16 Wiltshire Pardons or Indulgences. 



confessors who, though not called on to make resistance unto blood, 

 had yet endured some other degree of cruelty, to speak up for their 

 wavering friends, and to write from their prisons, or after their 

 enlargement from captivity, "letters of peace," libellos pacis, as a 

 certificate of restoration to communion for the renegades. St. 

 Cyprian, Archbishop of Carthage, who had himself suffered as an 

 exile, and who was destined to become a martyr subsequently, in 

 A.D. 258, was indignant at the lengths to which this system was 

 being carried, and the mercenary spirit in which it was exercised, 

 and he prohibited the circulation of a form of written indulgence, 

 or certificate of remission in general terms, which was being intro- 

 duced into his province by one Lucianus, a Carthaginian confessor 

 (Cyprian Epistles, xv., 3 ; xx., 2 ; xxiii. ; xxvi. ; xxvii.) 1 In the 6th 

 and following centuries collections of Penitential Canons were 

 compiled to specify in detail what measure of ecclesiastical dis- 

 ciplinary punishment was to be meted out to each distinct class 

 of offender: e.g., a thief would be enjoined penance for half a year, 

 or, if he were a cleric, for an entire year; a murderer was excluded 

 from communion for seven years ; and so forth. Every sin re- 

 quiring its due and proper punishment, that punishment, it was 

 held, must be undergone in this world or the next. In case of 

 grievous sickness, the recognised meed of ecclesiastical temporal 

 punishment, such as penitential fasting for one or more Lentings, 

 or Lents 2 of forty days, or some other severe discipline, might be 

 commuted, e.g., for the recitation of a number of psalms ; or it might 

 be condoned, with the condition of a fine to be paid, or an act of 

 bounty to the poor to be performed. A man with many friends 

 or subordinates might even enlist their services to help him in his 

 attempt to get through his heavy obligations on this side the 

 grave by their undertaking to share his remedial discipline. The 

 " Irrefragable Doctor," Alexander of Hales, who died at Paris in 

 1245, formulated the belief that the Church has an available fund 

 of superabundant merits as her "treasure" for the remission or 



1 See Archbishop Benson's Cyprian, and his article (" libelli ") in Smith 

 and Cheetham's Diet. Chr. Antiq., ii., 982. 



2 " Lents " : i.e., quarentanes. 



