containing the good deeds of living men, of the saints in heaven, and the inexhaustible merits of Christ, and that the merits there accumulated had been placed in the charge of the Pope and could be dispensed by him to the faithful. The doctrine was not thoroughly defined in the fifteenth century, but it was generally accepted and increased the power and resources of the Pope. It had one immediate consequence on the theory of Indulgences. They were no longer regarded as the substitution of some enjoined work for a canonical penance; they could be looked upon as an absolute equivalent of what was, due to God, paid over to Him out of this Treasury of merits.
When the institution became the Sacrament of Penance it was divided into three parts-Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction; and Absolution was made to accompany Confession and therefore to precede Satisfaction, which it had formerly followed. Satisfaction lost its old meaning. It was not the outward sign of inward sorrow, the test of fitness for pardon, and the necessary precedent of Absolution. According to the new theory, Absolution, which followed Confession and preceded Satisfaction, had the effect of removing the whole guilt of the sins confessed, and, with the guilt, the whole of the eternal punishment due; but this cancelling of guilt and of eternal punishment did not open straightway the gates of Heaven. It was thought that the Divine righteousness could not permit the baptised sinner to escape all punishment; so the idea of temporal punishment was introduced, and these poenae temporales, strictly distinguished from the eternal, included punishment in Purgatory. The pains of Purgatory therefore were not included in the Absolution, and everyone must suffer these had not God in His mercy provided an alternative in temporal Satisfactions. This gave rise to a great uncertainty; for who could have the assurance that the priest in imposing the Satisfaction or penance had calculated rightly and had assigned the equivalent which the righteousness of God demanded? It was here that the new idea of Indulgences came in to aid the faithful. Indulgences in the sense of relaxations of imposed penance went into the background, and the valuable Indulgence was what would secure against the pains of Purgatory. Thus in the opinion of Alexander of Hales, of Bonaventura, and above all of Thomas Aquinas, the real value of Indulgences is that they procure the remission of penalties after Contrition, Confession, and Absolution, whether these penalties have been imposed by the priest or not; and when the uncertainty of the imposed penalties is considered, Indulgences are most valuable with regard to the unimposed penalties; the priest might make a mistake, but God does not.
While, as has been seen, Indulgences were always related to Satisfactions and changed in character with the changes introduced into the meaning of these, they were not less closely affected by the distinction
