384 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
in her zeal to prevent violence and bloodshed, rightly favored the custom of the barbarians to substitute pecuniary com pensation for punishment of an offence, but wrongly applied this custom to the sphere of religion. Thus money might be substituted for fasting and other satisfactions, and was clothed with an atoning efficacy. This custom seems to have proceeded from the church of England, and soon spread over the con tinent.1 It degenerated into a regular traffic, and became a rich source for the increase of ecclesiastical and monastic property.
Here is the origin of the indulgences so called, that is the remis sion of venial sins by the payment of money and on condition of contrition and prayer. The practice was justified by the scholastic theory that the works of supererogation of the saints constitute a treasury of extra-merit and extra-reward which is under the control of the pope. Hence indulgence assumed the special meaning of papal dispensation or remission of sin from the treasury of the overflowing merits of saints, and this power was extended even to the benefit of the dead in pur gatory.2
Indulgences may be granted by bishops and archbishops in their dioceses, and by the pope to all Catholics. The former dealt with it in retail, the latter in wholesale. The first in-
1 Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury is the reputed author of this commu tation of penance for a money-payment. See his Penitential I. 3 and 4, and the seventh penitential canon ascribed to him, in Haddan and Stubbs III. 179, 180,211. "Siquis" says Theodore, ''pro ultione propinqui hominem Occident, peniteat sicut homicida, VIL vel X- annos. Si tamen reddere vult propinquis pecuniam ceKtimationis, lemor erit penitentia, id est, dimidio spatiC' The Synod of Clovesho (probably Abingdon), held under his successor, Cuthbert, for the reformation of abuses, in September 747, decreed in the 26th canon that alms were no longer to be given for diminishing or commuting the fastings and other works of satisfaction. See Haddan and Stubbs, III. 371 sq.
2 This theory was fully developed by Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen (see Gieseler II. 521 sq.), and sanctioned by the Council of Trent in the 25th Session, held Dec. 4, 1563 (Creeds II. 205 sq.), although the Council forbids " all evil gains " and other abuses which have caused " the honorable name of indulgences to be blasphemed by heretics." The popes still exercise from time to time the right of granting plenary indulgences, though with greater caution than their mediaeval predecessors.
287. PENANCE AND INDULGENCE. 385
stances of papal indulgence occur in the ninth century under Paschal is I. and John VIII. who granted it to those who had fallen in war for the defence of the church. Gregory VI. in 1046 promised it to all who sent contributions for the repair of the churches in Rome. Urban II., at the council of Clermont (1095), offered to the crusaders " by the authority of the princes of the Apostles, Peter and Paul/7 plenary indulgence as a reward for a journey to the Holy Land. The same offer was repeated in every crusade against the Mohammedans and heretics. The popes found it a convenient means for promoting their power and filling their treasury. Thus the granting of indul gences became a periodical institution. Its abuses culminated in the profane and shameful traffic of Tetzel under Leo X. for the benefit of St. Peter's church, but were overruled in the Providence of God for the Reformation and a return to the biblical idea of repentance.
NOTE.
The charge is frequently made against the papal court in the middle ages that it had a regulated scale of prices for indulgences, and this is based on the Tax Tables of the Roman Chancery published from time to time. Roman Catholic writers (as Lingard, Wiseman) say that the taxes are merely fees for the expedition of business and the payment of offi cials, but cannot deny the shameful avarice of some popes. The sub ject is fully discussed by Dr. T. L. Green (R. C.), Indulgences, Sacra mental Absolutions, and the Tax- Tables of the Roman Chancery and Penitentiary, considered, in reply to the Charge, of Venality, London (Longmans) 1872, and, on the Protestant side, by Dr. Richard Gibbings (Prof, of Ch. Hist, in the University of Dublin), The Taxes of the Apos tolic Penitentiary ; or, the Prices of Sins in the Church of Rome, Dublin 1872. Gibbings reprints the Taxce Sacrce Pocnitentiarice Romance from the Roman ed. of 1">10 and the Parisian ed. of 1520, which cover 21 pages in Latin, but the greater part of the book (104 pages) is an historical in troduction and polemical discussion.