Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/594

 686 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October who are restored to communion, after a term of exclusion, upon the inter- cession of martyrs, Cyprian's prudent government checking the tendency to undue laxity and laying the foundations of systematic discipline, yet at the cost of the first puritan schism ; for the Novatianists will for more than three centuries refuse to own as a church the catholics who recognize that in this life the tares cannot wholly be separated from the wheat and that there is pardon for penitent sinners. Meanwhile, besides the three capital sins, less serious offences (not to be confused with those later distinguished as ' venial ') are brought into the penitential system ; and, especially in the Asian provinces, the four stages of penance are elaborated and terms of years prescribed for each offence. Mr. Watkins imports confusion by talking of five grades of penitents (p. 224) : in spite of Balsamon, admission to communion is not a grade of penance. Nor is he right in translating prostrati by ' Fallers ', a term which does aot convey to an English ear the meaning of kneeling (as opposed to standing in the eucharistic praise), and does suggest an illusory connexion with ' fallen sinners '. Codification is as necessary in ecclesiastical as in civil procedure, if inequalities are to be avoided and extremes of laxity or severity restrained. Chrysostom's decision to let every man be the judge of his own fitness to approach the altar does not seem to have been successful ; the penitential system will be extended to cover all grave sins, and the requirement of at least an annual confession by the Lateran council of 1215 does but give formal authority to what must have long been a practical necessity. It is needless to enlarge upon the weaknesses attaching to this rule, which is not peculiar to the Latin Church; it may be well to consider whether the alternative course, wherein the greater part of the Anglican and Protestant churches follow Chrysostom, is not equally disastrous in substituting outward respectability for inward purity as a mark of spiritual fitness, and in allowing an unre- pentant sinner to delude himself into a false security. Mr. Watkins adheres so rigidly to his prescribed limits that we bid farewell to the Eastern Church after a. d. 450. But Greek practice cannot have been wholly without influence upon Latin developments ; Theodore of Tarsus, who marks an important stage in the publication of penitentials, must have owed something to his Eastern training. The curtailment of a certain diffuseness of comment would have left room for the addition of a brief sketch of the later Eastern development in which such points as the substitution of the monastic for the secular clergy as confessors and the custom of habitual confession (still by no means obsolete in the Oriental Churches) would have found mention. We have space only for a few notes on details. Honorius Augusto- dunensis need no longer be styled * the great unknown ' (p. 742) since the appearance of Dr. J. A. Endres's monograph.^ Mr. Watkins is offended by Basil's Can. 71, prescribing for an ' accessory after the fact ', if he has not given information, the same penance as for the offender ; he apparently takes this to refer to all sins, but more probably it refers to the two preceding canons concerning sins of clerics, which for the good of the Church ought not to be covered up. We should have liked to see a fuller investigation of
 * Hanorius Avgustodnnensis (Kempton, 1906).