The Confessions

“ My confession then, O my God, in Thy sight, is made silently, and not silently. For in sound, it is silent; in affection, it cries aloud. For neither do I utter any thing right unto men, which Thou hast not before heard from me; nor dost Thou hear any such thing from me, which Thou hast not first said unto me. What then have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions- as if they could heal all my infirmities- a race, curious to know the lives of others, slothful to amend their own? Why seek they to hear from me what I am; who will not hear from Thee what themselves are? ”

“ My Confessions, in thirteen books, praise the righteous and good God as they speak either of my evil or good, and they are meant to excite men’s minds and affections toward him. At least as far as I am concerned, this is what they did for me when they were being written and they still do this when read. ”

“ The real object of my confessions is to communicate an exact knowledge of what I interiorly am and have been in every situation of my life. I have promised the history of my mind, and to write it faithfully I have no need of other memoirs: to enter into my own heart, as I have hitherto done, will alone be sufficient. ”

“ I shall for ever confess unto Thee. In the morning I shall stand in Thy presence, and shall see the health of my countenance, my God, who also shall quicken our mortal bodies, by the Spirit that dwelleth in us, because He hath in mercy been borne over our inner darksome and floating deep: from Whom we have in this pilgrimage received an earnest, that we should now be light: whilst we are saved by hope, and are the children of light, and the children of the day, not the children of the night, nor of the darkness, which yet sometimes we were. ”

“ In his justly famous and justly infamous Confessions, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at the last Judgment, these Confessions in his hand, a challenge to the remainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let a single one assert to Thee, if he dare: I am better than that man." ”

“ I would give you some characters out of the text, to discover unto you the vanity and emptiness of your ordinary confessions. The confession of sin must be particular, universal, perpetual, or constant;—particular, I say, for there are many thousands who confess that they are sinners, and yet do not at all confess their sins; for, to confess sins is to confess their own real actual guiltiness, that which they indeed have committed or are inclined to do. So the true and sincere confession of a repenting people is expressed, 1 Kings viii. ”

“ During the first year that I remained under the direction of this Father, I confined myself entirely to the accusation of my sins, thinking that nothing else should be introduced at confession, but having heard a pious girl say that it was not right to practise corporal austerities without permission from the confessor, I applied for it to mine, and he then regulated the amount of these, as well as the number of my confessions and communions. ”

“ Nay, raising such thoughts in them, and in general creating sentiments of love in their Confessors, are designs which numbers of female penitents, who at no time entirely cease being actuated by womanish views, expressly entertain, notwithstanding the apparent ingenuity of their confessions, and in which they but too often succeed, to their own, and their frail Confessors, cost. ”

“ We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! ”

“ To confess, then, is to praise and glorify God; it is an exercise in self-knowledge and true humility in the atmosphere of grace and reconciliation. ”

“ I have known this many a day that there needs no priest to make a confession valid, but that to every truly penitent heart the way to the very throne of Heaven is open, and that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin. If I regretted aught, it was that I must die without another kind of confession—the confessing my faith openly before men. ”

“ Such is the peace of the confessional! The soul, the intelligence, the honor, the self-respect, the conscience, are there sacrificed. There they must die! Yes, the confessional is a veritable tomb of human conscience, a sepulchre of human honesty, dignity and liberty; the grave-yard of human soul! By its means, man, whom God hath made in his own image, is converted into the likeness of the beast that perishes; woman, created by God to be the glory and help-mate of man, is transformed into the vile and trembling slave of the priest. ”

“ My dear Christian, when you come to confession, you must not be satisfied in repeating with the mouth a prayer which you have committed to memory, or to permit a prayer of confession to be repeated to you by your confessor, but you must yourself bring with you a penitent heart, out of which your confession will then freely flow, for to confess without a penitent heart is mocking God, and without it no forgiveness of sins can take place.
To a penitent heart in the first place belongs, that you confess your sins and experience sorrow and penitence on account of them. ”

“ But it is not Nature's generous impulses, its tender yearnings, its noble aspirations, that the stricken conscience pours into the confessor's ear. The strugglings and writhings of the soul, the convulsive efforts to cast off an insupportable burden, to escape from an insufferable anguish, to find rest for itself in its weariness, peace for its warring passions, an answer and a solution to its doubts,—these are the events of the confessional. ”

“ Does confession really relieve your mind? Does it make your sins fall off you like an old garment? My friends have told me so, but I cannot believe it.’
‘Oh, sir, your friends were right, indeed. It is the greatest comfort anyone can have. Why, when the priest absolves you, they are all gone. You not only need not trouble yourself about them again, but you are strictly forbidden to do so. It would be doubting God’s goodness, and the power He has imparted to His priests. Oh, sir, do try it, only just once,’ continued the woman, who saw in Hindes a possible convert. ”

“ Instead of brotherly confession one to another, or the pastoral sympathy of a fatherly elder, the religious mind of the day was instructed in an awful mysterious sacrament of confession, which gave to some human being a divine right to unlock the most secret chambers of the soul, to scrutinize and direct its most veiled and intimate thoughts, and, standing in God's stead, to direct the current of its most sensitive and most mysterious emotions. ”

“ It is an odd fact that writers and philosophers and even poets, all people who live necessarily a little apart from their kind, are frequently chosen as confessors by those who feel the need of confession. ”

“ Oh! my confession will be a long one, but the time is not yet ripe."
"The virtue of confession lies all in repentance, in sorrow for having sinned; and the greatest of all sins, I have just told you is scandalous living."
"Oh! but all the world lives so. There is not one of us but affords matter for evil tongues. ”

“ At this end of the telephone whisper your confession, and before it has well passed your lips there comes back the voice sweet as that of angels, 'The Lord hath forgiven thy sin.' One word, one motion of a heart aware of, and hating, and desiring to escape from, its evil, brings with a rush the whole fulness of fatherly and forgiving love into any heart. And that one confession may be the turning-point of a man's life, and may obliterate all the sinful past, and may bring him into loving, reconciled, harmonious relations with the Almighty Judge. ”

“ Do you not see that all these are deceitful artifices of the devil to bring you to hell? No; the confessor will not rebuke you, but he will give an advice suited to your state. A confessor cannot experience greater consolation than in absolving a penitent who confesses his sins with true sorrow and with sincerity. If a queen were mortally wounded by a slave, and you were in possession of a remedy by which she could be cured, how great would be your joy in saving her life! Such is the joy which a confessor feels in absolving a soul in the state of sin. ”

“ I am beginning to hope that my surmises are correct, but I know it is hardly fair to force a confession from you that I shrink from making myself. It may be true that 'open confession is good for the soul,' but I find it is particularly mortifying to the body. ”

“ Her mind was one luxurious confusion, through which travelled a ghostly little sprite, who kept tumbling her thoughts about, sneering, smirking, whispering—"You dare not go to confession—dare not go to confession. You will never be the same again—never feel the same again—never think the same again; your dreams are done! You can only love. And what will this love do for you? What do you expect to happen—you dare not go to confession!" ”

“ You seek sympathy, and all you get is the most evanescent sense of relief--if you get that much. For a confession, whatever it may be, stirs the secret depths of the hearer's character. Often depths that he himself is but dimly aware of. ”

“ Go thou and lie at God's footstool and convey thy sins before him, for it is he that confesseth and forsaketh all still find merry and where there is this true and hearty confession there must needs be a godly sorrow for sin. ”

“ Cry and sigh are the original forms of all lyricism, and just as they are a sweet compulsion to expel an inner overflow by utterance, so confession is only deliverance from an inner pressure, from guilt and penitence, from mighty forces, accordingly, which the confessor wishes to transmit to others. ”

“ Although the life or salvation of a man, or the ruin of the state, should depend upon it, what is discovered in confession cannot be revealed. The secret of the seal—confession—is more binding than the obligation of an oath. ”

“ It is so that, owing to a most marvellous protection of God, some privileged souls do escape, here and there, the fatal destruction which overtakes so many others in the confessional.
The confessional is just as the spider's web. How many too unsuspecting flies find death when seeking rest on the beautiful framework of their deceitful enemy! ”

“ And because, among other confessors, thou hast highly exalted holy N., to be both an example and patron to many, we beseech thee to accept the aid of his prayers in our behalf, that we may perfectly confess with thy confessors the Catholic Faith, not only with our heart and mouth, but also in our life and works; and in knowing and doing the Lord’s will, may shine like burning lights in thy house on every side, and ever glorify thy name: who livest and reignest, world without end. ”

“ The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. ”

“ Why does not innocence,—native, conscious innocence,—if, in reality, there is such a thing,—teach woman to flee from those incarnate demons, Romish confessors? Why will they entrust themselves, alone and unprotected by father or mother, brother or honorable lover, with these scheming, artful seducers? Why will mothers, married women, go to confession to these men, or why will husbands be such inconceivable dupes as to permit it? Have husbands any idea of the questions which a confessor puts to their wives? They have not even the remotest. ”

“ But this is just the way the spiritual physician, with whom the devil enslaves and corrupts women, acts. When the fair, honest, and timid spiritual patient has come to her confessor, to show him the little sore she has on the small finger of her soul, the confessor is bound in conscience to suspect that she has other sores,—secret, shameful sores! ”

“ Let confidence begin early, move the lips first lisping for utterance, and continue in maturity, when the world’s folly that sometimes names itself experience shall try to teach disguise as prudence, and artifice as wisdom. Whatever we may think of the confessor, as an official person, confession is founded in the nature of things, and God bids us confess our faults one to another. Who ought to be confidential, if not those whose experience and destiny so unite their lives? I cannot even glance at the chief forms of this confidential relation. ”

“ That it was a great pity for a man to be obliged to tell another, meaning the Confessor, everything he did, and that it would be better to speak into a hole and stop it up, for ‘what good did confession do?’ That he went to confession but once a year, signifying that but for constraint he would not go at all. ”

“ That confession springs from the root of the heart. Sometimes thou hearest a man confessing, and knowest not whether he believes. But thou oughtest not to call him one confessing, if thou shouldest judge him to be one not believing. ”

“ Too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the heart, the moral nature, was the beginning and the end; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion. ”

“ In the event that you have sinned grievously, resolve to go to confession at the first opportunity. Meditate for a few moments on eternity, death, judgment, heaven, and hell, mindful of the admonition of the Holy Spirit: "In all thy works, O man, remember thy last end and thou wilt never sin." ”

“ Miss —— remains so long in the confessional-box! they receive the holy communion so frequently; they both speak so eloquently and so often of the admirable piety, modesty, holiness, patience, charity, of their incomparable spiritual Father!
Every one congratulates them on their new and exemplary life; and they accept the compliment with the utmost humility, attributing their rapid progress in Christian virtues to the holiness of their confessor. He is such a spiritual man! ”

“ The confessor, full of joy, answered, "Oh, dear Lady, wherein can thy servant please thee?" She replied, "The queen of this kingdom will confess herself to you; but there is one sin she has committed, which shame and horror will not permit her to disclose. On the morrow she will come to you; tell her from me, that her alms and her prayers have been accepted in the sight of my Son; I command her, therefore, to confess that crime which she secretly committed in her chamber—for, alas! she slew her daughter. I have entreated for her, and her sin is forgiven, if she will confess it. ”