after baptism. The theory on which it rests was prepared by the fathers (Tertullian and Cyprian), completed by the schoolmen, and sanctioned by the Roman church. It is supposed that baptism secures perfect remission of past sins, but not of subsequent sins, and frees from eternal damnation, but not from temporal punishment, which culminates in death or in purgatory. Penance is described as a "laborious kind of baptism," and is declared by the Council of Trent to be necessary to salvation for those who have fallen after baptism, as baptism is necessary for those who have not yet been regenerated.1

The sacrament of penance and priestly absolution includes three elements: contrition of the heart, confession by the mouth, satisfaction by good works. On these conditions the priest grants absolution, not simply by a declaratory but by a judicial act. The good works required are especially fasting and almsgiving. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Tours, Compostella, and other sacred places were likewise favorite satisfactions. Peter Damiani recommended voluntary self-flagellation as a means to propitiate God. These pious exercises covered in the popular mind the whole idea of penance. Piety was measured by the quantity of good works rather than by quality of character.

Another medieval institution must here be mentioned which is closely connected with penance. The church in the West,

1 Conc. Trid. Sess. XIV. cap. 2 (Schaff's Creeds I. 143). The Council went so far in Canon VI. (II. 165) as to anathematize any one 'who denies that sacramental confession was instituted or is necessary to salvation, of divine right; or who says that the manner of confessing secretly to a priest alone, which the church has ever observed from the beginning (?), and doth observe, is alien from the institution and command of Christ, and is a human invention."

2 Contritio cordis, confessio oris, satisfactio operis. See Conc. Trid. Sess. XIV. cap. 3–6 (Creeds, II. 143–153). The usual Roman Catholic definition of this sacrament is: "Sacramentum pœnitentiæ est sacramentum a Christo institutum, quo homini contrito, confesso et satisfacturo (satisfacere volenti) per juridicam sacerdotis absolutionem peccata post baptismum commissa remittuntur." Oswald, Die dogmat. Lehre von den heil. Sacramenten der katholischen Kirche, II. 17 (3rd ed. Münster 1870).

in her zeal to prevent violence and bloodshed, rightly favored the custom of the barbarians to substitute pecuniary compensation for punishment of an offence, but wrongly applied this custom to the sphere of religion. Thus money might be substituted for fasting and other satisfactions, and was clothed with an atoning efficacy. This custom seems to have proceeded from the church of England, and soon spread over the continent.' It degenerated into a regular traffic, and became a rich source for the increase of ecclesiastical and monastic property.

Here is the origin of the indulgences so called, that is the remission of venial sins by the payment of money and on condition of contrition and prayer. The practice was justified by the scholastic theory that the works of supererogation of the saints constitute a treasury of extra-merit and extra-reward which is under the control of the pope. Hence indulgence assumed the special meaning of papal dispensation or remission of sin from the treasury of the overflowing merits of saints, and this power was extended even to the benefit of the dead in purgatory.

Indulgences may be granted by bishops and archbishops in their dioceses, and by the pope to all Catholics. The former dealt with it in retail, the latter in wholesale. The first in

1 Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury is the reputed author of this commutation of penance for a money-payment. See his Penitential I. 3 and 4, and the seventh penitential canon ascribed to him, in Haddan and Stubbs III. 179, 180, 211. "Si quis" says Theodore, "pro ultione propinqui hominem occiderit, peniteat sicut homicida, VII. vel X. annos. Si tamen reddere vult propinquis pecuniam æstimationis, levior erit penitentia, id est, dimidio spatii." The Synod of Clovesho (probably Abingdon), held under his successor, Cuthbert, for the reformation of abuses, in September 747, decreed in the 26th canon that alms were no longer to be given for diminishing or commuting the fastings and other works of satisfaction. See Haddan and Stubbs, III. 371 sq.

2 This theory was fully developed by Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen (see Gieseler II. 521 sq.), and sanctioned by the Council of Trent in the 25th Session, held Dec. 4, 1563 (Creeds II. 205 sq.), although the Council forbids "all evil gains" and other abuses which have caused "the honorable name of indulgences to be blasphemed by heretics." The popes still exercise from time to time the right of granting plenary indulgences, though with greater caution than their medieval predecessors.

stances of papal indulgence occur in the ninth century under Paschalis I. and John VIII. who granted it to those who had fallen in war for the defence of the church. Gregory VI. in 1046 promised it to all who sent contributions for the repair of the churches in Rome. Urban II., at the council of Clermont (1095), offered to the crusaders "by the authority of the princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul," plenary indulgence as a reward for a journey to the Holy Land. The same offer was repeated in every crusade against the Mohammedans and heretics. The popes found it a convenient means for promoting their power and filling their treasury. Thus the granting of indulgences became a periodical institution. Its abuses culminated in the profane and shameful traffic of Tetzel under Leo X. for the benefit of St. Peter's church, but were overruled in the Providence of God for the Reformation and a return to the biblical idea of repentance.

NOTE.

The charge is frequently made against the papal court in the middle ages that it had a regulated scale of prices for indulgences, and this is based on the Tax Tables of the Roman Chancery published from time to time. Roman Catholic writers (as Lingard, Wiseman) say that the taxes are merely fees for the expedition of business and the payment of officials, but cannot deny the shameful avarice of some popes. The subject is fully discussed by Dr. T. L. Green (R. C.), Indulgences, Sacramental Absolutions, and the Tax-Tables of the Roman Chancery and Penitentiary, considered, in reply to the Charge of Venality, London (Longmans) 1872, and, on the Protestant side, by Dr. Richard Gibbings (Prof. of Ch. Hist. in the University of Dublin), The Taxes of the Apos tolic Penitentiary; or, the Prices of Sins in the Church of Rome, Dublin 1872. Gibbings reprints the Taxæ Sacræ Pœnitentiariæ Romanæ from the Roman ed. of 1510 and the Parisian ed. of 1520, which cover 21 pages in Latin, but the greater part of the book (164 pages) is an historical introduction and polemical discussion.

25

CHAPTER IX.

CHURCH AND STATE.

Comp. vol. III. ch. III., p. 90 sqq., and the Lit. there quoted.

§ 88. Legislation.

MEDIEVAL Christianity is not a direct continuation of the ante-Nicene Christianity in hostile conflict with the heathen state, but of the post-Nicene Christianity in friendly union with a nominally Christian state. The missionaries aimed first at the conversion of the rulers of the barbarian races of Western and Northern Europe. Augustin, with his thirty monks, was provided by Pope Gregory with letters to princes, and approached first King Ethelbert and Queen Bertha in Kent. Boniface leaned on the pope and Charles Martel. The conversion of Clovis decided the religion of the Franks. The Christian rulers became at once the patrons of the church planted among their subjects, and took Constantine and Theodosius for their models. They submitted to the spiritual authority of the Catholic church, but aspired to its temporal government by the appointment of bishops, abbots, and the control over church-property. Hence the frequent collisions of the two powers, which culminated in the long conflict between the pope and the emperor.

The civil and ecclesiastical relations of the middle ages are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to study or understand the one without the other. In Spain, for instance, the synods of Toledo were both ecclesiastical councils and royal parliaments; after the affairs of the church were disposed of, the bishops and nobles met together for the enactment of civil 386

laws, which were sanctioned by the king. The synods and diets held under Charlemagne had likewise a double character. In England the bishops were, and are still, members of the House of Lords, and often occupied seats in the cabinet down to the time of Cardinal Wolsey, who was Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England. The religious persecutions of the middle ages were the joint work of church and state.

This union has a bright and a dark side. It was a wholesome training-school for barbarous races, it humanized and ennobled the state; but it secularized the church and the clergy, and hindered the development of freedom by repressing all efforts to emancipate the mind from the yoke of despotic power. The church gained a victory over the world, but the world gained also a victory over the church. St. Jerome, who witnessed the first effects of the marriage of the church with the Roman empire, anticipated the experience of later ages, when he said: "The church by its connection with Christian princes gained in power and riches, but lost in virtues."1 Dante, who lived in the golden age of the medieval hierarchy, and believed the fable of the donation of Constantine to Sylvester, traced the ills of the church to ."that marriage-dower" which the first wealthy pope received from the first Christian emperor.

The connection of the ecclesiastical and civil powers is embodied in the legislation which regulates the conduct of man in his relations to his fellow-men, and secures social order and national welfare. It is an index of public morals as far as it presupposes and fixes existing customs; and where it is in advance of popular sentiment, it expresses a moral ideal in the mind of the lawgivers to be realized by the educational power of legal enactments.

During the middle ages there were three systems of jurisprudence: the ROMAN law, the BARBARIC law, and the CANON

1 “Ecclesia postquam ad Christianos principes venit, potentia quidem et divitiis, major, sed virtutibus minor facta."