to bear down the encroaching advances of what they called heresy, by the outward force of fire and sword, of imprisonment, or banishment and confiscation. An immense assemblage of bishops, abbots, and titled laymen, the representatives of royalty, was brought together at the papal Church in Rome, and the decrees passed came forth before the world with all the influence of a supposed infallible authority.

It is beside my present object to enlarge on the oppressive, inquisitorial, and cruel spirit which breathes in the enactments of this celebrated Council. But the canons which bear upon our subject of the Confessional are as follows, viz.:

CANON XXI.

"Of Confession to be made, and not to be revealed by the Priest; and the Communion to be received at least at Easter.

"Every believer of either sex, after coming to years of discretion, shall faithfully confess all his sins alone, at least once a year, to his own priest, and shall endeavor, to the utmost of his power, to fulfill the penance enjoined; receiving reverently, at least at Easter, the Sacrament of the Eucharist, unless, perhaps, through the counsel of his own priest, for some reasonable cause, he should conclude to abstain at that time from its reception otherwise, let him be prohibited from entering the Church while living, and, dying, be deprived of Christian burial. Wherefore, let this salutary law be frequently published in the churches, lest any one may assume the vail of excuse from the blindness of ignorance. If any one, however, should desire for a just cause to confess his sins to another priest, let him first ask and obtain a license from his own priest, since otherwise the other can not loose or bind."-(App., Note 157.)

"But let the priest be discreet and cautious, that, in the manner of a skillful physician, he may pour the oil and the wine into the wounds of the sick, diligently inquiring into the circumstances both of the sinner and the sin, by which he may wisely understand what counsel he ought to give him, and what kind of remedy he should apply, using divers expedients to heal the patient. And let him by all means take heed that he betray not the sinner in any degree, either by word or by sign, or in.

any other manner whatever; but if he should need more prudent counsel, let him ask for it cautiously, without any indication of the person; for we hereby decree that whoever shall presume to reveal a sin made known to him in the tribunal of penitence shall not only be deposed from the sacerdotal office, but shall also be thrust into a close monastery, to perform perpetual penance."-(App., Note 158.)

These stringent rules did not concern the priesthood alone, for even the members of the medical profession were forced to become parties to the new discipline by the same despotic authority. This provision of the Council is in the following words, viz.:

....

CANON XXII.

"That the Sick should provide for the Soul before the Body. "Inasmuch as corporal infirmity sometimes proceeds from sin, . . . . we ordain by this present decree, and strictly command the physicians of bodies, that whenever they shall happen to be called to the sick, they must, before all things, admonish and induce them to send for the physicians of souls, in order that, after provision shall have been made for the spiritual health of the sick, they may proceed to the remedy of bodily medicine more beneficially, since the cause ceasing, the effect also ceases."

"And if any of the physicians shall be found to have transgressed this our Constitution after it shall have been published by the prelates of the dioceses, let him be prohibited from entering the Church until he has given complete satisfaction for his offense."-(App., Note 159.)

Here, then, the keystone appears to have been set in the arch of sacerdotal despotism. For the first time in the history of the Church, private auricular confession to the priest of the parish was rendered obligatory on every person without exception, at least once a year. And the neglect of it was punished, if not by formal, yet by virtual excommunication; since the transgressor was prohibited from entering the doors of the Church while living, and when dead he was deprived of Christian burial! The very terms of the decree show that this obligation was a novelty, be

cause the sentence was not to be executed until it had first been publicly proclaimed. And even the physicians are obliged to become the agents of the priest in compelling the laity to submit to this act of usurpation, notwithstanding the danger which the patient might incur by thus forcing him to go through the process of the confessional, before he was allowed to attend to their prescriptions.

In close connection with this novel assumption of sacerdotal authority, a serious change took place in the form of absolution, which, up to this time, had been simply a prayer that God would remit the sins of the penitent, accompanied by the laying on of hands. But now the priests advanced another step; not, as formerly, content with beseeching the Lord to absolve, but saying, "I absolve thee," thus claiming a full and positive power to forgive the sins of the penitent, and taking upon them a far higher expression of prerogative than the Church had known since the apostolic day. For the evidence of this, I recur to the testimony of the learned Benedictine, Hugo Menard, in his Annotations on the Sacramentary of Gregory the Great. The passage is as follows, viz.:

"There was formerly," saith this author, "a controversy between St. Thomas and a certain doctor concerning the form of absolution; the doctor asserting that it was precatory, and that scarcely thirty years had elapsed since all used this form only: May the omnipotent God grant to thee absolution and remission. While the other contended that the form of absolution was enunciatory or indicative, in these words: I absolve thee, &c., which indicate the judicial power of the priest."(App., Note 160.)

Now it is highly improbable that the "certain doctor" who entered into controversy with the redoubtable Thomas Aquinas would have been so weak or rash as to assert a fact, in which, if he were in error, it

must have been in the power of every priest in Christendom to have exposed him. His positive assertion, therefore, that thirty years had hardly elapsed since the form of absolution had been precatory in all the Churches, was doubtless the truth; and he was right in opposing the introduction of the indicative form as an unwarrantable innovation. But the change was favorable to the papal doctrine of priestly power, of which Thomas was a shrewd and unflinching champion; and it is easy to imagine on which side of such an argument victory and applause would attend in the thirteenth century.

A still more positive proof, however, of the time when this change was introduced, may be derived from the form in which Thomas Aquinas has arranged the argument in his famous Summa; for he was born in A.D. 1224, nine years after the fourth Council of Lateran, and died in 1274, leaving his great work unfinished. And the following extracts will show how perfectly destitute his doctrine was of any authority from antiquity, and how victoriously, by his own tacit admission, that authority was arrayed on the other side. It must be granted, indeed, in palliation of his sophistry, that he thought himself bound to sustain the Council by the best reasoning in his power. That Council was called a General Council; it claimed infallibility; and it had outraged the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church, by compelling all, without exception, of either sex, to place themselves from the age of discretion in the position of penitents, and by debarring them of the sacrament, and even depriving them of access to the Church while living, and of Christian burial when dead, if they refused to submit to a private priestly inquisition at least once in every year. As a faithful soldier of the Church,

Thomas set his ingenuity to work for the purpose of justifying this novel assumption, and saw no other plan so likely to succeed as the making penitence a sacrament, and thus taking the highest ground for its universal necessity. His language is the following, viz.:

"Whether Penitence is a Sacrament.

"It seems that penitence is not a sacrament. For Gregory saith, and it is in the Decretals, that The Sacraments are Baptism, Chrism, the Body and Blood of Christ: which are called Sacraments for this reason, because, under the veil of material things, the divine virtue secretly works salvation in them. But this does not take place in penitence; because in it no material things are employed, under which the divine power works salvation. Therefore penitence is not a sacrament.”

To this argument, which Thomas places in the mouth of his supposed antagonist, he answers as follows:

"But the contrary is the truth, that as baptism is employed for the purifying from sin, so also is penitence. And hence Peter said to Simon, Acts, viii., Exercise penitence for this thy wickedness. But baptism is a sacrament, as has been shown. Therefore, by equal reason, penitence is so likewise.”—(App., Note 161.)

Then follows a sophistical chain of argument to prove this new theological proposition, in which, however, he pretends to no authority from fathers or councils, striving only to make good his position by an ingenious, but utterly forced and unreasonable analogy, derived from baptism. Now Thomas was a man of profound learning, and never failed, when it was in his power, to exhibit for his conclusions both scriptural and patristic authority. And therefore, when we see him obliged to confess that the Church of former ages is against him, as he here does by putting Gregory and the Decretals in the mouth of his adversary, and arguing the question as if now, in the thirteenth cen