you want. You must have felt that even the formula
of the Church of Rome would be a blessed power to exercise, could it
but once be accepted as a pledge that all the past was obliterated,
and that from that moment a free untainted future lay before the
soul--you must have _felt_ that; you must have wished you had dared to
_say_ it. My whole spirit has absolved my erring brother. Is God less
merciful than I? Can I--dare I--say or think it conditionally? Dare I
say, I hope? May I not, must I not, say, _I know_ God has forgiven
you?

Every man whose heart has truly bled over another's sin, and watched
another's remorse with pangs as sharp as if the crime had been his
own, _has_ said it. Every parent has said it who ever received back a
repentant daughter, and opened out for her a new hope for life. Every
mother has said it who ever by her hope against hope for some
profligate, protested for a love deeper and wider than that of
society. Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong. See then,
_why_ and _how_ the church absolves. She only exercises that power
which belongs to every son of man. If society were Christian--if
society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, truly represented the
mind of God--there would be no necessity for a Church to speak; but
the absolution of society and the world does not represent by any
means God's forgiveness. Society absolves those whom God has _not_
absolved--the proud, the selfish, the strong, the seducer; society
refuses return and acceptance to the seduced, the frail, and the sad
penitent whom God has accepted; therefore it is necessary that a
selected body, through its appointed organs, should do in the name of
Man what man, as such, does not. The Church is the ideal of Humanity.