t of sinners was publick
censure, and open penance; penalties inflicted merely by ecclesiastical
authority, at a time when the church had yet no help from the civil
power; while the hand of the magistrate lifted only the rod of
persecution; and when governours were ready to afford a refuge to all
those who fled from clerical authority.

That the church, therefore, had once a power of publick censure is
evident, because that power was frequently exercised. That it borrowed
not its power from the civil authority is, likewise, certain, because
civil authority was at that time its enemy.

The hour came, at length, when, after three hundred years of struggle
and distress, truth took possession of imperial power, and the civil
laws lent their aid to the ecclesiastical constitutions. The magistrate,
from that time, cooperated with the priest, and clerical sentences were
made efficacious by secular force. But the state, when it came to the
assistance of the church, had no intention to diminish its authority.
Those rebukes and those censures, which were lawful before, were lawful
still. But they had hitherto operated only upon voluntary submission.
The refractory and contemptuous were at first in no danger of temporal
severities, except what they might suffer from the reproaches of
conscience, or the detestation of their fellow christians. When religion
obtained the support of law, if admonitions and censures had no effect,
they were seconded by the magistrates with coercion and punishment.

It, therefore, appears, from ecclesiastical history, that the right of
inflicting shame by publick censure has been always considered as
inherent in the church; and that this right was not conferred by the
civil power; for it was exercised when the civil power operated against
it. By the civil power it was never taken away; for the Christian
magistrate interposed his office, not to rescue sinners from censure,
but to supply more powerful means of reformation; to add pain where
shame was insufficient; and when men were proclaimed unworthy of the
society of the faithful, to restrain them by imprisonment, from
spreading abroad the contagion of wickedness.

It is not improbable, that from this acknowledged power of publick
censure, grew, in time, the practice of auricular confession. Those who
dreaded the blast of publick reprehension, were willing to submit
themselves to the priest, by a private accusation of themselves; and to
obtain a rec