Others have dealt with the original reconciliation of sinners and their incorporation into the Body of Christ. My subject follows upon this; I am concerned with the case of Christians who have lapsed into sin.

It is possible to detect in the apostolic writings two different strains of thought. On the one hand there is an exultation of spirit which sees the reconciled as saints, the regenerate as perfect; the culminating expression of it is in the Epistle of St. John: Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God. On the other hand there is a clear recognition of the possibility of such lapse, and definite provision for dealing with it. There may be terrible sternness, as in the case of the incestuous Corinthian: Put away the wicked man from among yourselves; but in a later epistle there is tender forgiveness and complete restoration for a penitent offender, whether the same or another is not known, and to the Galatians St. Paul writes, as of an established practice: Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye which are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of meekness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

The former of these two habits of thought may bring you to strange conclusions. Apply those words of St. John rigidly, and a Christian has no sin, there is no place for repentance in the Christian life, no need of any further absolution after baptism. But then you come face to face with facts. You see a Christian sinning grievously. Will you call it illusion? Will you invent some monstrous theory to empty his conduct of sinfulness? It is possible; it has been done. Or will you evade the difficulty by saying that his fall proves him to have been no Christian? You may then plead in support this same Epistle of St. John: They went out from us, but they were not of us: for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. You may then argue that, since there is no place for penitence in the Christian life, these lapsed Christians are incapable of restoration; and you will find something to support that conclusion in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

These inferences from his enthusiastic words St. John cuts off peremptorily with a trenchant assertion: If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us: if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Yet the habit of thought out of which the false inferences are drawn is there; and it has continued, with its effects, all through the history of Christendom. At the close of the apostolic age it seems to have been dominant. In spite of the practice of St. Paul, in spite of the plain assertion of the Johannine Epistle, there was evidently a widespread unwillingness to admit any erring Christian to penance and restoration. In the second century we find Hermas earnestly pleading for this mercy, and supporting his contention by a Vision, without which he would seem to have been doubtful of success. Later writers, upholding the practice, are still more or less on the defensive. And so far it is allowed only once. Penance is in some sort a renewal of baptism, a plank for the shipwrecked, and no more to be repeated than is baptism. Not until the fourth century was this severity relaxed. It should not be misunderstood. The possibility of salvation was not denied by anyone to those who fell into sin after baptism, or after the one penance allowed; but they were left to the uncovenanted mercy of God, and it was held that the Church had no right to use for their benefit the ministry of reconciliation. This could be done once in Baptism, a second time in Penance, but no more.

The severity of the practice had inevitable consequences. The Johannine Epistle definitely established the distinction between a sin that is unto death and a sin that is not unto death. For the lighter kind of sin, prayer is sufficient remedy: If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. Penance was the remedy for a sin which was unto death. But if a man was to be admitted to Penance only once, as a most exceptional event, the deadly sins, peccata capitalia, would inevitably be reckoned exceptional and few. In point of fact they were usually restricted to the three heads of murder, adultery, and idolatry; and adultery was usually understood in a very narrow sense. St. Basil the Great refused, on the ground of a prevailing custom of the Church, to require a husband sinning with an unmarried woman to do penance as an adulterer. Deadly sin being thus narrowly defined, all other sins were venial, peccata cotidiana, the every-day faults of Christians, which are remitted, says St. Augustine, at the daily prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses." This hard and fast distinction could not make for a high standard or morality; and in the Epistles of St. Cyprian there is abundant evidence to show that with a severe discipline for the three capital sins there went great laxity of manners in the ordinary Christian household. St. Cyprian was distressed by this, and other bishops, no doubt, were equally perturbed. What was to be the remedy?

One point must first be made clear. It has been suggested that the penitential discipline of the early Church was a matter of police, a control of public scandals, a safeguard for the character of the community. It was not so regarded. Perhaps the Cathari who denied the power of the Church to give absolution after baptism, and confined membership in the Church to those who were presumed to be free from all deadly sin, may have treated their discipline as no more than the casting out of the unfit. But the Catholic writers against them argue precisely that refusal of absolution was an injury done to souls; it was the duty of the Church, not only to condemn sinners, but also to restore them by the ministry of reconciliation. Penance was exactly analogous to Baptism; it was a ministry of grace; in a word, it was a true Sacrament. It seems strange that men who so argued should themselves have adhered to the practice of refusing a second access to Penance. Indeed that refusal could not be maintained.

It was giving way in the fourth century. The scandalous laxity of Nactarius at Constantinople was local and peculiar. He abolished in effect the whole public exercise of Penance, except in relation to the most open and notorious sins, a secret sinner being left to the control of his conscience. The historian Socrates thought this dangerous; but he was even more concerned when the successor of Nectarius, no less a person than St. John Chrysostom, flung to the winds the established discipline, and declared from the pulpit that a sinner might be admitted to Penance a thousand times. Such Penance would certainly not be public; we may infer that these two bishops, the man of the world and the most unworldly of saints, by a strange combination gave a new direction to the penitential practice of the Church. Almost contemporaneously we find in a sermon of St. Augustine mention of a private exercise of Penance, allowed to sinner whose lives might be endangered by publicity; and in the East St. Basil the Great had already made the same concession to a wife confessing adultery. It is, I think, the first definite mention of what was afterwards called auricular confession.

These modifications of the sterner discipline are not to be regarded as declension. They are the removal of intolerable restrictions which hindered the free working of divine grace in the Sacrament of Penance. Incidentally they brought in a more wholesome severity in the classification of sins. As long as the rigour of public penance continued, the three capital sins remained in a category apart, and the rest were venial. It held its ground here and there for a long time, but after the ninth century it rapidly disappeared. What remained of it became that system, rather of police than of penance, which was administered by ecclesiastical courts until modern times. Confession to a priest alone, and absolution given by him in strictest privacy, was now the only recognised ministration of sacramental Penance. Simultaneously the last vestiges of restriction to a single act of penance disappeared. A new measure of the sinfulness of sin became possible; it was no longer external circumstances that marked a sin as being deadly, but rather the evidence of conscience bearing on the elements of malice underlying it. Moral theology, and the science of Casuistry which is the application of its principles to particular cases, were still in their infancy; but the line of their future development was marked out. In the year 1215 the reform was completed by the canon Omnis utriusque sexus of the Fourth Lateran Council, which required all the faithful without exception, after reaching years of discretion, to confess all their sins and to do penance at least once a year. This was no doubt directed specially against the Cathari amongst the Albigenses, who life their predecessors of the fourth century denied both the necessity of Penance and the power of the Church to absolve; but it became a standing rule of the Christian life. Whatever may be though of the wisdom of this rule, or of the risk of a merely perfunctory penance attaching to it, one unquestionable result was a definite exclusion of the idea that membership in the Church carries with it a guarantee of sinlessness. The solemn admission of the Epistle of St. James, In many things we offend all, was recognised as normal; the warning of St. John, If we saw that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, was accepted for all Christian; all perilous exaggeration of the evangelic consciousness of liberation from sin was condemned; and with the universality of Penance, the universality also of pardon was proclaimed. There was no sin from which the ministry of reconciliation would not or could not absolve the sinner. The broad moral effect was immense. It was made plain that the Christian life is normally a life of penitence. The perversion of the evangelic doctrine of sin and forgiveness, in the direction either of antinomianism or of ruthless puritanism, might still flourish in fanatical sects, but there was no longer any loophole by which it might effect a lodgement in the Catholic Church. Those who value a sane ethical Christianity, while disparaging institutional religion, owe more than they willingly acknowledge to the autocratic Innocent III and this most institutional of Councils.

The words of the Council are Confiteatur proprio sacerdoti, et iniunctam sibi paenitentiam pro viribus studeat adimplere. The "proprius sacerdotus" is a priest who stands in a pastoral relation to the penitent; that is to say, one on whom the pastoral office has been devolved by the Bishop, who from the first was the true minister, and for some time the only ordinary minister, of reconciliation. The conditions of absolution are confession and an undertaking to do as far as possible some prescribed act of penance. Confession as such a condition is apostolic:-If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. God's forgiveness is not an act merely of mercy, as if the divine attributes were separable; it is an act of justice and fidelity. I none word, there is a covenant. There is a Sacrament of Penance. So the confession which forms part of it is an outward act. Wherever the word occurs in the writings of the New Testament, with all its various meanings, there is always this sense of openness, of publicity. It is never used of a secret disposition of the heart. So the homologesis of Christian penitence has always been open, with the spoken word, whether in full publicity before the congregation of the faithful, or more privately before an accredited minister. It is a confession to God, and to God's Church. Only when that is done can the pastoral office be exercised in the sacramental absolution of the sinner.

But the condition required is not confession alone. A bare confession might be an act of brazen effrontery. Penitence is also required. Our English word, and the Latin word from which it is derived, are in themselves inadequate to express the fulness of what is meant. They represent a word in the Greek of the New Testament which is more explicit, and this controls the sense in which they are used. The precise meaning of that word is a mental change; what we might call a change of heart. It is used in conjunction with another word which signifies turning towards an object. So you get the familiar phrase, used by St. Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, Repent and be converted. That gives us the exact sense that we need. Sin is aversion from God; repentance is conversion to God. But this is a secret of the heart; how can it be made a condition of sacramental absolution? Evidence is sought; and the humble acceptance of an imposed penance is allowed as indicating a change of heart. It must be so allowed; for, according to the teaching of the Gospel, human forgiving is an image of the divine forgiving, and the rule is, If thy brother sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven times turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.

In every penance imposed there is also an element of satisfaction. Exaggerated, perhaps, in the earlier discipline, and lending itself to abuse of indulgences, in modern practice it is reduced to a just proportion. The penitent soul desires to achieve the impossible task of paying the uttermost farthing. Something symbolic is not unmeet. But penance or satisfaction is not allowed to assume the guise of a price paid for absolution. It is a condition, but a condition regarding the recipient, and not the bestower of pardon. It is by this condition that a sinner can appropriate the free grace of forgiveness.

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