According to Protestants, penance has no countenance whatever from Scripture, and Is contrary to some of the most essential principles of the Christian religion; particularly to the doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone, on the ground of his com plete or "finished " work; penance being, in fact, founded on a doctrine of—at least- supplementary atonement by the works or sufferings of man—the sinner—himself. The outward expressions of humiliation, sorrow, and repentance common under the Jewish dispensation, are regarded as very consistent with the character of that dispensation, in which so many symbols were employed. It is also held that the self-inflicted austeri ties, as fasting, sackcloth and ashes, etc., of Jewish and earliest Christian times, had for their sole purpose the 'mortification of unholy lusts and sinful passions in the people of God; or the expression of sorrow for sin, so that others beholding might be warned of its evil and restrained from it; all which is perfectly consistent with the principles of Christianity, if kept within the bounds of moderation and discretion. But penance in any other view, as a personal exercise, is utterly rejected. Arguments founded on the of the two Greek words Irtetanoe6 and metamele.omai, both translated in our English version repent, are much urged by many Roman Catholic controversialists—the former being represented as equivalent to the English do penance; but this is condemned by Protestants as inconsistent with the very use of the words in the New Testament itself. That penance began, as a practice, very early in the Christian church, is not only admitted by Protestants, but alleged in proof of the very early growth of those corrup tions which finally developed themselves in the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic church, and of which Protestants also hold that there are plain intimations in the New Testament, not only prophetical, but showing the development of their germs to have already begun during the age of the apostles.
In the discipline of the Protestant churches, penance is now unknown. The nearest approach to the Roman Catholic polity on the subject was that in use among the English Puritans of the 17 c., and more particularly in the church of Scotland during that and the succeeding century, when it was common " to make satisfaction publicly on the stool of repentance" (q.v.). It does not seem to have occurred to the Reformers, or their more immediate successors in the Protestant churches, that their sytem of discipline, with its public rebukes and enforced humiliations of various kinds—as the wearing of a sackcloth robe, and sitting on a particular seat in church—was liable to be interpreted in a sense very different from that of a mere expression of sorrow for sin; but the belief is now very general among the most zealous adherents of their doctrinal opinions, that in all this they adopted p6ctices incongruous with their creed, and in harmony rather with that of the church of Rome. Nor do they seem to have perceived that church discipline (q.v.), in its proper sense, as relating to ecclesiastical rights and privileges, is wholly dis tinct from the imposition of penalties by churches or church courts. Penitential humili ations, imposed by ecclesiastical authority, are now no more in favor where church dis cipline is most strict than where the utmost laxity prevails. The commutation of pen alties deemed shameful, for a fine to the poor of the parish, was an abuse once prevalent in Scotland, but never sanctioned by the higher ecclesiastical authorities.