Indulgence (Lat. indulgentia), in English history, is the title applied to a proclamation of Charles II (A.D. 1G62), and especially to one of James II, April 4, 1G87, announcing religious toleration to all classes of his sub- jects, suspending all penal laws against nonconformists, and abolishing religious tests as (lualiflcations for civil office. The king's object was simply to favor Roman Catholics, and therefore neither the English Church nor the great body of the dissenters received the illegal stretch of prerogative with favor, and refused to believe that a " dispensing power" exercised by the king inde- pendently of Parliament could be of any lasting advan- tage, Howe and Baxter maintained this opinion. The same instnmient was extended to Scotland, and divided the Covenanters into two parties. At first the king- asked toleration for Pajnsts only, but the Scottish Par- liament, usually very obsequious, would not listen. He finallj' declared, as if Popery were already in the ascend- ant, that he would never use "force or invincible neces- sity against any man on account of his Protestant faith,"' and all this he did " bj' his sovereign authoritj', prerog- ative royal, and absolute power." — Eadie, Eccles. Diet. s. V. ; Macaulny, Hist, of Engl. i,2\Z; iii,44sq. ; Skeats, Hist. Free Churches of England, p. 77 sq. ; Stoughton, Eccl. Hist, of Engl, since the Restoration, ii, 296, et al.
Indulgences (Lat. indulgentiai), the name of a pe- culiar institution in the Roman Church. The doctrine of indulgence, in its most plausible form, is stated by a Romanist writer as follows : " It is a releasing, by the power of the keys committed to the Church, the debt of temporal punishment which may remain due upon account of our sins, after the sins themselves, as to the guilt and eternal punishment, have been ah-eady remit- ted by repentance and confession" {Gromuls of Catholic Doctrine, chap, x, quest. 1). The doctrine and practice of indulgence constitutes the very centre of the hier- archical theory of Romanism, and was, probably for that very reason, the first object of attack on the part of Lu- ther in the beginning of the Reformation.
I. Origin of the System. — The early Church knew nothing of indulgences. The system seems to have originated in that of penance (q. v.), which, in the hands of the episcopacy, began to assume a corrupt form in the 3d century. The immediate object of j enr.nce was to restore an otfender, not to communion with (Jod, but to the communion of the Church. AVhen an excom- municated person sought readmission, the bishop as- signed him a penitential discipline (q. v.) of abstinence, mortification, and good works, after which he was taken back into fellowship by certain regular modes of pro- cedure. The bishop had the power to abridge the pe- riod of probation, or to mitigate the severity of the pen- ance, and in this power lies the germ of the doctrine of
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indulgence (see Canons of Council of A nqjra, c. v). In course of time penitential discipline came to be applied, not merely to excommunicatetl persons, but to all delin- quents within the pale of the Church ; and penance came at last, iu the hands of the schoolmen, to be a sac- rament, with its systematic theory nicely fitting into the hierarcliical system, of which, in fact, it became the verv keystone. Nothing could so surely augment the power of the priesthood as the right of fixing penalties for sin, and making terms of forgiveness. " Just as, in early times, the penances of the excommunicated were frequently mitigated, so, in the course of the Middle Ages, an analogous mitigation was introduced with ref- erence to the works of penance to which delinquents were subjected. Permission was given to exchange a more severe for a gentler kind of penance. Sometimes, in place of doing penance himself, the j^arty was allowed to employ a substitute. And sometimes, in fine, in- stead of the actual penance prescribed, some service con- ducive to the interest of the Church and the glory of God was accepted. This last was the real basis of in- dulgence. Even here, however, the process was gradual. At first only personal acts performed for the Church were admitted. Then pecuniar}' gifts became more and more common, nntil at last the matter assumed the shape of a mere monej^ speculation. Initiatively the abuse grew up in practice. Then came .Scholasticism, and furnished It with a theoretical substratum ; and not until the in- stitution had thus received an ecclesiastical and scien- tific basis was a method of practice introduced which overstepped all limits. The first powerful impulse to the introduction of indulgences, (iroperly so called, was given by the Crusades at the great Synod of Clennont in 109(3. Urban II there promised to all who took part in the Crusade, which he proposed as a highly merito- rious ecclesiastical work, plenary indulgence {indukjen- iias plenarias) \ and from that date for a period of two hundred years, this grace of the Church continued one of the most powerful means for renewing and enlivening these expeditions, although it was evident to unpreju- diced contemporaries that the adventurers, when tliey crossed the ocean, did not undergo a change of charac- ter with tlie change of climate. The same favor was ere long extended to the military expeditions set on foot against the heretics in Europe, and at last, by Boniface VIII, in 1300, to the year of the Roman .Jubilee. Sub- sequently to that date, several monastic orders and holy places likewise received from successive popes special privileges in the matter of indulgence" (Ullmann, Re- formers hpfore the Reformation, i, 236).