An Admonition to Confessors

I. Briefly has it been disputed concerning the sacrament of Penance. Do you, O confessors, supply by doctrine, zeal, and vigilance those things which I have passed over either from a study of brevity, or from unskilfulness and ignorance. Two things it greatly concerns you to recall. One, that unless you yourselves diligently cultivate the vineyard of your own conscience, the thorns, briers, and thistles being torn out of it; unless you busy yourselves to moderate the inordinate motions of the soul, to repress pride and the ambition of shining in this stage of the world; unless you renounce the delights, enticements, and prestiges of the world; unless you yourselves be chaste, mortified, humble, and devout — in vain will you learn from the reading of books the rules and the art of governing other souls. Remember that the Venerable Master Avila teaches that scarcely one confessor in a thousand, and St. Francis de Sales that scarcely one in ten thousand, is found excellent and adorned with the necessary endowments. If I wrote such things, what curses would not be hurled against me? But I beg you often to turn over in mind documents of this kind, and that of St. Thomas of Villanova: What destroys the Church of God today, if not the flattering adulation of confessors and pastors? The reformation of Christians depends chiefly upon your care, and first of all upon the bishops, concerning whom below.

II. The other document of Christ I propose to you to be seriously meditated, which is had in Matthew 13: But while men were asleep, his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat, and went his way. And when the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit, then appeared also the cockle. At the beginning the cockle was not distinguished from the wheat, but was most like to it. Hence it is that to the servants desiring to root up the same — Wilt thou that we go and gather it up? — Christ forbade it, saying: No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle you root up the wheat also together with it. So long as certain new systems of moral doctrine are disputed in the schools, they appear like to the grain of truth. They are encrusted with so many specious paints and allurements of distinctions and cavillings, that the cockle can scarcely be discerned from the wheat. But in very truth, when fruits are to be brought forth, then truth shines forth, and the falsity of the cockle pours out its own darkness.

III. Whither do these things tend here? Behold. I have set forth to you in Book 1 the new manner of opining, implicated with very many most subtle sophisms and softened with bland speculations. To the unskilled and to minds of a duller edge the wheat of truth appeared perchance not to all clearly distinguished from the falsity of the cockle. The fruits of that manner of opining, on the testimony of the Supreme Pontiff foreign to the simple grain of evangelical truth, you have yourselves seen through all the books hitherto written, and chiefly in this eleventh, and have almost touched with your hands. How diverse the image of Christian justification which certain casuists depict is from the image which St. Paul and all the Evangelists delineate, you have yourselves seen — both in a grief conceived from the fear of some sickness, imprisonment, or infamy; and in a versatile and inconstant purpose; and in the contrariety of favourable and unfavourable doctrines. These fruits you have seen.

IV. Turn your eyes to the last and more visible fruits, namely to the morals of Christians. You yourselves behold lovers and mistresses, tardy debtors, usurers, perjurers, and followers of vanities, ambition, and pomps approaching the sacraments in troops. What reformation of morals? The wheat of truth and the sacraments of Christ bring forth their own fruits, and indeed most abundant. Do you yourselves therefore sit as judges, and pronounce sentence whether the cockle of falsity be mingled with the grain of truth.

V. Meanwhile let the most learned and most pious Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine impose an end upon this book, who in a letter to his nephew writes these things: If anyone wish to place his own salvation in safety, he ought with his whole mind to inquire the certain truth, not to regard what MANY (N.B.) at this time say or do. And if the certitude of the matter cannot clearly appear, he ought altogether to follow the SAFER part, and by no reason, at no man's command, for no temporal UTILITY (N.B.) set before him, to decline to the LESS safe. For the sum of the matter is at stake, since it is treated of eternal salvation. And it is most base (N.B.) to put on an erroneous conscience by the example of others. Meditate these things, O confessors.