On Repentance

Tertullian

  1. 1. Of Heathen Repentance
  2. 2. True Repentance a Thing Divine, Originated by God, and Subject to His Laws
  3. 3. Sins May Be Divided into Corporeal and Spiritual. Both Equally Subject, If Not to Human, Yet to Divine Investigation and Punishment.
  4. 4. Repentance Applicable to All the Kinds of Sin. To Be Practised Not Only, Nor Chiefly, for the Good It Brings, But Because God Commands It
  5. 5. Sin Never to Be Returned to After Repentance.
  6. 6. Baptism Not to Be Presumptously Received. It Requires Preceding Repentance, Manifested by Amendment of Life
  7. 7. Of Repentance, in the Case of Such as Have Lapsed After Baptism
  8. 8. Examples from Scripture to Prove the Lord's Willingness to Pardon
  9. 9. Concerning the Outward Manifestations by Which This Second Repentance is to Be Accompanied
  10. 10. Of Men's Shrinking from This Second Repentance and Exomologesis, and of the Unreasonableness of Such Shrinking
  11. 11. Further Strictures on the Same Subject
  12. 12. Final Considerations to Induce to Exomologesis

Repentance, men understand, so far as nature is able, to be an emotion of the mind arising from disgust at some previously cherished worse sentiment: that kind of men I mean which even we ourselves were in days gone by — blind, without the Lord's light. From the reason of repentance, however, they are just as far as they are from the Author of reason Himself. Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason— nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason. All, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world. Moreover, how irrationally they behave in the practice of repentance, it will be enough briefly to show just by this one fact, that they exercise it even in the case of their good deeds. They repent of good faith, of love, of simple-heartedness, of patience, of mercy, just in proportion as any deed prompted by these feelings has fallen on thankless soil. They execrate their own selves for having done good; and that species chiefly of repentance which is applied to the best works they fix in their heart, making it their care to remember never again to do a good turn. On repentance for evil deeds, on the contrary, they lay lighter stress. In short, they make this same (virtue) a means of sinning more readily than a means of right-doing.