and the Roman Curia-a confessedly difficult task. The question still remains whether the official documents did not assert that Indulgences did remove guilt as well as penalty of the temporal kind. If documents granting Indulgences, published after the Sacrament of Penance had been formulated, be examined, it will be found that many of them, while proclaiming the Indulgence and its benefits, make no mention of the necessity of previous confession and priestly absolution; that others expressly assert that the Indulgence confers a remission of guilt (culpa) as well as penalty; and that very many, especially in the Jubilee times, use language which inevitably led intelligent laymen (Dante for example) to believe that the Indulgence remitted the guilt as well as the penalties of actual sins; and when all due allowance has been made it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Indulgences had been declared on the highest authority to be efficacious for the removal of the guilt of sins in the presence of God.
Luther however approached the whole question not from the side of theological theory but from its practical moral effect on the minds of the common people, who were not theologians and on whom refined distinctions were thrown away; and the evidence that the people believed that the Indulgence remitted the guilt as well as the penalties of sins is overwhelming. Putting aside the statements or views of Hus, Wiclif, and the Piers Plowman series of poems, contemporary chroniclers are found describing Indulgences given for crusades or in times of Jubilee as remissions of guilt as well as of penalty; contemporary preachers dwelt on the distinction between the partial and the plenary Indulgence, asserted that the latter meant remission of guilt as well as of penalty, and explained their statements by insisting that the plenary Indulgence included within it the Sacrament of Penance; the popular guide-books written for pilgrims to Rome and Compostella spread the popular ideas about Indulgences, and this without any interference from the ecclesiastical authorities. The Mirabilia Romae, a very celebrated guide-book for pilgrims to Rome, which had gone through nineteen Latin and twelve German editions before the year 1500, says expressly that every pilgrim who visits the Lateran has forgiveness of all sins, of guilt as well as of penalty, and makes the same statement about the virtues of the Indulgences given to other shrines. The popular belief was so well acknowledged that even Councils had to excuse themselves from having fostered it, and did so by laying the blame on the preachers and sellers of Indulgences, or, like the Council of Constance, impeached the Pope and compelled him to confess that he had granted Indulgences for the remission of guilt as well as of penalty. This widespread popular belief justified the attitude taken up by Luther.
But if it be granted that the intelligent belief of the Church as found in the writings of its most respected theologians was that the Indulgence remitted the penalty and not the guilt of sin, it is well to
