our face? Are
you commanded to confess them to one of your equals, who could publish them
and ruin you? What we ask of you, is simply to show the sores of your soul
to your Lord and Master, who is also your friend, your guardian and
physician."

In a small work of Chrysostom's, intitled: "Catechesis ad illuminandos,"
vol. II., p. 210, we read these remarkable words: "What we should most
admire, is not that God forgives our sins, but that he does not disclose
them to any one, nor wishes us to do so. What he demands of us, is to
confess our transgressions to him alone to obtain pardon."

St. Augustine, in his beautiful homily on the 31st Ps., says: "I shall
confess my sins to God, and he will pardon all my iniquities. And such
confession is made not with the lips, but with the heart only. I had hardly
opened my mouth to confess my sins, when they were pardoned; for God had
already heard the voice of my heart."

In the edition of the Fathers by Migne, vol. 67, p. 614, 615, we read:
"About the year 390, the office of penitentiary was abolished in the
church, in consequence of a great scandal given by a woman who publicly
accused herself of having committed a crime against chastity with a
deacon."

The office of penitentiary was this: in every large city, a priest or
minister was specially appointed to preside over the church meetings where
the members who had committed public sins were obliged to confess them
publicly before the assembly, in order to be reinstated in the privileges
of their membership; and that minister had the charge of reading or
pronouncing the sentence of pardon granted by the church to the guilty
ones, before they could be admitted again to communion. This was perfectly
in accordance with what St. Paul had done with regard to the incestuous one
of Corinth, that scandalous sinner, who had cast obloquy on the Christian
name; but who, after confessing and weeping over his sins, before the
church, obtained his pardon--not from a priest in whose ears he had
whispered all the shocking details of his incestuous intercourse, but from
the whole church assembled. St. Paul gladly approves the Church of Corinth
in thus receiving again in their midst a wandering but repenting brother.

There is as much difference between such public confessions and auricular
confessions, as there is between heaven and hell, between God and his great
enemy, Satan.

Public confession, then, dates from the time of the apostles,