Note 341 — Chapter XXIII

To these free views, most Protestant writers, following the authority of Fox and Knight, have added that Colet was opposed to the practice of Auricular Confession. This charge is, however, distinctly disproved in his life. Not only did he bear witness to the comfort and help he himself found in the practice, but in his “Institution of a Christian Man,” written for the use of his school, he expressly enjoins the frequent use of confession. ‘Use oft tymes confessyon,’ is one of his “Precepts of Lyvynge,” besides other directions for the reception of the Sacraments of Penance and Houslynge, in sickness, and the hour of death. Colet’s strictures, however free, were in fact never directed against the doctrines of the Church, but only against popular practices of devotion. The idea of his having set himself against the use of one of the sacraments, so very welcome to those who would fain claim him as a precursor of the Reformation, has arisen from a gross misconstruction put upon a passage in one of the Epistles of Erasmus. That writer, speaking of his deceased friend, says, among other things, “Ut confessionem secretam vehementer probabat, negans se ulla ex re capere tantundem consolationis ac boni spiritus; ita anxiam ac subinde repetitam vehementer damnabat” (Eras. Jod. Jon. Ep. 577). Knight, in his Life of Colet (p. 68), paraphrases this sentence in the following extraordinary manner: “Though he approved of private confession, receiving himself a great deal of comfort and inward satisfaction from the use of it, yet he could not but condemn the popular custom of the frequent repetitions of what they called auricular confession.” The uninitiated Protestant reader is here given to understand that private confession was something quite distinct from what they called auricular confession, and that whilst Colet approved of the one, he vehemently condemned the other. The plain fact, of course, being that he approved, practised, and enjoined the right and proper use of the Sacrament of Penance, but condemned the indiscreet use which may be made of it by scrupulous and weak-headed penitents. And it is probable that most directors would be of the same opinion.