The Forgiveness of Sins

As for the forgiveness of sins, it ought to be enough simply to believe it. For who asks the cause or the reason when a ruler grants a pardon? When the generosity of an earthly sovereign is no fit subject for debate, will man’s rashness debate God’s bounty? For the pagans like to ridicule us, saying that we deceive ourselves when we imagine that crimes committed in deed can be purged away by words. They say, “Can a man who has committed murder be no murderer, and a man who has committed adultery be counted no adulterer? How then is someone guilty of crimes like these to be made holy all of a sudden?”

But to this, as I said, we give a better answer by faith than by reason. For the one who has promised it is King of all; the one who assures us of it is Lord of heaven and earth. Would you have me refuse to believe that he who made me a man from the dust of the earth can make me innocent when I was guilty? Or that he who made me see when I was blind, or hear when I was deaf, or walk when I was lame, can recover for me my lost innocence?

And to come to the witness of nature: to kill a man is not always a crime, but to kill out of malice and not by law is a crime. In such matters, then, it is not the deed that condemns me, since sometimes it is rightly done, but the evil intention of the mind. If, then, my mind, which had been made criminal and in which the sin began, is corrected, why should I seem to you incapable of being made innocent, I who was criminal before? For if it is plain, as I have shown, that crime lies not in the deed but in the will, then just as an evil will, prompted by an evil demon, made me liable to sin and death, so the will prompted by the good God, once changed to good, has restored me to innocence and life. It is the same with all other crimes. In this way there is found to be no conflict between our faith and natural reason, since forgiveness of sins is credited not to deeds, which once done cannot be changed, but to the mind, which, it is certain, can be turned from bad to good.