The office of penitentiary was this: in every large city, a priest or minister was specially appointed to preside over the church meetings where the members who had committed public sins were obliged to confess them publicly before the assembly, in order to be reinstated in the privileges of their membership; and that minister had the charge of reading or pronouncing the sentence of pardon granted by the church to the guilty ones, before they could be admitted again to communion. This was perfectly in accordance with what St. Paul had done with regard to the incestuous one of Corinth, that scandalous sinner, who had cast obloquy on the Christian name; but who, after confessing and weeping over his sins, before the church, obtained his pardon--not from a priest in whose ears he had whispered all the shocking details of his incestuous intercourse, but from the whole church assembled. St. Paul gladly approves the Church of Corinth in thus receiving again in their midst a wandering but repenting brother. There is as much difference between such public confessions and auricular confessions, as there is between heaven and hell, between God and his great enemy, Satan. Public confession, then, dates from the time of the apostles, and is still practised in protestant churches of our day. But auricular confession was unknown by the disciples of Christ; as it is rejected, to-day, with horror by all the true followers of the Son of God. Erasmus, one of the most learned Roman Catholics which opposed the Reformation in the 16th century, so admirably begun by Luther and Calvin, fearlessly and honestly makes the following declaration in his treaty: De Paenitantia, Dis 5. "This institution of penance began rather of some tradition of the Old or New Testament. But our divines, not advisedly considering what the old doctors do say, are deceived: that which they say of general and open confession, they wrest by and by to this secret and privy kind of confession. It is a public fact, which no learned Roman Catholic has ever denied, that auricular confession became a dogma and obligatory practice of the church only at the council of Lateran in the year 1215, under the Pope Innocent III. Not a single trace of auricular confession, as a dogma, can be found before that year. Thus, it has taken more than twelve hundred years of efforts for Satan to bring out that master-piece of his inventions to conquer the world and destroy the souls of men. Little by little, that imposture had crept into the world, just as the shadows of a stormy night creep without any one being able to note the moment when the first rays of light give way before the dark clouds. We know very well when the sun was shining, we know when it was very dark all over the world, but no one can tell positively when the first ray of light faded away. So saith the Lord: "The Kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field.