In the second place, repentance and grace are obscured. For eternal death is not atoned for by this compensation of works because it is idle, and does not in the present life taste of death. Something else must be opposed to death when it tries us. For just as the wrath of God is overcome by faith in Christ, so death is overcome by faith in Christ. Just as Paul says, 1 Corinthians 16, 67: But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He does not say: "Who giveth us the victory if we oppose our satisfactions against death." The adversaries treat of idle speculations concerning the remission of guilt, and do not see how in the remission of guilt, the heart is freed by faith in Christ from God's anger and eternal death. Since, therefore, the death of Christ is a satisfaction for eternal death, and since the adversaries themselves confess that these works of satisfactions are works that are not due, but are works of human traditions, of which Christ says, Matthew 16, 9, that they are vain acts of worship, we can safely affirm that canonical satisfactions are not necessary by divine Law for the remission of guilt, or eternal punishment, or the punishment of purgatory.
But the adversaries object that vengeance or punishment is necessary for repentance, because Augustine says that repentance is vengeance punishing, etc.. We grant that vengeance or punishment is necessary in repentance, yet not as merit or price, as the adversaries imagine that satisfactions are. But vengeance is in repentance formally, i.e., because regeneration itself occurs by a perpetual mortification of the oldness of life. The saying of Scotus may indeed be very beautiful, that poenitentia is so called because it is, as it were, poenae tenentia, holding to punishment. But of what punishment, of what vengeance, does Augustine speak? Certainly of true punishment, of true vengeance, namely, of contrition, of true terrors. Nor do we here exclude the outward mortifications of the body, which follow true grief of mind. The adversaries make a great mistake if they imagine that canonical satisfactions [their juggler's tricks, rosaries, pilgrimages, and such like] are more truly punishments than are true terrors in the heart. It is most foolish to distort the name of punishment to these frigid satisfactions, and not to refer them to those horrible terrors of conscience of which David says, Psalm 18, 4; 2 Samuel 22, 5: The sorrows of death compassed me. Who would not rather, clad in mail and equipped, seek the church of James, the basilica of Peter, etc., than bear that ineffable violence of grief which exists even in persons of ordinary lives, if there be true repentance?
