Editorial December 11, 1915 Issue

"In sacred confidence"

Archibald McLellan

It is well understood by most persons that there is a confidential relationship established between lawyer and client, physician and patient, clergyman and parishioner, which precludes the lawyer, physician, or clergyman from disclosing to other persons the information communicated to him in the course of this relationship. In fact the law so regards the confidential nature of such information as not only to free the person receiving it from the necessity of disclosing it, but also positively to forbid him to disclose it, even on the witness-stand. Both the reasonableness of this provision for safeguarding such confidential relations, and the necessity for its establishment and enforcement, are so apparent to thinking persons that they never question its propriety. Without such assurance it would be impossible to expect that persons in distress would be willing to talk freely to those of whom they naturally should seek advice and assistance.

In the very nature of things the relationship which is established between a Christian Science practitioner and his patients becomes of the same character and necessitates the same confidence as that which exists between the lawyer and his client, the physician and his patient, the clergyman and his parishioner, and it is because of this confidential relationship that practitioners should be especially careful in their conversation, even though the communications made to them may not be under the same protection of the law as are those made to the professional men referred to. We do, however, hear of practitioners who are careless in this regard, and it is because of this that we call attention to the by-law on this subject in the Church Manual.

We also hear of practitioners who think it necessary on taking a case for treatment to require the patient to lay bare his whole life history and confess all the sins he has ever committed, whether these sins be quite recent or far in the past; repented of and turned away from, or unrepented and continued in. Just why this is done, no one seems able to say, but that such is the practice of some practitioners appears to be quite well known. It is no wonder therefore that in the course of time those who have accumulated so much in the way of information about the personal affairs of others should find themselves unable to keep this information from bursting forth and being blown to the four winds, notwithstanding the very definite wording and unmistakable meaning of the first paragraph of Section 22 of Article VIII of the by-laws of The Mother Church. This paragraph reads as follows:—

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