The hour came, at length, when, after three hundred years of struggle and distress, truth took possession of imperial power, and the civil laws lent their aid to the ecclesiastical constitutions.  The magistrate, from that time, cooperated with the priest, and clerical sentences were made efficacious by secular force.  But the state, when it came to the assistance of the church, had no intention to diminish its authority.  Those rebukes and those censures, which were lawful before, were lawful still.  But they had hitherto operated only upon voluntary submission.  The refractory and contemptuous were at first in no danger of temporal severities, except what they might suffer from the reproaches of conscience, or the detestation of their fellow christians.  When religion obtained the support of law, if admonitions and censures had no effect, they were seconded by the magistrates with coercion and punishment.

It, therefore, appears, from ecclesiastical history, that the right of inflicting shame by publick censure has been always considered as inherent in the church; and that this right was not conferred by the civil power; for it was exercised when the civil power operated against it.  By the civil power it was never taken away; for the Christian magistrate interposed his office, not to rescue sinners from censure, but to supply more powerful means of reformation; to add pain where shame was insufficient; and when men were proclaimed unworthy of the society of the faithful, to restrain them by imprisonment, from spreading abroad the contagion of wickedness.

It is not improbable, that from this acknowledged power of publick censure, grew, in time, the practice of auricular confession.  Those who dreaded the blast of publick reprehension, were willing to submit themselves to the priest, by a private accusation of themselves; and to obtain a reconciliation with the church by a kind of clandestine absolution and invisible penance; conditions with which the priest would, in times of ignorance and corruption, easily comply, as they increased his influence, by adding the knowledge of secret sins to that of notorious offences, and enlarged his authority, by making him the sole arbiter of the terms of reconcilement.

From this bondage the Reformation set us free.  The minister has no longer power to press into the retirements of conscience, or torture us by interrogatories, or put himself in possession of our secrets and our lives.  But though we have thus controlled his usurpations, his just and original power remains unimpaired.  He may still see, though he may not pry; he may yet hear, though he may not question.  And that knowledge which his eyes and ears force upon him, it is still his duty to use, for the benefit of his flock.  A father, who lives near a wicked neighbour, may forbid a son to frequent his company.  A minister, who has in his congregation a man of open and scandalous wickedness, may warn his parishioners to shun his