Confession is an act of faith on the part of the creature. It is also an act of the most concentrated worship. It is a breaking with the world, and a turning to God. It is a triumph over millions of evil spirits of huge power and, comparatively with us men, of unbounded intellect. It is the beginning of an eternity of ineffable union with God, and confers the right of beholding the Invisible face to face. A man sees in a fellow-creature as sinful as himself, perhaps even evidently more unworthy, the form and features and real jurisdiction of the Incarnate Son of God. He kneels at his feet as if he were divine. He narrates to him the most secret shames and hidden sins of his soul. He submits to his questioning, as if he were the absolute and ultimate Judge of all the earth. He listens with meekness to his reproof, as if it were God himself who spoke. He leaves to him the fixing of his punishment. He gives him rights over the arrangement of much of his external life. He makes this narration of his sins with a profound sorrow, a sorrow which is bases on no mere human disgrace, or forfeiture of worldly honor, or ruin of temporal interests. It is not even based only on the fear of divine punishments without some admixture of divine love. He is sorry with a sorrow to which neither all the power nor all the wisdom of the world can help him, but which is itself the supernatural gift of God. His sorrow involves a detestation of his past sin, which is another gift of God. It is accompanied also with a firm determination never to offend God again, a determination which chooses between the will of God and the liberty to sin, and elects God's will, whatever cost it may be found to involve. This energetic determination it the thing which he has taken most pains about. Neither has he come to it without study, effort, and diligence. Nevertheless it is God's gift rather than his own attainment. His act thus completed, with much help and interference on the part of God, God himself begins his exclusive part. One of his creatures, a fallible as well as himself a guilty judge, pronounces some few words, and straightway, though invisibly and spiritually, there falls from the veins of Jesus a shower of the Precious Blood, shed hundreds of years ago and resumed three days after it was shed, and bedews the sinner's soul. All his guilt is dome away instantaneously. His state is completely changed. Manifold works are done in his soul, such as the reinfusion of certain supernatural habits, the revival of dead merits, and a a communication of the divine nature. His change can only be parralleled with that of a devil into an angel. All heaven is stirred at the event. It is the special subject of an angelic jubilee. No angel or saint could have done it, or even have applied it as instruments. It is the immediate action of the Creator on the soul of his creature. This is a modes description of a good confession, kept very much within bounds, and which might have been heightened by many other seemingly miraculous phenomena. In its measure and degree, withoug the reinfusion fo habits, and sundry other changes, the same supernatural apparatus attends upon the confession of venial sins. God is not less active, nor grace less mysterious in the act. Yet this is the act which we with God perform weekly, and are what we are!
Father Frederick William Faber, Spiritual Conferences, Philadelphia: Peter Reilly Co., 1960, 204.
