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_,