confession, and penance. But an exception was introduced in the case of adulteresses, who might risk their lives if they confessed publicly; and these exceptions, or concessions, multiplied. In 459, Leo | forbade reading confessions in public; he said it sufficed to confess to God, and then to a priest or bishop, who would pray for the sinner. By the time of Gregory the Great it was accepted that confession was necessary for the remission of sin, and that it was in sacerdotal hands; but it was apparently accompanied by a public ceremony. Auricular confession, in its mature form, was probably a byproduct of the conversion of the Germanic tribes; it was established much more slowly in southern Europe. Of course most people preferred it to public humiliation; the chief brake on its expansion was the shortage of priests. The Council of Chalons, 813, laid down that confessions in private to God or to a priest were equally effective; and delayed, or deathbed, confessions were popular - as baptism had once been. Auricular confession as a standard, and as a sacrament, developed pari passu with papal and clericalist theory in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and was clearly connected with them. The first formulation of the sacramental basis was by the Paris schoolmen, especially by Peter Lombard, who relied on a forged Augustinian tract (Augustine did not in fact deal with the problem). Pseudo-lsadora forgeries played a major role in the evolution of the related 'Power of the Keys' theory. The salient forgery was in the Capitularies of Benedict the Levite, a supposed document of Clement |, reciting his ordination as Bishop of Rome, in which Peter formally transmitted to him the power of the keys; Peter was made to say that bishops were the keys of the Church since they have the power to open and close the gates of Heaven. Hence, in the twelfth century, confession to a priest in private was the only form still used in the West, except in certain monasteries where the earlier tradition of public confession lingered on for a time. The Council of Paris, 1198, published the first synodical code of instructions for confessors; and at the Lateran Council in 1216 Innocent Ill made auricular confession compulsory for all adult Christians. There remained an unresolved argument throughout the Middle Ages whether confession was a human or divine institution; then, in the sixteenth century, the denial of the Reformers that it was a sacrament at all hardened opinion among the papalists, and the Council of Trent declared it divine. Innocent III'S insistence on confession to a priest, in private, undoubtedly sprang from his resolve to fight deviation and heresy by all means available. It enabled the Church to be far more flexible in its tactics, and to adapt them to particular problems, places and men. And, whereas public confession was a form of rude democracy, the carefully selected confessor underpinned the hierarchy of society. Confessing a king, a duke or an archbishop was a highly skilled clerical trade, as many manuals survive to testify - they give us, among other things, revealing insights into medieval political theory. The development of the ‘private confessor’ was yet one more indication that, in the eyes of the Church, Christians were not necessarily equal even in spiritual matters. The principle tended to be extended to penance also; or, more particularly, to the methods of performing it. The Christian promise of salvation, so hugely attractive to the Mediterranean world and, later, to the northern barbarians, was balanced by a horrifying theory of the alternative for sinners. The existence of Hell, as some of the early Fathers had argued, helped to justify Heaven; at any rate, it seemed to unsophisticated minds to make salvation seem more credible. There was never absolute agreement about how many would be saved. Origen had thought it possible all might, in the end, be redeemed; but this opinion was condemned by a sixth-century council and the tendency in the Dark Ages was to reduce the possibilities sharply. By the thirteenth century, official opinion had stabilized: ‘few’, thought Aquinas, would be saved, and ‘very many’ damned; most later medieval preachers put the saved as one in 1,000 or even one in 10,000. Hence, with the development of Hell-theory and the paucity of the saved, the difficulty of obtaining full remission for sin naturally increased. Dark Age penances were almost incredibly arduous. Like secular crimes, they were based on the principle of compensation - not to the victim, however, but to God. And hew eeuid an guiraged God be compensated in full? The only way to do it was to inflate the idea of self67