eserved" for the absolution of the higher Church authorities.

The demand for contrition was somewhat more difficult to meet.
But here too there was a way out. Complete contrition included
love to God as its motive, and the truly contrite man was not
always easy to find; but some of the scholastic Doctors had
discovered a substitute for contrition in what they called
"attrition." viz., incomplete contrition, which might have fear
for a motive, and which the Sacrament of Penance could transform
into contrition. When, therefore, a man was afraid of hell or of
purgatory, he could make his confession to the indulgence-seller
or his agent, receive from him the absolution which gave his
imperfect repentance the value of true contrition, released him
from the guilt of sin, and changed its eternal penalty to a
temporal penalty; then he could purchase the plenary indulgence,
which remitted the temporal penalty, and so in one transaction,
in which all the demands of the Church were formally met, he
could become sure of heaven. Thus the indulgence robbed the
Sacrament of Penance of its ethical content.

Furthermore, indulgences were made available for souls already in
purgatory. This kind of indulgence seems to have been granted for
the first time in 1476. It had long been been that the prayers of
the living availed to shorten the pains of the departed, and the
institution of masses for the dead was of long standing; but it
was not without some difficulty that the Popes succeeded in
establishing their claim to power over purgatory. Their power
over the souls of the living was not disputed. The "Power of the
Keys" had been given to Peter and transmitted to his successors;
the "Treasury of the Church," [22] i. e., the merits of Christ and
of the Saints, was believed to be at their disposal, and it was
this treasury which they employed in the granting of
indulgences;[23] but it seemed reasonable to suppose that their
jurisdiction ended with death. Accordingly, Pope Sixtus IV, in
1477, declared that the power of the Pope over purgatory, while
genuine, was exercised only _per modum sufiragii_, "by way of
intercession." [24] The distinction was thought dogmatically
important, but to the layman, who looked more to results than to
methods, the difference between intercession and jurisdiction was
trifling. To him the important thing was that the Pope, whether
by jurisdiction or intercession, was able to release the soul of
a departed C