Good works are the consequence of repentance.
Good works are the consequence of repentance.
§ 55. Although the new obedience may be distinguished from repentance very correctly, nevertheless it may by no means be separated from it, since the new obedience is the necessary and perpetual consequence of true repentance. Many passages of Scripture describe it as coming from it like fruit. “Decline from evil and do good” (Ps. 37:27). “Wash yourselves; be clean; take away the evil of your doings from the sight of My eyes; cease to do evil. Learn to do well, seek judgment, guide the oppressed, judge for the fatherless and widow. If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:16–18). “If that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do to it” (Jer. 18:8). “If a wicked man turns away from all his sins which he has done and keeps all My Commandments and does judgment and justice, living he shall live; he shall not die. I will not remember all his iniquities that he has done” (Ezek. 18:21–22). “God saw the works of the Ninevites, that they were turned from their evil way, and God repented of the evil which He had spoken” (Jon. 3:10).
The statements of the fathers have the same intent. Irenaeus (bk. 3, ch. 5): “How will sinners repent? Will they persevere in the very same things? Or, on the contrary, will they experience a great change and move away from their earlier behavior?” Tertullian (at the very beginning of De poenit.): “Where there is no emendation [of life], repentance is necessarily vain, for it is devoid of the fruit for which God planted it, that is, man’s wholeness [salus].” [Tertullian again] (De pudic.): “What grows out of repentance other than the effect of emendation?”
** Hilary (on Psalm 136): “From then on, no one ought to commit the sin he has confessed, since the confession of sin is the profession of the cessation [of sinning].” Lactantius (Divin. instit., bk. 6, ch. 13): “God especially desires people to be cleansed of their sins, and therefore He commands them to repent. But to repent is nothing else than to profess to affirm that one will sin no more. Therefore He pardons those who slip into sin ignorantly, unwisely, and incautiously.” **
Augustine (De fide et operibus, ch. 20): “We receive remission not to have license to sin but that we may not be harmed by having [already] sinned, so that remission is made for what has been done and is not permission for doing.” [Augustine again] (Sermon 7 de temp.): “Many people zealously say that they are sinners, and yet it delights them to sin. Profession is not emendation. The soul is accused, not cleansed; an offense is declared, not removed; etc. When you repent in such a way that what was once sweet in your life now leaves a bitter taste in your soul and what used to delight you in your body now torments you in your mind, then you are beginning to groan well before God.”
Chrysostom (on John, homily 33): “This, then, is repentance: if we no longer sin or do the same things; for whoever returns to his sins is like a dog that goes back to his own vomit” (which is taken from Prov. 26:11 and 2 Pet. 2:22).
Bernard (Medit. devotiss., ch. 4, col. 1194): “He is a scoffer and not truly repentant who is still doing what he repents of.” [Bernard again] (De modo bene vivendi, sermon 27, from Isidore): “Repentance is empty if fault follows and corrupts it.”
Hugh of St. Victor: “When in contrition God absolves a person from his sins, He binds him with chains of eternal detestation so that from then on he always detests sin.” See [Ius canonicum,] De poenit., dist. 3., c. Poenitentis, c. Irrisor.