now her; and they do
this on their own authority and without the command of God. What
madness! My advice is that the confessor beware of tyrannical
decrees or laws, and confidently sentence a sinner to some other
penance, or totally abstain from punishing, leaving free to him
the right of matrimony which has been given him not by man, but
by God. For no angel in heaven, still less any man on earth, has
the power to enjoin this penance, which is the burning occasion
of continual sin. Wherefore they are not to be heeded who wish
such things to be done, and the penitent is to be freed from this
scruple and peril.

But who may recount all the tyrannies with which the troubled
consciences of penitent and confessing Christians are daily
disturbed, by means of death-bringing "constitutions" and
customs, administered by silly manikins, who only know how to
bind and place on the shoulders of men burdens grievous and heavy
to be borne, which they themselves are not willing to move with a
finger? [Matt. 23:4] So this most salutary sacrament of penance
has become nothing else than a mere tyranny of the great, then a
disease, and a means to the increase of sins. Thus in the end it
signifies one thing and works another thing for miserable
sinners, because priestlings, impious and unlearned in the law of
the Lord, administer the Church of God, which they have filled
with their laws and their dreams.

_Here follows, in the original, a paraphrase of the apocryphal
Prayer of Manasseh._

FOOTNOTES

[1] Luther quotes from the Vulgate and frequently from memory, a
fact which should always be remembered in comparing his
quotations from the text of Scripture.

[2] Vulgate, _Justus prior est accusator_.

[3] The apocryphal Prayer of Manasseh was included by Luther as
an appendix to this treatise.

[4] _Augustine Conf._, X, 29.

[5] i. e., Forced to confess hidden sins.

[6] The so-called "science of casuistry," by which the moral
value of an act is determined and the exact degree of guilt
attaching to a given sin is estinated.

[7] Cf. _Small Catechism_, "Of Confession," Ques. "What sins ought
we to confess?"

[8] The decrees of the Popes collected in the Canon Law. The
decretal here referred to is _C. Omnis Utriusque, X. de
poententiis et remissionibus_.

[9] Anecdotes illustrating the doctrines of the Church were
favorite contents of the sermons in Luther's day. Various
collections of these edifying legends are still exta