Exeter Hall was alive with all its old fury of
bad 'rhetoric on Monday, Lord Shaftesbury leading the way in a speech of violent and rather feeble passion against the 483 clergy who had asked for an Order of Anglican Confessors,—whom Lord Shaftes- bury likened to the priests of Baal who sat at Jezeb. . table, and of whom he would evidently have liked to dispose much as Elijah disposed of the priests of Baal. We have no kind of doubt that the practice of the Confessional has often been made the means of very great demoralisation, nor that in certain lines of moral disease its tendency is very mischievous. But it is silly and weak to talk of everybody as " unholy " who recommends it, and quite false to deny that in relation to other than sexual sins it has sometimes done good service. The Irish are by general consent the purest of modern populations, and yet the Confes- sional is in full force amongst them. The Anglicans who are trying to restore the "sacrament," as they call it, are men perhare of the weakest, but generally of the best, of their order. A COX which .:can only be served by language so unscrupulous and ahusiVie as Lord Shaftesbury's will not generally be deemed a good cause. There is no danger of the restoration of the Confessional- in the English Church. But if there were any of so great a calamity, Lord Shaftesbury's Billingsgate would increase rather than diminish it. Lord Shaftesbury tried, perhaps, to act on the maxim, "Tell the whole truth and shame the devil." He probably succeeded in the latter effort, while failing conspicuously in the first.
