Shame must not delay public confession

Yet 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 If we have withdrawn something from human knowledge, will we hide it from God just the same?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.