are equally insufficient in morals, as they are
in law, to keep him from stumbling or from missing his road, he comes to
regard a conscience-keeper as being no less indispensable for his daily
life and conversation, than his legal agent, or his professional 'man of
business,' for the safe management of his property, and for his guidance
amongst the innumerable niceties which beset the real and inevitable
intricacies of rights and duties, as they grow out of human enactments
and a complex condition of society. Fortunately for the happiness of
human nature and its dignity, those holier rights and duties which grow
out of laws heavenly and divine, written by the finger of God upon the
heart of every rational creature, are beset by no such intricacies, and
require, therefore, no such vicarious agency for their practical
assertion. The primal duties of life, like the primal charities, are
placed high above us--legible to every eye, and shining like the stars,
with a splendour that is read in every clime, and translates itself into
every language at once. Such is the imagery of Wordsworth. But this is
otherwise estimated in the policy of papal Rome: and casuistry usurps a
place in her spiritual economy, to which our Protestant feelings demur.
So far, however, the question between us and Rome is a question of
degrees. They push casuistry into a general and unlimited application;
we, if at all, into a very narrow one. But another difference there is
between us even more important; for it regards no mere excess in the
_quantity_ of range allowed to casuistry, but in the _quality_ of its
speculations: and which it is (more than any other cause) that has
degraded the office of casuistical learning amongst us. Questions are
raised, problems are entertained, by the Romish casuistry, which too
often offend against all purity and manliness of thinking. And that
objection occurs forcibly here, which Southey (either in _The Quarterly
Review_ or in his _Life of Wesley_) has urged and expanded with regard
to the Romish and also the Methodist practice of _auricular
confession_--viz., that, as it _is_ practically managed, not leaving the
person engaged in this act to confess according to the light of his own
conscience, but at every moment interfering, on the part of the
confessor, to suggest _leading questions_ (as lawyers call them), and to
throw the light of confession upon parts of the experience which native
modesty would leave in darkn