1. To this is added that the sins themselves are so held hidden—whether others' from us, or ours from others—that very often even a holy man passes for a sinner, and a sinner obtains the reputation of a holy man. If an innocent man cannot defend himself, the incautious suspicion of a judge condemns him, and the cunning of a lively wit excuses the guilty. Yet these things deceive not the divine but the human judgment. And what wonder, if without their confession we do not know what the souls of others are like, when we so know our own selves today that we do not know what we shall be like tomorrow? But when any of our brethren open to us, as to physicians, their sins—the wounds by which they are pressed;
we ought to take pains that they may come, by God's authorship, as quickly as possible to health, lest by a dissembled treatment they grow worse. But those crimes of any persons, if—the criminals themselves being unwilling to confess them—they have become clear from any source; whatever has not been healed by the gentle medicament of patience must be burned and cured, as it were, by a certain fire of pious rebuke. 2. But if not even thus has the remedy of one bearing with equanimity and piously rebuking profited in those who, long borne with and wholesomely chided, have refused to be corrected; they must, like putrid parts of the body, be cut off with the knife of excommunication: lest, as flesh deadened by diseases, if it be not cut away, corrupts the health of the remaining flesh by the contagion of its own rottenness;
so these who scorn to be amended, and persist in their disease, if with depraved manners they remain in the society of the saints, may infect them by the example of their own perdition. Furthermore, those whose sins lie hidden from human knowledge—neither confessed by themselves nor published by others—if they are unwilling to confess or amend them, will have God, whom they have as witness, also as avenger. And what does it profit them to avoid human judgment, since, if they persist in their evil, they will go into eternal punishment, with God requiting it? But if they become judges of themselves, and, as avengers of their own iniquity, here in themselves exercise a voluntary penalty of the most severe chastisement;
they will exchange eternal torments for temporal penalties, and with tears flowing from true compunction of heart they will quench the burnings of eternal fire. But those who, set in some ecclesiastical rank, secretly commit some crime, deceive themselves by a vain persuasion, if it seems to them that they ought therefore to communicate and to fulfill their office, because they deceive men by the concealment of their crime. For excepting those sins which are so small that they cannot be guarded against—for the expiation of which we daily cry to God and say: Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors (Matt. vi, 12)—let those crimes be guarded against which, once made public, cause their authors to be condemned by human judgment.
But those who have committed such crimes, and for that reason fear to disclose them, lest they receive the sentence of a just excommunication, communicate without cause; nay rather, they doubly heap up against themselves the wrath of the divine indignation, in that they both feign innocence before men, and, despising the judgment of God, are ashamed to abstain from the altar on account of men. Wherefore those will more easily appease God for themselves who acknowledge their crime not convicted by human judgment, but of their own accord;
those who either disclose it by their own confessions, or—while others remain unaware of how hidden their sins are—pass upon themselves the sentence of voluntary excommunication, and being separated from the altar at which they were ministering, not in spirit but in office, lament their own life as though it were dead; certain that, when they have been reconciled to God by the fruits of an effective penance, they will not only recover what they had lost, but, being made citizens of the heavenly city, will also attain to everlasting joys.