Public.
Public.
Public or canonical and ecclesiastical satisfaction was used in the early church. It was part of church discipline by which certain fines and chastisements were imposed on those who either had renounced faith during persecution or had fallen into manifest, atrocious sins. (The descriptions of these impositions are in Tertullian, De poenit.; Eusebius, bk. 5, ch. 28; bk. 6, ch. 25.) These were imposed not so that the people might expiate their sins before God through them, but rather so that the penitents’ hearts could be searched as to whether their sorrow for what they had done was real or feigned, so that the satisfaction might be made to the offended church with the outward declaration of repentance, and, finally, so that these spectacles might arouse the rest to avoid sins and turn away from them with greater zeal. Since the church of that time lacked a Christian magistracy, these rites and severity bore public witness that they hated these serious sins and by no means tolerated them among their own people.
** Luther (Jena German edition, vol. 5, An die Geistlichen auf dem Reichstage zu Augsburg versammelt, f. [81]b): “If they” (the Papists) “had distinguished this satisfaction for sins wisely—namely, in such a way that it would be done toward men, not toward God, as Christ shows in Matthew 5 and 18; as the holy fathers also used it in former times and caused the Christians who had sinned to make satisfaction before the church and the brothers, as the words state, that they imposed penance for two, three, or seven years—then Christ would still have remained in heaven with His satisfaction for us. But in this way the services of God in chapters and cloisters and indulgence would not have arisen, and not so much would have gone to the great god ‘Belly,’ ” etc.3 **
Jerome (on Matthew 6): “I admit that repentance for sins is far different than satisfaction, over which the church interposes its judgment publicly when it has taken injury and been offended. It imposes serious public satisfaction that all may know that they are truly repentant who with a prompt spirit take up whatever the church has decreed.” Augustine (Ench. ad Laurent., ch. 65): “Because the grief of one person’s heart is frequently hidden from another, and because it does not become known to others through words or some other signs since it is before Him to whom one says, ‘My groaning is not hidden from You’ [Ps. 38:9], those who are in charge of the church are correct in establishing times of repentance, that satisfaction may be made to the church in which sins themselves are remitted and outside of which they indeed are not remitted.”
In regard to this canonical and disciplinary satisfaction, we say with Dr. Chemnitz (Exam. Concil. Trident., part 2, ch. De satisfact.): “It is to be wished that something could be brought into use without superstition and false opinions for the sake of discipline and example on the basis of the rites of the ancient church.”4 He is entirely correct in this, because experience testifies that in these last days of the world the license to sin increases and church discipline is weakened by those who should have been its guardians and defenders.