In the Service for the Visitation of the Sick, the Church of England puts into the lips of her ministers words quite unconditional: "I absolve thee from all thy sins." You know that passage is constantly objected to as Romish and superstitious. I would not give up that precious passage. I love the Church of England, because she has dared to claim her inheritance--because she has courage to assert herself as what she ought to be--God's representative on earth. She says to her minister, Stand there before a darkened spirit, on whom the shadows of death have begun to fall: in human flesh and blood representing the Invisible,--with words of human love making credible the Love Eternal. Say boldly, I am here to declare not a perhaps, _but a fact_. I forgive thee in the name of Humanity. And so far as Humanity represents Deity, that forgiveness is a type of God's. She does not put into her ministers' lips words of incantation. He cannot bless whom God has not blessed--he cannot curse whom God has not cursed. If the Son of absolution be there, his absolution will rest. If you have ever tried the slow and apparently hopeless task of ministering to a heart diseased, and binding up the wound that _will_ bleed afresh, to which no assurances can give comfort, because they are not 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?