On Repentance

1This kind of people—and we ourselves were once among them, blind, without the Lord's light—know repentance by nature only, as a certain passion of the soul that comes from the offense of a worse opinion. But they are as far from its reason as they are from the very author of reason. For reason is a thing of God, because God, the founder of all things, has provided, arranged, and ordered nothing without reason, and has willed nothing to be handled or understood without reason. Therefore whoever is ignorant of God must also be ignorant of God's things, because no treasure at all lies open to strangers. And so they cross the whole course of life without the helm of reason, and they do not know how to avoid the storm that hangs over the world.

How irrationally they wander in the act of repentance will be clear enough from this one point: they apply it even to their good deeds. They repent of faith, of love, of simplicity, of patience, of mercy, whenever anything has fallen into disfavor. They curse themselves because they have done good, and they fix in their hearts that kind of repentance especially which is inflicted on the best works, taking care to remember not to do anything good again. But they lie more lightly upon repentance for evils. In short, they sin more easily through the same repentance than they do right.

2But if people had God, and therefore reason as well, they would first weigh what repentance deserves. They would never use it as a device for perverse correction. They would at least set a limit to their repenting, because they would also hold a limit to their sinning, since they fear the Lord. But where there is no fear of God, there is likewise no amendment. Where there is no amendment, repentance is necessarily empty, because it lacks the fruit for which God sowed it, namely human salvation.

For after so many and such great sins of human recklessness, begun with Adam the first of our race, after man was condemned along with the world's endowment, after he was cast out of paradise and made subject to death, God then hastened back to his own mercy. From that point on he dedicated repentance in himself. The sentence of his former wrath was rescinded, and he covenanted to forgive his own work and image. And so he gathered a people to himself and nourished them with many gifts of his goodness. Though he found them utterly ungrateful time and again, he always urged them to repentance. Through the mouths of all the prophets he spoke, soon promising the grace with which he would illuminate the whole world through his Spirit at the end of the ages. He commanded the baptism of repentance to go before, so that if he called any through grace to the promise destined for Abraham's seed, he might first prepare them through the sealing of repentance.

John the Baptist does not keep silent. He says, "Begin repentance, for salvation is now drawing near to the nations," meaning the Lord who brings it according to God's promise. Ministering to him, John appointed repentance to be set over minds that needed cleansing, so that whatever old error had defiled, whatever ignorance had contaminated in the human heart, repentance might sweep it, scrape it, and cast it out. It would prepare a clean house of the breast for the Holy Spirit who was about to come upon it, so that he might gladly bring himself in with heavenly goods. One title of these goods is human salvation, with the abolition of former sins sent ahead. This is the cause of repentance, this its work, attending to the business of divine mercy. Whatever benefits a human being is what serves God.

Moreover, the rule of repentance, which we learn once we have come to know the Lord, holds to a fixed form: it must never lay violent hands, so to speak, on good deeds or good thoughts. For God does not hold the rejection of good things as valid, since they are his own. As their author and defender, he must also be their acceptor, and if their acceptor, then also their rewarder. Let human ingratitude see to it, then, if it plans repentance even for good deeds. Let gratitude see to it too, if courting it is an incentive to doing good. Both are earthly and mortal. How small is the gain if you do good to a grateful person, or the loss if to an ungrateful one? A good deed has God as its debtor, just as an evil deed does, because every judge is the rewarder of a case.

But since God the judge presides over justice, which he holds dearest and demands and defends, and since he ordains the whole sum of his discipline toward it, can there be any doubt that in the matter of repentance, as in all our actions, justice must be rendered to God? And this can only be fulfilled if repentance is applied to sins alone. For sin does not deserve to be called anything but an evil deed, and no one sins by doing good. But if he does not sin, why does he seize upon repentance, the private property of sinners? Why does he impose the office of wickedness on his own goodness? So it happens that when something is applied where it should not be, it is neglected where it should be.

3Now the argument itself calls for me to point out what repentance is just and owed—that is, what things must be assigned to sin—but this may seem unnecessary. For once the Lord is known, the spirit, looked back upon by its own author, rises of its own accord to the knowledge of the truth, and once admitted to the Lord's commands it is immediately taught from those very commands that whatever God keeps a person away from must be assigned to sin. Since it is agreed that God is something of great goodness, surely nothing but evil could displease the good, because there is no friendship between opposites.

Still, it will not be a burden to touch briefly on the fact that some sins are carnal, that is bodily, while others are spiritual. For since a human being is made from the joining of these two substances, he sins from nowhere else than from what he is made of. But they do not differ from each other in this respect, that body and spirit are two things—otherwise they would be all the more equal, because two make one—so let no one distinguish their sins on the basis of the difference of their materials, thinking one lighter or heavier than the other. For both flesh and spirit are God's property: one shaped by his hand, the other completed by his breath. Since they belong to the Lord equally, whichever of them sins offends the Lord equally.

Would you make a distinction between the acts of flesh and spirit, when they share so much communion and partnership in life and in death and in resurrection that they are raised together, then either to life or to judgment—because, of course, they either sinned together or acted innocently together? I have said this first so that we understand that the necessity of repentance presses no less on one part than on both, if either has sinned. The guilt of both is common, and the judge is common—God, that is—and therefore the remedy of repentance is common as well.

From this they are called spiritual and bodily, because every sin is either done or thought: what is in the deed is bodily, because a deed, like a body, can be seen and touched, while what is in the mind is spiritual, because the spirit is neither seen nor grasped. Through this it is shown that not only sins of deed but also sins of will must be avoided and cleansed by repentance. For if human limitation judges only the deed, because it cannot match the hidden places of the will, that does not mean we should ignore the will's crimes under God. God is sufficient for all things. Nothing is removed from his sight from which sin arises at all, because he neither fails to know nor fails to pass judgment on it. He is not a concealer or a betrayer of his own perception.

What of the fact that the will is the origin of the deed? Let them see to it if any sins are attributed to chance or necessity or ignorance; apart from these exceptions, sin is now committed only by the will. Since the will is the origin of the deed, is it not so much more liable to punishment as it is primary in guilt—a guilt that is not released even when some difficulty interrupts the carrying out of the deed? For the will itself is charged against itself, and it cannot be excused by the misfortune of not completing the act, since it did what belonged to it.

Finally, how does the Lord show that he is building an addition onto the law, except by forbidding sins of the will as well? He defines as an adulterer not only the one who has actually fallen into another's marriage, but also the one who has defiled himself by the lust of a look (Matthew 5:28). So what is forbidden to be carried out, the mind dangerously enough represents to itself, and rashly works out the effect through the will. Since the will's force is so great that it satisfies itself and stands in place of the deed, it will be punished in place of the deed.

It is utterly empty to say: "I wanted to, but I did not do it." But you ought to carry it out, because you want it—or else not want it, because you do not carry it out. But you pronounce judgment on yourself by your own conscience's confession. For if you desired something good, you would have been eager to accomplish it; and just as you do not accomplish the evil, so you ought not to have desired it. Wherever you place yourself, you are bound by the charge, because you either wanted evil or did not fulfill good.

4So the same God who has appointed punishment by judgment for every sin, whether of flesh or spirit, whether in act or in will, has also promised forgiveness through repentance. He says to his people: "Repent, and I will save you." And again he says: "As I live, says the Lord, I desire repentance rather than death." Repentance, then, is life, since it is preferred to death.

You, sinner like me, no, less than me, for I acknowledge my own preeminence in sins, seize it and embrace it as a shipwrecked man seizes the solidity of some plank. It will lift you up when you are drowning in the waves of sin and carry you forward into the harbor of divine mercy. Snatch the chance of unexpected happiness: you who were once nothing before God but a drop of a bucket, dust of the threshing floor, a potter's little vessel, become from then on that tree which is planted by the waters, remains green in its leaves, and bears fruit in its season, which will see neither fire nor axe. Let repentance follow the discovery of truth after error; let it repent of having loved what God does not love, since we ourselves do not even allow our own servants to fail to hate the things that offend us. For the principle of obedience is established in likeness of minds.

The good of repentance could be set out at length, and this great theme deserves eloquence. But I, within my narrow limits, press one point upon you: what God commands is good and best. I consider it audacity to debate the goodness of a divine command. We should not obey because it is good, but because God has commanded it. For the performance of obedience, the majesty of divine power comes first; the authority of the one who commands comes before the advantage of the one who serves.

Is it good to repent or not? Why do you turn it over? God commands it. And he does not merely command, he also urges. He invites with a reward: salvation. Even swearing, saying "As I live," he desires to be believed. O how blessed we are, for whose sake God swears! O how wretched, if we do not believe the Lord even when he swears! What God so earnestly commends, what he testifies even in human fashion under an oath, we must undertake and guard with the utmost seriousness, so that as we remain in the assertion of divine grace we may likewise persevere in its fruit and benefit.

5What I am saying is this: repentance, which God's grace has shown us and commanded us, and which calls us back into God's favor, must never be undone by repeating the sin once it has been recognized and accepted.

You no longer have any excuse of ignorance to defend you. After you have come to know the Lord, accepted his commands, and then carried out repentance for your sins, you have put yourself back into those sins again. To the degree that you are separated from ignorance, you are glued to defiance. For if you repented of your sin because you had begun to fear God, why did you choose to undo what you did out of fear, unless because you stopped fearing? Nothing but defiance overturns fear.

Even those who do not know the Lord have no exemption to protect them from punishment, because God stands in the open and can be understood from the very blessings of heaven, so it is not permitted to be ignorant of him. How much more dangerous is it to despise him once he is known? And the one who has received from him the understanding of good and evil despises him when he takes up again what he understands he should flee and what he has already fled. He insults his own understanding, which is God's gift. He rejects the giver when he abandons the gift; he denies the benefactor when he does not honor the benefit. How can he please the one whose gift displeases him? So you appear before the Lord not only defiant but also ungrateful.

Moreover, it is no light sin against the Lord when someone who had renounced the devil, God's rival, through repentance and in that name had subjected him to the Lord, raises that same devil up again by his return and makes himself the devil's exultation, so that the evil one rejoices against the Lord once more, having recovered his prey. Does he not put the devil before the Lord? It is dangerous even to say this, but it must be said for building up. The one who has known both seems to have made a comparison and, after judging, declared that the one he chose to belong to again is better. So the one who had begun to make amends to God through repentance for his sins will make amends to the devil through a repentance of repentance, and he will be that much more hated by God as he is accepted by God's rival.

But some people object: God is satisfied if he is honored in heart and soul, even if less is done in action. So they sin with fear and faith intact—that is, they violate marriages with chastity intact, they mix poison for a parent with piety intact. In the same way, they will be thrust into hell with forgiveness intact, while they sin with fear intact. This is the first example of their perversity: they sin because they fear. I think they would not sin if they did not fear. So the one who does not want God to be offended should not revere him at all, if fear of offending is a defense for sin. But these ideas usually sprout from the seed of hypocrites, whose friendship with the devil is inseparable, and whose repentance is never faithful.

6So whatever our modest ability has tried to suggest about taking up repentance once and holding to it forever concerns all who are devoted to the Lord, since all are seeking salvation by winning God's favor. But it presses especially on these newcomers, who are just now beginning to let their ears be nourished by God's words. Like newborn animals still unsteady, with eyes not yet fully formed, they crawl about uncertainly. They say they renounce their former ways and they take up repentance, but they neglect to lock it in. The very goal they desire distracts them, tempting them to want something from the past—like fruit that is beginning to grow sour or bitter with age, yet still flatters them with some part of its sweetness.

Moreover, every fault of hesitation and evasion regarding repentance is brought in by presumption about baptism. Certain of undoubted forgiveness for their sins, they steal the time in between and make for themselves a holiday from sinning rather than a training in not sinning. How absurd it is not to fulfill repentance while waiting for forgiveness of sins! That is holding out your hand for the merchandise without paying the price. For the Lord has appointed forgiveness to be sold at this price; he offers freedom from punishment to be redeemed by this payment of repentance. If sellers first examine the coin with which they are bargaining to see whether it is scratched or filed or counterfeit, do we believe the Lord does not first test repentance before granting us so great a reward—eternal life?

But let us postpone the truth of repentance for a little while. Then, I suppose, it will be clear that we are reformed when we are absolved. Not at all. Rather, when forgiveness is still pending and punishment is in view, when we do not yet deserve to be set free so that we may deserve it, when God threatens—not when he forgives. What slave, after being changed by freedom, charges himself with his thefts and flights? What soldier, after being discharged from his camp, troubles himself over the marks branded on his body? A sinner ought to weep before forgiveness, because the time of repentance is the same as the time of danger and fear of God.

I do not refuse the divine benefit—the abolition of sins—to those about to enter the water; it is wholly saving. But one must labor to arrive there. Who will grant you, a man of such unfaithful repentance, a single sprinkling of any water? It is easy to approach by theft and lead the one in charge of this matter astray with your assertions, but God watches over his treasure and does not allow the unworthy to creep in. What does he say after all? "Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed" (Matthew 10:26). However much darkness you pile over your deeds, God is light.

But some think that God is obliged to provide what he promised even to the unworthy, and they make his generosity into slavery. If he grants us the symbol of death by necessity, then he does it unwillingly. Who permits what he gave unwillingly to remain? Do not many fall away afterward? Is not that gift taken away from many? These are the ones who creep in, who attack the faith of repentance and build a house about to collapse on sand.

Let no one flatter himself because he is counted among the catechumens under instruction, as if even now it were permitted to him to sin. As soon as you know the Lord, fear him; as soon as you have seen him, revere him. What good is it to have known him if you lie on the same things you did before, when you were ignorant? What separates you from a perfect servant of God? Is there one Christ for the baptized and another for catechumens? Is there one hope or reward, another fear of judgment, another necessity of repentance? That washing is the sealing of faith, and this faith begins and is commended by the faith of repentance. We are not washed so that we may stop sinning, but because we have stopped, since we have already been washed in heart. For this is the first baptism of the catechumen: complete fear of God. From then on, as long as you have felt the Lord, faith is sound and conscience has once embraced repentance.

But if we stop sinning from the waters, we put on innocence by necessity, not by choice. Who excels in goodness? The one to whom evil is not permitted, or the one to whom evil is displeasing? The one who is commanded, or the one who delights to be free from crime? So let us not turn our hands from theft unless the hardness of locks resists, nor restrain our eyes from lustful desires unless dragged away by guardians of bodies—if no one devoted to the Lord stops sinning unless bound by baptism. But if anyone thinks this way, I do not know whether the baptized person is more grieved that he has stopped sinning than glad that he has escaped.

Therefore catechumens ought to desire baptism, not presume upon it. The one who desires honors it; the one who presumes is arrogant. In the former modesty appears, in the latter insolence. The former labors, the latter neglects. The former longs to deserve it, the latter promises it to himself as a debt. The former receives, the latter seizes. Whom would you judge more worthy except the more reformed? Whom more reformed except the more fearful, and therefore the one who has performed true repentance? For he feared to sin any longer, lest he not deserve to receive. But the presumptuous one, since he promised it to himself, was of course secure and could not fear. Thus he did not fulfill repentance, because he lacked the instrument of repentance—that is, fear of God. Presumption is a portion of shamelessness: it inflates the petitioner and despises the giver. So it sometimes deceives. For it promises before it is owed, and by this the one who is about to grant is always offended.

7Up to this point, Christ our Lord, may your servants be permitted to learn and hear about the discipline of repentance. May they learn it only up to the point where catechumens must no longer sin, so that they know nothing of repentance and seek nothing from it. I am reluctant to add any mention of the second hope, which is now indeed the last hope, lest by discussing the remaining help of repentance I seem to be pointing out a period of time for further sinning. Far be it from anyone to interpret it this way: as if the door to sinning still stands open for him because the door to repentance stands open, and as if the overflowing of heavenly mercy gives license to human rashness. Let no one become worse because God is better, sinning as often as he is forgiven. Otherwise, he will certainly reach an end of escaping when he reaches an end of offending. We have escaped once. Let us go on endangering ourselves only so far, even if we seem likely to escape again. Many who have been freed from shipwreck renounce both ship and sea from then on, and honor God's benefit, their salvation, by remembering the danger. I praise their fear. I love their modesty. They do not wish to burden divine mercy again. They are afraid of seeming to trample on what they have received, and with a certainly good anxiety they avoid experiencing again what they once learned to fear. Thus restraint from rashness is a testimony of fear. And human fear is an honor to God.

But that most obstinate enemy never lets his malice rest. Indeed, he rages most fiercely when he feels a person has been fully set free. He is most inflamed when he is being extinguished. He must grieve and groan, since the forgiveness of sins has been granted, so many works of death in a person have been destroyed, so many titles of his former condemnation have been erased. He grieves that that sinner, the servant of Christ, is going to judge him and his angels. So he watches, attacks, besieges, to see if he can strike the eyes with fleshly desire, or entangle the mind with worldly enticements, or overturn faith through fear of earthly power, or twist it from the sure path by perverse traditions. He does not fail in scandals or temptations. Therefore God, foreseeing these poisons of his, though the door of forgiveness is closed and the bar of baptism is fastened, has still permitted something to remain open. He has placed second repentance at the threshold, to open the way for those who knock. But only once, because it is already the second time. But never again, because the previous time was in vain. For is not even this once enough? You have what you no longer deserved, for you lost what you had received. If the Lord's indulgence provides you with the means to restore what you had lost, be grateful for the repeated benefit, not to mention the increased one. For it is greater to restore than to give, since it is more wretched to have lost than never to have received at all.

But the soul must not be cut down and overthrown immediately by despair if someone has become a debtor of second repentance. Let it shame you to sin again, but let it not shame you to repent again. Let it shame you to be endangered again, but not to be freed again. Let no one be ashamed. For repeated sickness the medicine must be repeated. You will show yourself grateful to the Lord if you do not refuse what the Lord offers you. You have offended, but you can still be reconciled. You have someone to whom you can make amends, and he is willing.

8If you doubt this, look at what the Spirit says to the churches. He charges the church in Ephesus with abandoning its first love. He rebukes the church in Thyatira for fornication and eating food sacrificed to idols. He accuses the church in Sardis of incomplete works. He reproaches the church in Pergamum for teaching falsehood. He scolds the church in Laodicea for trusting in riches. Yet he urges them all to repentance, though with threats. He would not threaten the one who refuses to repent if he did not forgive the one who repents. Could there be any doubt, when he has shown this outpouring of his mercy elsewhere as well? Does he not say, "The one who falls will rise again, and the one who turns away will turn back"? He is the one, surely, who desires mercy rather than sacrifices. The heavens rejoice, and the angels there, over the repentance of a human being. So be of good cheer, you sinner! You see where your return brings joy.

What do those parables of the Lord mean for us? A woman loses a coin, searches for it, finds it, and invites her friends to celebrate. Is that not a picture of the restored sinner? One little sheep of the shepherd's wanders off, but the flock as a whole was not dearer to him. That one is sought out, that one is longed for more than all the rest, and at last it is found and carried back on the shepherd's own shoulders. It had suffered much in its wandering.

I will not pass over that most gentle father either, who calls back his prodigal son, and after his poverty welcomes him gladly when he repents. He slaughters the fattened calf and adorns his joy with a feast. Why not? He had found the son he had lost, and felt him dearer because he had gained him back. Who is this father we are to understand? God, of course. No one is so much a father, no one so loving. He will receive you as his son, even if you have squandered what he gave you, even if you return naked, because you have returned. He will rejoice more over your coming back than over the sobriety of another. But only if you repent from the heart, if you compare your hunger with the fullness of your father's hired servants, if you leave the pigs, that unclean herd, if you seek your father again even though you have offended him, saying, "Father, I have sinned, and I am no longer worthy to be called yours." Confession of sins brings as much relief as concealment adds weight. For confession is the plan for making amends; concealment is defiance.

9This second repentance is a single one, and the narrower its ground, the more demanding its proof. It must not be carried only in the conscience, but also performed in some outward act. That act, which is better expressed and more often practiced by a Greek word, is public confession. Through it we confess our sin to the Lord—not as if He did not know it, but because making amends is set in motion by confession, repentance is born from confession, and God is appeased by repentance.

Public confession, therefore, is a discipline of prostrating and humbling a person, imposing a manner of life that entices mercy. It commands the sinner to lie in sackcloth and ashes, to darken the body with filth, to cast down the spirit with grief, to exchange for harsh treatment whatever one has sinned with. For food and drink it prescribes what is pure—not for the belly's sake, of course, but for the soul's. Most often it nourishes prayer with fasts, groaning, weeping, and bellowing day and night to the Lord your God, falling before the presbyters, kneeling before God's beloved, and charging all the brothers and sisters to carry the embassies of one's own entreaty.

Public confession does all this to make repentance commendable, to honor the Lord through fear of danger, to stand in for God's indignation by pronouncing sentence against the sinner, and by temporal affliction not—I will not say to frustrate—but to wipe out eternal punishments. When it throws a person down, it lifts him up more; when it makes him filthy, it returns him more cleansed; when it accuses, it excuses; when it condemns, it absolves. To the degree you have not spared yourself, believe that God will spare you.

10Yet many people either avoid this work as a public exposure of themselves or put it off from day to day. I presume they are more mindful of shame than of salvation, like those who, when disease has settled in the more private parts of the body, avoid the doctors' knowledge and so perish along with their embarrassment. It is intolerable, apparently, for shame to make amends to an offended Lord, to be restored to a salvation that has been put at risk. A fine thing your modesty is: boldly showing your face for sinning, but hiding it for begging. I make no room for blushing, since I gain more from its loss, since shame in some way urges the person on, saying, 'Do not look at me; it is better for me to perish through you.' Certainly its danger is burdensome, if at all, when it stands among those who will mock with derisive talk, where one person is lifted up by another's ruin, where someone climbs over the one who has fallen. But among brothers and fellow servants, where there is common hope, fear, joy, sorrow, suffering—because there is a common Spirit from a common Lord and Father—why do you think of them as anything other than yourself? Why do you flee those who share your misfortunes as if they were applauders? The body cannot rejoice over the affliction of one member; the whole must grieve with it and labor together for the remedy. In one and another the church is, and the church is Christ. So when you stretch yourself out at the brothers' knees, you touch Christ, you beg Christ. Likewise when they shed tears over you, Christ suffers, Christ pleads with the Father. What the Son asks is always easily obtained. The concealment of sin promises a great advantage to modesty, to be sure. If we have withdrawn something from human knowledge, will we hide it from God just the same? Are human opinion and God's knowledge really comparable? Is it better to be damned in hiding than to be absolved openly? It is a wretched thing to come to public confession this way! Yes, one comes to wretchedness—but where repentance is required, it ceases to be wretched, because it has become salutary. It is wretched to be cut and burned with a cautery and tormented by the bite of some powder; yet the things that heal through unpleasantness excuse their offense by the benefit of the cure and commend their present injury for the sake of the usefulness to come.

11What if, beyond the modesty they consider so important, they also dread the bodily discomforts—having to stay unwashed, filthy, outside all festivity, in the roughness of sackcloth and the griminess of ashes, with the emptiness of the face from fasting? Are we then to plead for our sins dressed in scarlet and Tyrian purple? Hand me the pin for parting the hair and the powder for polishing the teeth and some two-pronged tool of iron or bronze for scraping the nails. Apply whatever artificial shine, whatever forced redness, to lips or cheeks. What is more, seek out the more pleasant baths in gardens or seaside retreats, add to the expense, hunt down enormous fattened fowl, clarify the aged wine—and when someone asks you for whom you are lavishing all this, say: I have sinned against God, and I am in danger of perishing forever. So now I hang and am worn down and am tortured, so that I may reconcile God to me, whom I injured by sinning.

But those who go about canvassing for public office are neither ashamed nor reluctant to strive with every disadvantage of soul and body—and not only disadvantages, but every kind of insult—for the sake of what they desire. What shabby clothing do they not put on? What doorways do they not occupy with nighttime and undigested greetings? They shrink at every encounter with any person of greater rank, celebrated at no banquets, gathered at no feasts, but exiled from the happiness of freedom and festivity—and all of it for the fleeting joy of a single year. We, though the pursuit of the fasces sustains us, doubt whether we can endure the danger of eternity? And shall we refuse to offer to an offended Lord the discipline of food and dress that the nations impose on themselves when no one at all has been injured? These are the ones of whom Scripture says: Woe to those who tie their sins together like a long rope (Isaiah 5:18).

12If you shrink back from public confession, picture hell in your heart, which public confession will extinguish for you. First imagine the magnitude of the punishment, so that you will not hesitate to embrace the remedy. What do we think that storehouse of eternal fire is, when its mere smoke-vents stir up such eruptions of flame that nearby cities either no longer exist or expect the same fate any day? The proudest mountains burst apart from the fire conceived within them, and what proves to us the endlessness of the judgment is this: though they burst apart, though they are devoured, they are never finished. Who will not regard these torments of the mountains as previews of the threatening judgment? Who will not agree that such sparks are missiles and practice-darts from some great and immeasurable furnace? Therefore, since you know that against hell, after those first defenses of the Lord's baptism, there are still second aids in public confession, why do you abandon your salvation? Why do you hesitate to undertake what you know can heal you? Even mute and irrational creatures recognize in due time the medicines divinely assigned to them. A stag pierced by an arrow knows that it must be healed with dittany, to drive the iron and its unyielding delays from the wound. A swallow, if it has blinded its chicks, knows how to restore their sight with its own celandine. Will the sinner, knowing that public confession was established by the Lord for his restoration, pass by the very thing that restored the Babylonian king to his kingdom? For Nebuchadnezzar had long offered repentance to the Lord, performing public confession through seven years of squalor, with nails grown wild like an eagle's and neglected hair presenting a lion-like horror. What harsh treatment! The man whom humans shuddered at, God was receiving. The Egyptian ruler, by contrast, who had long persecuted God's people—once afflicted and denied to their Lord—rushed into battle, and after so many plague-signs, when the sea parted and made a way passable for God's people alone, he perished as the waves rolled back. For he had cast aside repentance and its ministry, public confession. Why should I say more about these two planks, so to speak, of human salvation? I am more concerned with the duty of my conscience than with the business of writing. For since I am a sinner of every mark, born for nothing but repentance, I cannot easily keep silent about the very thing that Adam—the originator of the human race and of offense against the Lord—does not keep silent about, having been restored to his paradise through public confession.