St. Chrysostom, in his thirtieth Homily, says: “Lo! we have now, at length, reached the close of Holy Lent; now especially we must press forward in the career of fasting, ... and exhibit a _full_ and _accurate confession of our sins_, ... that with these good works, having come to the day of Easter, we may enjoy the bounty of the Lord.... For, as the enemy knows that having confessed our sins and _shown_ our wounds to the _physician_ we attain to an abundant cure, he in an especial manner opposes us.” Again he says: “Do not _confess to me_ only of fornication, nor of those things that are manifest among all men, but bring together also thy secret calumnies and evil speakings, ... and all such things.”(451) The great Doctor plainly enjoins here a detailed and specific confession of our sins not to God, but to His minister, as the whole context evidently shows. The same Father, in an eloquent treatise on the power of the sacred ministry, uses the following words: “To the Priests is given a power which God would not grant either to angels or archangels; inasmuch that what the Priests do below God ratifies above, and the Master confirms the sentence of His servants. For, He says, ‘Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.’ “What power, I ask, can be greater than this? The Father hath given all power to the Son; and I see all this same power delivered to them by God the Son. “To cleanse the leprosy of the body, or rather to pronounce it cleansed, was given to the Jewish Priests alone. But to our Priests is granted the power not of declaring healed the leprosy of the body, but of absolutely cleansing the defilements of the soul.”(452) And again: “If a sinner, as becomes him; would use the aid of his conscience, and hasten to confess his crimes and disclose his ulcer to his physician, who may heal and not reproach, and receive remedies from him; if he would speak to him alone, without the knowledge of any one, and with care lay all before him, easily would he amend his failings; _for the confession of sins is the absolution of crimes_.”(453) St. Jerome writes: “If the serpent, the devil, secretly bite a man and thus infect him with the poison of sin, and this man shall remain silent, and do not penance, nor be willing to make known his wound to his brother and master; the master, who has a tongue that can heal, cannot easily serve him. For if the ailing man be ashamed to open his case to the physician no cure can be expected; for medicine does not cure that of which it knows nothing.”(454) Elsewhere he says: “With us the Bishop or Priest binds or looses—not them who are merely innocent or guilty—but _having heard, as his duty requires, the various qualities of sin_ he understands who should be bound and who loosed.”(455) Could the Catholic doctrine regarding the power of the Priests and the obligation of confession be expressed in stronger language than this?