INDULGENCE. An indulgence is a par tial or total remission by the Church, through an extra-sacramental channel, of the temporal punishment due for sin after its guilt and eternal penalty have been removed by the sacra ment of penance. The theological basis upon which the doctrine rests is that all the acts of Christ, the God-Man, were of infinite value, that the acts of the Saints are his acts because vivified by divine grace, and from this treasury of divine, supereminent merit the Church is able, so to speak, to pay the debt of temporal punishment for the repentant sinner.
Certain cardinal principles of Catholic life are requisite to obtain a correct idea of the Catholic doctrine of indulgences. Growth and adaptation have characterized the Christian organism from the Apostolic Council of Jeru salem to the (Ecumenical Council of the Vat ican. The development of doctrine, upon which such explicit emphasis was laid by the late Cardinal Newman, is of prime significance for the student who would institute a comparison between the teaching and practice of the Church in the matter of indulgences at the present day and during apostolic times. We may observe in passing that the principle of doctrinal development is in perfect harmony with the scientific spirit of the present age. Growth and adaptation are now believed to be distinguishing features of every living and pro gressive organism. We should not, therefore, expect to find the Catholic system of indul gences, in all its complex details, flourishing in the primitive Church. In harmony with the law of development, essential to every organ ization among men, we believe that the Church's boast of *temper eadent* is not defeated by calling attention to the richness, variety and flexibility of the outer forms of its polity and liturgy, or to the varying emphasis given to special dogmas in the course of its history, in response to the needs of particular eras. Unity in diversity is the Church's most appropriate motto. The doctrine and practice of indul gences, therefore, which obtain throughout the Catholic world at the present time must be sought for only in germ in Sacred Scripture and in the practice of the primitive Church, just as the bole, the branches and the foliage of an oak tree, monarch of the forescp existed potentially in the acorn from which it sprung.
Indulgences being the remission of the tem poral punishment due to sin, the interpretation of the true character should start from the Christian idea of the nature and purpose of punishment. It is therefore strange that writ ers of all schools of opinion concerning indul gences should fail to correlate the two con cepts. At the present day the conviction pre
vails almost universally among non-Catholic students of penology that punishment is ex clusively disciplinary and correctional. No theory could be more alien to the spirit of the entire Old Testament or to the mind of the early Christian Fathers. The inflexible and rigorous justice of God making death the wages of sin appears in almost every page of the history of his covenant with Israel. The New Testament, founded on the atonement by Christ, only mitigates this view by impressing on the minds of men the possibility of vicarious satisfaction for their transgressions. But al though Christ's atoning and vicarious sacrifice was all-sufficient in itself, or objectively con sidered, to satisfy the offended justice of his Heavenly Father, nevertheless the Christian economy of redemption demands each individ ual's co-operation at every stage in order to appropriate Christ's merits and make them sub jective to himself. The opposite view (that is, the belief), that the creature has no active part in his sanctification and salvation, inclines toward Pantheism, robs good works and the Christian sacraments of genuine value, and differentiates the Lutheran from the Catholic position. According to Catholic teaching the guilt of sin is cleansed from the soul by the application of the merits of the precious blood of Christ through the instrumentality of the Sacraments, whose efficacy, in the case of adults, depends on the subjective disposition of the recipient. The eternal punishment due to sin disappears with the guilt to which it is annexed. But, besides having these super natural and eternal relations and consequences, sin viewed even within the circumscribed limits of man's natural life on earth is an act of treason against God in His own kingdom involving forfeiture of all rights to life and all the good things with which God's prov idence has so bountifully enriched it. This temporal consequence of sin calls for a tem poral reparation. The canonical penalties there fore imposed on the Church during the first centuries were intended to pay this temporal debt to the Divine justice, and were not merely disciplinary or correctional; and the sinner. in submitting to them, or in seeking mitigation from them through the intercession of the martyrs, recognized the necessity of his own personal act to satisfy thejustice of God, either directly or vicariously by appropriating through the charity of the Church the super abundant merits of Christ and His Saints.