2. Among the living Greek Communions are to be found descendants of those sects which either separated from or were cast off by the Church centuries ago. The Photians date back to the tenth century; the Nestorians, the Jacobites, the Abyssinians, the Copts, to the fifth and sixth centuries. Differing as these do in some points of doctrine, and parted by the bitterest antipathies, yet on the matter of absolution and confession they have the same teaching and practice. It is no question of unburdening a troubled conscience for peace and counsel, but confession is exacted as a necessary condition for obtaining pardon. In 1576, the patriarch Jeremias of Constantinople sent to the Protestant theologians of Tuebingen a declaration of the belief of the Greeks. In it, among other doctrines, that of the absolute necessity of detailed confession to a priest is asserted. These sects then are, by their practice and teaching, witnesses to the truth concerning the sacrament of reconciliation as taught by Holy Church in our day. 3. Early heresies contribute, in like manner, their part to the mass of irrefragable evidence in support of the doctrine. As early as the second century, Eusebius says A. D. 171, the Montanists arose in Asia Minor. Among other things, Montanus, their founder, taught that were any to "commit grievous sin after baptism, to deny Christ, or have been stained with the guilt of impurity, murder, or like crimes, they were to be for ever cut off from the communion of the Church." While admitting that power to forgive sin was given by Christ to the Apostles and their successors, Montanus wished to restrict that power, excluding from its domain idolatry, impurity, and homicide. Some eighty years later, two schisms were created: the one in North Africa, led by the priest Novatus, aided by the deacon Felicissimus, the other by the anti-pope Novatian, in Rome. Both were prompted by the question of receiving into the communion of the Church those who had lapsed into idolatry, or had denied the faith during the times of persecution. The African schism insisted on the laxest possible line of action, namely, to receive indiscriminately without proof of penitence. The schism in Rome pursued the most unyielding rigorism. "Whoever," said Novatian, its leader, "has offered sacrifice to idols, or stained his soul with the guilt of sin, can no longer remain within the Church; and if he be of those who have denied the faith, he can not again enter her communion: for her members consist only of pure and faithful souls."