Yet I presume that most men either shun this work as a publication of themselves, or defer it from day to day, more mindful of shame than of salvation—like those who, having contracted an ailment in the more shameful parts of the body, avoid the physicians who could heal them, and so perish together with their bashfulness. It is intolerable, forsooth, to make satisfaction to the offended Lord, to be restored to one's forfeited salvation! You are a fine one for modesty, opening wide your brow to sinning, but drawing it down when it comes to deprecating! I make no room for a blush, when I gain more from the loss of it, when it in a manner exhorts the man, saying, 'Have no regard for me; it is better for me to perish for your sake.'
Surely its peril is then burdensome, if at all, when it consists among mockers in derisive talk, where by another's downfall another is exalted, where one is trodden upon while prostrate; but among brethren and fellow-servants, where the hope, the fear, the joy, the grief, the suffering is common, because the Spirit is common, from a common Lord and Father—what else do you think these are than yourself? Why do you flee the partners of your own misfortunes as though they were applauders? The body cannot rejoice at the ailing of a single member: the whole must needs suffer together and labour together toward a remedy. In one and another the Church is present, and the Church, indeed, is Christ: therefore, when you stretch yourself out at the knees of the brethren, you are handling Christ, you are entreating Christ;
and likewise, when they shed tears over you, it is Christ who suffers, Christ who entreats the Father. Easily is that always obtained which the Son asks. Plainly, the concealment of a fault promises a great reward to bashfulness! Namely, if we withdraw something from human knowledge, shall we likewise hide it from the Lord? Are the estimation of men and the conscience of God to be so compared? Or is it better to lie hidden while condemned, than to be openly absolved? 'It is wretched thus to come to exomologesis.' Yes—it is wretched to sin; but where one must repent, wretchedness departs, because it has become salutary. It is wretched to be cut and burned with the cautery and tormented by the sharpness of some powder:
yet the things that heal by their unpleasantness both excuse the offence they give by the profit of the cure, and commend the present injury for the sake of the advantage to come. XI. What if, besides the shame which they count the weightier thing, they also dread the discomforts of the body—that one must sojourn unwashed, sordid, apart from cheerfulness, in the roughness of sackcloth and the horror of ashes, and with a countenance wan from fasting? Is it fitting, then, that we should make supplication for our faults in scarlet and Tyrian purple? 'Fetch me the pin for parting my hair, and the powder for polishing my teeth, and some two-pronged instrument of iron or bronze for trimming my nails!
If there be any counterfeit sheen, if any forced blush, let it press upon lips or cheeks!' Besides, seek out the more pleasant baths of some garden or seaside retreat, add to your expense, hunt up the huge fattening of fowls, refine the age of every wine: and if anyone should ask why you lavish upon your soul, say: 'I have sinned against the Lord, and I am in peril of perishing forever: and so now I hang in suspense, and I mortify and torment myself, that I may reconcile to myself God, whom by sinning I have wounded!'
But consider those who go about canvassing for the winning of magistracies: they are neither ashamed nor grieved to strain themselves in pursuit of their ambitions amid disadvantages of soul and body, and not only amid disadvantages but even amid every kind of indignity. What meanness of dress do they not affect? What halls do they not besiege with nocturnal and premature salutations, bowing lower at every encounter with any person of greater rank, frequenting no banquets, joining in no feastings, but exiles from the blessedness of liberty and gladness — and all this for the fleeting joy of a single year!
Shall we, then, hesitate to endure for the sake of eternity what the seeking of the axes and rods sustains, and shall we fail to render to our offended Lord a chastisement of food and dress, such as the heathen inflict upon themselves though no one at all is harmed? These are they of whom Scripture makes mention: Woe to them who bind their sins as it were with a long rope! XII. If you draw back from confession, consider in your heart the hell which confession shall extinguish for you; and first imagine the greatness of the punishment, that you may not doubt about accepting the remedy. What must we reckon that treasury of eternal fire to be, when certain little vents of it stir up such strokes of flame that the nearest cities either no longer stand or expect the same for themselves from day to day?
The proudest mountains, teeming with fire within, burst asunder; and — what proves to us the perpetuity of the judgment — though they burst asunder, though they are devoured, yet they are never brought to an end! Who will not reckon these punishments of the mountains meanwhile to be patterns of the threatening judgment? Who will not agree that such sparks are certain missiles and practice-javelins of some great and inestimable furnace? Therefore, since you know that against hell, after those first defences of the Lord's baptism, there are still further aids in a second confession, why do you abandon your salvation? Why do you delay to approach what you know will heal you? Even dumb and unreasoning creatures recognize in due season the medicines divinely bestowed upon them:
the stag, pierced through by an arrow, that it may expel from the wound the iron and its irrevocable lingering, knows that it must eat dittany; the swallow, if she has blinded her young, knows how to give them eyes again from her own celandine: shall the sinner, in restoring to himself the confession appointed by the Lord, knowingly pass it by — that confession which restored the Babylonian king to his kingdom? For long had he offered penitence to the Lord, working out his confession in a seven-year squalor, with a savagery like a lion's claws and a neglect of hair presenting an eagle-like ruggedness. O the blessedness of that evil treatment! Whom men shuddered at, God received.
But on the contrary, the Egyptian ruler, who having persecuted the people of God — once afflicted, and long denied to their Lord — rushed into battle, after so many proofs of the plagues perished by the splitting of the sea, which it was granted to that people alone to pass through, when the waves rolled back: for he had cast away penitence and its ministry, confession! Why should I say more of these two, as it were the planks of human salvation, caring rather for the business of the pen than for the duty of my conscience? For sinner as I am, of every mark, and born for nothing but penitence, I cannot easily keep silence about that thing concerning which even Adam himself, the head both of the human race and of the offence against the Lord, restored by confession to his own paradise, does not keep silence!