Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/593

 1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 685 It is perhaps not easy for the modern reader to take the penitential system seriously. He knows, or thinks he knows, its abuses : the com- pounding by money payments (a Teutonic corruption of which less trace will be discovered than may be imagined), the casuistry that descends to the expedients so diligently raked together in Zola's Rome ; and he finds difficulty in adjusting his conceptions to judge a practice that prevailed for more than 1,000 years. Yet it did prevail ; and it was ac- cepted by people who were in no way terrorized by priestcraft. Before A. D. 150 we find in The Shepherd of Hermas a rigorist view of ' sin unto death': ' it is impossible to renew again unto repentance ' those who have been guilty of grievous sin, and in particular of the three capital sins, apostasy, unchastity, and murder. It will be remembered that the Latin Church, with a part of the Eastern Church, read Acts xv. 20 and 29 in the form ' abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from fornication and from blood ', and interpreted this threefold law, not as a ceremonial food-law, but as referring to the second, seventh, and sixth commandments forbidding idolatry, fornication, and murder. The Church dare not pronounce ' loosed upon earth ' sins which it has no authority to say will be ' loosed in heaven ' ; yet in recognition of human weakness in face of persecution, one repentance (and one only) may be accorded in a long course of contri- tion, steadfast perseverance, acceptance of penance, and ultimate restora- tion, in accordance with the apostolic ' delivering unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh that the spirit may be saved '. The subjoined references show that this conception had considerable support in the New Testament, and the historian will not be surprised at its appearance in the early days of Christianity. An infant community, secular or religious, is bound to demand strictness of discipline. It has as yet no other title-deeds than the character of its adherents, and therefore it cannot afford a scandal. A single unworthy member will cast discredit upon the movement which a hundred exemplary lives cannot outweigh ; at all costs the Church must be ' pure ', and those who have disgraced it will not be readmitted to fellowship until the approach of death. And this demand for rigorism comes from the community, long before an official hierarchy has arisen : Hermas is a typical layman of middle age, as artless as Pepys in his confession of his delinquencies ; and, since his book had for two centuries as good a claim to canonicity as some of the lesser epistles or the Apocalypse, his teaching must have been approved far beyond Italy. And ' the fierce TertuUian ' reserves his bitterest gibes for clerical laxity in the person of a bishop of Rome, * this Pontifex Maximus, I presume ', who admits repentant adulterers to penance on this side of the grave. For of course excommunication did not mean that the sinner was excluded from the Divine mercy, but that the Church had no authority to remit the capital sins ; Savonarola's retort ' From the Church llilitant, aye : but from the Church Triumphant you cannot cut me off ' was magnificent, but a commonplace. When, however, the first flush of enthusiasm has passed, the strict standard cannot be maintained. Early in the third century the adulterer is admitted to penance, though in the face of protest ; and a generation later the Decian persecution necessitates similar treatment of the lapsed,