“The Roman Catholic Church has historically taught that, as an element of penance and evidence of true repentance, the Christian must confess all his sins without reserve, in all their details and qualifying circumstances, to a priest having jurisdiction; and that if any mortal sin is unconfessed it is not forgiven; and if the omission is willful, it is sacrilege, and greater guilt is incurred. (Cat. Rom., part 2., ch. 5., qs. 33, 34, 42.) And they maintain that the priest absolves judicially, not merely declaratively, from all the penal consequences of the sins confessed, by the authority of Jesus Christ. This is an obvious perversion of the Scriptural command to confess. They bid us simply to confess our faults one to another. There is not a word said about confession to a priest in the Bible. The believer, on the contrary, has immediate access to Christ, and to God through Christ (1 Tim. 2:5; John 14:6; 5:40; Matt. 11:28), and is commanded to confess his sins immediately to God. (1 John 1:9.) No priestly function is ever ascribed to the Christian ministry in the New Testament. The power of absolute forgiveness of sin belongs to God alone (Matt. 9:26), is incommunicable in its very nature, and has never been granted to any class of men as a matter of fact. The authority to bind or loose which Christ committed to his Church was understood by the apostles, as is evident from their practice, as simply conveying the power of declaring the conditions on which God pardons sin;”
Charles Hodge was the principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. He is considered to be one of the greatest exponents and defenders of historical Calvinism in America during the 19th century.
All of the books that he authored have remained in print over a century after his death.