Without Guile | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 21, 1883

Without Guile.

The Episcopal "Book of Common Prayer," in the forms for family devotion, attaches to the Prayer of Confession of Sin the direction, "Here let him who reads make a pause, that every one may secretly confess the sins and failings of that day." Whether this direction is generally complied with we do not know; whether the opportunity, if offered, is availed of by those who are being led in prayer, we suspect is very doubtful. But the direction is suggestive. It indicates that the framers of the "Book of Common Prayer" recognized the fact that confession to be of any value must be specific. Public confession cannot well be phrased other than in general terms; but private confession should be of special faults. There are, indeed, times when the soul is bowed down by a sense of guiltiness, and can find no other language in which to express its sense of sin and shame than "God be merciful to me a sinner." But these are exceptional experiences; and, in general, that is the truest confession which is the most definite. If a child should come to his father at night with the kind of confession which the father rattled off so glibly in the prayer-meeting, "Father, I have done the things which I ought not to have done, and I have left undone those things which I ought to have done, and I am a miserable offender. Good night!" the father would call for specifications. "Hold on, my boy," he would say, "what are the things which you ought to have done that you have left undone; and what are the things that you have done which you ought not to have done?" What men call confession is often only profession; it is only a public exhibition of the virtue of humility and contrition. If David's implication is true, and the Lord imputeth not iniquity only to the man in whose confession there is no guile, a great deal of confession receives no absolution. A general confession of total depravity costs nothing; it is only an item in the general inventory of orthodox experiences. To say, even to the Lord, and in closet prayer, "I was snap pish this morning at breakfast, I was unjust to my boy, I was cross to my servant, I lied by my silence in order to get advantage in that bargain, I coveted my neighbor's horse when he drove by me while I walked, I have been cross, false, mean, selfish," that requires real contrition; that is real confession. And one such confession as that at night would have some efficacy to prevent snappishness at breakfast, and lying in the store tomorrow morning.

Being specific in confession would go far to prevent lying confessions. Some one has said the tallest lying is done on the knees. Men imagine that if they put their prayers in Bible phraseology they are sound. Bible phraseology is admirable to express a Bible experience, but to use the words without the experience is the most impious form of lying. A good deacon, after a successful day of business and a good supper, with a heart full of self-satisfaction, whom all the world has treated well and who, on the whole, has treated all the world well, will answer the parson's call to prayer with the woeful declaration, "All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in us, but we are full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores." Does he believe it? Not a bit of it. Let his pastor say to him, in the way of private rebuke, "All your righteousnesses are as filthy rags," and either the deacon or the parson would have to leave the parish. There is no more confession in a self-satisfied, well-fed, prosperous, rubicund deacon's repeating of phrases from the first chapter of Isaiah, or the fifty-first psalm, than there is piety in a well-trained parrot's repeating phrases from the Lord's Prayer. There is considerable complaint of long prayers at the prayer-meetings. The remedy is a very simple one. If the people that pray will confess no sins and acknowledge no gratitude which they do not really feel in their inmost hearts, the prayers will be shortened amazingly; they will be more than make up in quality what they lose in quantity.

-Christian Union.