3. Nothing sheds clearer light upon the constitution of the Church, as a perfect society, than her action in the hearing and deciding of causes.[123] The coercive power of the Church descends to her direct from God, and not from man, and was comprised from the beginning in the twofold jurisdiction of the external and the internal forum, the one criminal and the other penitential. The Son of God, who gave this power to the prelates of His Church, appointed them to be judges of men, granting to them full power to absolve and to condemn, and pledging His divine word that their sentences should be confirmed in heaven. The grant is recorded in the sixteenth chapter of St. Matthew, as promised to St. Peter in his quality as head of the Church, and in the eighteenth chapter as promised to the Apostles collectively, and in their persons to the bishops who descend from them. By this divine disposition they are the sole and ordinary judges of the Church who belong essentially to the ecclesiastical polity; and therefore St. Cyprian wrote: that "heresies have arisen and schisms sprung up from no other reason than the not yielding obedience to God's priest; and from not reflecting that there is at a time but one priest in the Church, and one judge at a time in Christ's place: to whom, if according to the divine commands the whole brotherhood yielded obedience, no one would venture to do anything against the College of Priests;"[124] that is the episcopate. This power of the keys gave a true and proper jurisdiction as well in the criminal as the penitential forum. But the difference between the two is marked. The punishment inflicted by the Church on those who were accused and convicted in judgment was different from that which was laid upon such as of their own accord, either in public or in secret, confessed their sins. The punishment inflicted on delinquents after accusation and proof of their misconduct was called a sentence, a condemnation, a sacerdotal censure, to use St. Cyprian's term; the other, which was laid upon any one who of his own accord confessed his faults, was properly a penitence, and never called a condemnation, but, on the contrary, carried with it a sacerdotal absolution from the soul's stains. The former belonged to the exterior forum, judicial and contentious; the latter to the interior forum, that of conscience. There was, indeed, a great difference between the two; for the censure laid its stroke upon those who resisted and were contumacious, who refused to confess their crime, if they were once judicially convicted; but penitence was only given to those who, by confession, voluntarily disclosed their fault, and they only who were the guilty parties formed the accusers and the witnesses against themselves.[125]