1. Two Conclusions of Others

86. As to the question asked about the eighteenth distinction [n.3] there are two conclusions:

The first negative: namely that the force of the keys does not extend itself to the removal of guilt or of eternal penalty [Thomas Aquinas, Sent. IV d.18 q.1 a.3; Richard of Middleton, Sent. IV d.18 princ.2 q.1].

87. The master seems to think this in this distinction [Lombard, Sent. IV d.18 ch.6 n.3], “God,” he says, “does by himself dismiss sin thus, because he both cleanses the soul from interior stain and releases it from the debt of eternal death.”

88. What then do Gospel priests do?

He replies: “God bestows on them the power of binding and loosing, that is, of showing that they are bound or loosed.”

89. He proves it about the leper who is cured before sent to the priest, Luke 5.14; similarly about Lazarus resuscitated before handed to the disciples to be loosed, John 11.44.

90. Again, Jerome in his Commentary on Matthew 16.19, “I will give you the keys etc.,” says “In Leviticus 14.2-4 lepers are bidden to show themselves to the priests, because the priests do not make them lepers or clean, but discern who are clean or unclean.”

91. Herefrom the Master says [ibid.], “What once the legal priests had in the Law in curing lepers, this now the Gospel priest has in retaining or remitting faults.”

92. The affirmative conclusion is added [n.86; Aquinas, ibid., Richard of Middleton, ibid. q.2], that the force of the keys extends itself to the temporal penalty.

93. And in this the Master gives exposition in a different way [ibid. n.4] about how the Gospel priest looses and binds, because “he binds to the temporal penalty that he imposes on the confessing penitent, but he looses when he dismisses something from the penalty due, or admits the sinner who is purged by it to communion in the sacraments.”

94. But the point is added that this power is with respect to the temporal penalty, because the act of it is not ratified unless it is in conformity with divine judgment, namely, unless it imposes as much penalty as, according to divine justice, responds to the sins. Suppose, for example, that this man is by his sins bound according to strict rigor to such and such a penalty of ten days; the priest can remit, by virtue of the keys, a penalty for him of three days, and let it be that this priest, as dispenser of the Church’s treasury, could remit one or two days - after all this, the man remains obligated to six or five days, from which, if the priest dismiss something, this his obligation is not ratified, because the key of power is then erring in binding and loosing; for it makes him more loosed from temporal penalty than God judges him loosed,That is, the priest, by virtue of the keys, remits to the penitent in confession three days of the ten that are due. Then, by virtue of being dispenser of the Church’s treasury (and not by the power of the keys), he remits another one or two days, leaving the penitent with five or six days still to pay. If the priest remits more, imposing a lesser penalty still on the penitent in confession (as Richard [n.92] at least allows he may do), the penitent’s obligation to this lesser penalty is not ratified by God, but the penitent must pay the full five or six days remaining, at least in purgatory. ⁵⁹ and consequently, unless he pay those six days here, the remainder of them will be exacted in purgatory.