the hands of the bishops, and they used the money procured in building many of the great mediæval cathedrals. Episcopal abuse of Indulgences led to their being reserved for the Popes. Three conceptions, all of which belong to the beginning of the thirteenth century, combined to effect a great change on this old and simple idea of Indulgences. These were—(1) the formulation of the thought of a _treasury of merits_ (_thesaurus meritorum_); (2) the change of the _institution_ into the _Sacrament_ of Penance; and (3) the distinction between _attrition_ and _contrition_ in the thought of the kind of sorrow God demands from a real penitent. The conception of a storehouse of merits (_thesaurus meritorum_ or _indulgentiarum_) was first formulated by Alexander of Hales(156) in the thirteenth century, and his ideas were accepted, enlarged, and made more precise by succeeding theologians.(157) Starting with the existing practice in the Church that some penances (such as pilgrimages) might be vicariously performed, and bringing together the several thoughts that the faithful are members of one body, that the good deeds of each of the members are the common property of all, and therefore that the more sinful can benefit by the good deeds of their more saintly brethren, and that the sacrifice of Christ was sufficient to wipe out the sins of all, theologians gradually formulated the doctrine that there was a common storehouse which contained the good deeds of living men and women, of the saints in heaven and the inexhaustible merits of Christ, and that all these merits accumulated there had been placed under the charge of the Pope, and could be dispensed by him to the faithful. The doctrine was not very precisely defined by the beginning of the sixteenth century, but it was generally believed in, taught, and accepted. It went to increase the vague sense of supernatural, spiritual powers attached to the person of the Bishop of Rome. It had one important consequence on the doctrine of Indulgences. They might be the payment out of this treasury of an absolute equivalent for the _satisfaction_ due by the penitent for his sins; they were no longer merely the substitution of one form of penance for another, or the relaxation of a penance enjoined.