"Ah!" breathed Copas.
"And the desire to offer to others what has been a great blessing to myself, has at times been very strong. But I recognised that the general English mind—yes, I'll grant you, the general healthy English mind—had its prejudice too; a prejudice so sturdy against Confession, that it seemed to me I should alienate more souls than I attracted and breed more ill-temper than charity to cover it. So—weakly perhaps—I never spoke of it in sermons, and by consequence no Brother of St. Hospital has ever sought from me that comfort which my conscience all the while would have approved of giving."
Brother Copas bowed his head for sign that he understood.
"But—excuse me, Master—you say that you found profit in Confession at Cuddesdon; that is, when I dare say your manhood was young and in ferment. Be it granted that just at such a crisis, Confession may be salutary. Have you found it profitable in later life?"
"I cannot," the Master answered, "honestly say more than that no doubt of it has ever occurred to me, and for the simple reason that I have not tried. But I see at what you are driving—that we of St. Hospital are too old to taste its benefit?… Yet I should have thought that even in age it might bring comfort to some; and, if so, why should the others complain?"
"For the offence it carries as an infraction of the reformed doctrine under which they supposed themselves to order their lives and worship. They contend, Master, that they are all members of one Society; and if the doctrine of that Society be infringed to comfort A or B, it is to that extent weakened injuriously for C and D, who have been building their everlasting and only hope on it, and have grown too old to change."
"But," answered Master Blanchminster, pinning his finger on the paragraph, "you admit here that even the reformed Church, in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, enjoins Confession and prescribes a form of Absolution. Now if a man be not too old for it when he is dying, a fortiori he cannot be too old for it at any previous time."
Brother Copas rubbed his hands together softly, gleefully. He adored dialectic.
"With your leave, Master," he replied, "dying is a mighty singular business. The difference between it and growing old cannot be treated as a mere matter of degree. Now one of the points I make is that the Church, by expressly allowing Confession on this singular occasion, while saying nothing about it on any other, thereby inferentially excludes it on all others—or discountenances it, to say the least."
"There I join issue with you, maintaining that all such occasions are covered by the general authority bestowed at Ordination with the laying-on of hands—'Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven,' etc. To construe an open exhortation in one of her offices as a silent denunciation in all the rest seems to me—"