This same Father says:  “Let a man judge himself of his own will, whilst he has it in his power, and reform his manners, lest, when he shall have it no longer in his power, he be judged by the Lord against his will; and when he shall have passed upon himself the sentence of a most severe remedy, but still a remedy, let him come to the prelates by whom the keys are ministered to him in the Church, and as one now beginning to be a good son, let him receive the manner (or amount) of his satisfaction from those who are set over the sacraments."[52]

Writer after writer continues in the same strain, in this and the following century.  The passages cited clearly indicate that confession and absolution are assumed to be the ordinary channel whereby sin is pardoned.  Throughout they, as the Fathers of the preceding centuries, make the true dispenser of forgiveness, God in general, or, at other times, Jesus Christ, or again, the Holy Spirit; but they are equally explicit in declaring the earthly visible organ whereby the pardon is exercised to be, the Bishop, the Priest, the Ministers of the Church.  These Christian writers constantly prove the Ministry of Reconciliation by reference to the passages concerning loosing and binding, in the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew, and forgiving and retaining sin, in the twentieth chapter of St. John.

The authors we have cited, and in whose writings many other passages are to be found, are representatives during the first five centuries of the Church in North Africa, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Palestine, in Greece, in Italy, in Gaul, and in Spain.  They are unanimous in upholding the power of absolution and the necessity of confession.

6.  But a most unexpected witness is to be found in one of the great Protestant Communions.  The English Government, under the Tudor dynasty, threw off its allegiance in things ecclesiastical to the Holy See.  The sovereigns of England then claimed that spiritual authority heretofore exercised by the Pope.  Henceforth, the Church was not in, but of England.  It became a State Department, the archbishops and bishops receiving their appointment, care of souls, and jurisdiction, from the king, just as the judges, the officers of the army and navy, are commissioned to their circuits, their regiments, and their ships.  The Crown is not only the fountain-head of all spiritual governing-power, but the Crown, aided later by its Council, became the final Court of Appeal in all disputes about doctrine.

The Established Communion, in its doctrinal code, the Thirty-nine Articles, which each clergyman declares he accepts ex animo, asserts that “Penance is not a sacrament of the Gospel.”  And in the Book of Homilies, which the said Articles commend as containing “good and wholesome doctrine,” do we read:  “We ought to acknowledge none other priest for deliverance from our sins but Jesus Christ. * * * It is most evident and plain that this