p.164
I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:—whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained.
Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian! Even to the immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this,—Whenever you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you, repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled? Did Christ say, that true repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest's verbal remission was superadded?
In fine
If it were in my power I would have this book printed in a convenient form, and distributed through every house, at least, through every village and parish throughout the kingdom. A volume of thought and of moral feelings, the offspring of thought, crowd upon me, as I review the different parts of this admirable man's life and creed. Only compare his conduct to James Wadsworth (probably some ancestral relative of my honoured friend, William Wordsworth: for the same name in Yorkshire, from whence his father came, is pronounced Wadsworth) with that of the far, far too highly rated, Bishop Hall; his letter to Hall tenderly blaming his (Hall's) bitterness to an old friend mistaken, and then his letter to that friend defending Hall! What a picture of goodness! I confess, in all Ecclesiastical History I have read of no man so spotless, though of hundreds in which the biographers have painted them as masters of perfection: but the moral tact soon feels the truth.
In one of the volumes of this work used by the Editor for ascertaining the references, the following note is written by a former owner.