On Confessing One’s Sins

There is many a point of view from which the confession of sins may be considered. That one can never be free from sin until he has first seen sin as sin and then relinquished it is a foregone conclusion. To be blind to sin is to continue to be its inevitable victim. Therefore if sin is to be overcome, it must first be recognized. Men have often felt that to acknowledge their sins to their neighbor would ease their own conscience; and as a result many an unwilling ear has seemed to find it necessary to listen to long dissertations on sinful thoughts and practices. That this is reprehensible and almost always unnecessary may be readily seen.

Now sin seems to hold tenaciously to its own supposititious entity, and therefore it all too frequently deceives mortals into believing that it is well to talk much of it. As the Christian Scientist awakens to the claims of sin, unless he is aware that it is a mistake to chatter about his shortcomings, he may be betrayed into doing this, believing that it will be a benefit to himself or others. To be sure, James has written, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” He, however, could scarcely have intended that mortals should magnify evil by talking unduly of it. Nevertheless, James must also have recognized that when one’s sin has been openly against another it can never be completely unseen without its first having been openly acknowledged. Indeed, such restitution must be one of the first steps in true repentance and reformation.

“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” The Christian Scientist understands full well that to cover sin in his own thinking and acting is to encourage a brood of evils which will inevitably multiply to his own disaster. On the other hand, to be willing to recognize whatever is unlike God in the thoughts that knock at his mental door is to be on guard against all that can work ill in his experience.

If the Scientist is thus awake to the undesirable nature of sin, even though he temporarily may seem to entertain and express that which does not originate in divine Mind, he will gladly pray with the publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” Perhaps no one to-day has risen to such complete watchfulness that he does not need frequently to confess to himself the sinfulness of his own thoughts. By turning spontaneously to the God “who forgiveth all thine iniquities,” he may, however, rise into the understanding of the unsatisfactoriness of sin which rebukes it with its own unreality.

We find good advice in Revelation, where John presents the Christ as saying, “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear.” Here we have a beautiful promise that if we understand how truly to confess our sins they will be so uncovered and rebuked by Truth and Love that no one save those directly involved need ever be aware of them; thereby we shall prove that we possess the white raiment which obliterates the sense of evil. This loving protection from all unnecessary exposure of our sins to others will awaken us to the desire to cover with the mantle of charity the faults not only of our friends but of our enemies.

Christian Scientists will therefore readily see that undue talking of either their own or others’ mistakes, faults, foibles, or sins can only tend to make evil seem more and more real. To keep sin in thought is to enlarge the belief of it and render it less easy of vanquishment. On the contrary, the right confession of sin, that confession which lessens sin’s claim to power, making it appear less real, less formidable, will always tend to that righteousness of thought and word which is quick to discern evil, but is equally quick to reject and annul it.

The Christian Scientist who is actuated by love of God and his neighbor will therefore never talk unnecessarily of sin, either in its confession or otherwise. In “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany” (p. 146) our beloved Leader, Mrs. Eddy, writes, “A Christian Scientist never mentally or audibly takes the side of sin, disease, or death;” and she adds, “He lays his whole weight of thought, tongue, and pen in the divine scale of being-for health and holiness.”