CHAPTER VI.
OF PRIVATE CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION.

This rite, in any sense of the term, that can be given to it in the
Augsburg Confession and other former symbols of the Lutheran church,
has long since been abandoned throughout our church in Europe,
excepting in that small portion of German churches, known as Old
Lutherans, and among those foreigners in the west of our country, who
constitute the Missouri Synod. It is historically unjust to apply the
term _private_ confession to that public confession of sins, made by
the congregation collectively, as part of our preparatory exercises
on sacramental occasions, and usually a misnomer to apply the name
private confession, to the habit of some of our German ministers,
(termed Anmeldung,) of having all communicants call on them for
conversation on their spiritual state, prior to sacramental communion.
Although these customs both grew out of private confession properly so
called, neither of them retains its essential elements.

Let us first inquire _what does the Augsburg Confession mean by the
phrase Private Confession_. Among the Romanists, _Auricular_
Confession is that rite, in which every individual of both sexes must,
at least once a year, appear before the priest at the confession box
in the church or chapel, and confess in detail all the sins that he
can recollect; after which, the priest assigns the penitent some acts
of penance, and on his promising to perform them, he then, as in the
stead of God, professes to forgive him his sins. The Reformers, however,
distinctly rejected the necessity of the penitents enumerating his
individual sins, and the propriety of the minister's prescribing any