Catholics go to confession with a priest. Most Protestants do not. The Catholic claim is that Christ instituted this practice in John 20, that the apostles and their successors exercised it continuously from the earliest decades of the Church, and that the discipline was formalised — not invented — at Lateran IV in 1215 and defined against the Reformers at Trent in 1551. The Reformed objection is that penance is not a true sacrament, that confession is owed to God alone, and that the Catholic rite developed after the apostolic period. This article reports what the primary sources say on both sides: the Reformers stated in their own words, then the Scriptures, then the Fathers from the ante-Nicene period forward, then the conciliar and Magisterial reception, then the two questions Protestant readers most often ask. Every claim opens to its source. LumenVeritatis reports the Church's teaching from primary sources; it does not pronounce that teaching. The reader who wants to verify any citation can do so through the shortcode attached.

I. The Reformed objection, stated at its strongest

No honest discussion of sacramental confession can proceed without letting the Reformers speak in their own voice first. John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion devotes chapter IV.19 to a sustained argument that penance is not a sacrament instituted by Christ. Calvin's central move is to deny that the visible ceremony of absolution corresponds to a divine promise of the kind required to constitute a sacrament:

On the question whether penitence can properly be called a sacrament at all, Calvin writes that the Romanists and Schoolmen "anxiously labour to find a sacrament here, and it cannot seem wonderful, for they seek a thing where it is not."[1] He grants that, of the Catholic candidates, the priest's absolution is the most plausible nominee for a sacramental rite, but denies it stands: "I deny that it can justly be regarded as a sacrament; first, because there exists not to this effect any special promise of God, which is the only ground of a sacrament; and, secondly, because whatever ceremony is here used is a mere invention of man."[2] Baptism, Calvin concludes, is itself the sacrament of penitence; a second sacrament on top of it is, in his terms, "falsehood and imposture."

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) — the confessional standard of Reformed Presbyterianism — treats repentance in Chapter XV, Of Repentance unto Life. Repentance is "an evangelical grace," "the doctrine whereof is to be preached by every minister of the gospel, as well as that of faith in Christ."[3] On the question of confession specifically, the governing section is XV.VI: "As every man is bound to make private confession of his sins to God, praying for the pardon thereof, upon which, and the forsaking of them, he shall find mercy; so he that scandalizeth his brother, or the Church of Christ, ought to be willing, by a private or public confession and sorrow for his sin, to declare his repentance to those that are offended."[4] Confession to another human being is permitted only in the case of scandal given, and it is still directed at the offended party, not a priest as priest. The duty proper is "private confession of his sins to God."

The governing Reformed exegesis of 1 John 1:9 — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquity"[5] — takes "if we confess" as direct-to-God, transacted in the sinner's own heart, sufficient without any mediating minister. That is the Reformed position as the Reformers framed it, and it is the position a Protestant reader is entitled to have reported fairly before any Catholic source is opened. The remainder of this article reports what Scripture, the Fathers, and the Catholic councils say, and leaves the verdict to the reader.

II. Scripture: binding, loosing, and confession in the New Testament

The Catholic claim rests on four dominical or apostolic loci, read in their own context and their own Greek. The first is the scene on Easter evening in John 20, in which the risen Christ breathes on the apostles and commissions them with a power framed in forensic-juridical vocabulary.

John 20:21–23 — the dominical institution

"As the Father hath sent me, I also send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them; and he said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."[6] The Greek verbs are aphiēte (ἀφῆτε, from ἀφίημι, "to send away, forgive, remit") and kratēte (κρατῆτε, from κρατέω, "to hold fast, retain"). Both are in the aorist subjunctive active, and both are addressed in the second-person plural to the disciples present. The construction is not "declare forgiven" or "announce remission" but the direct forensic act of remitting and retaining. The minister is given a choice — to remit or to retain — which is incoherent unless the minister knows what is being brought forward. That requires disclosure, and disclosure is what confession is.

The setting compounds the structural weight: Christ's own language repeats the prologue's sending language ("as the Father hath sent me"), attaches the juridical commission to a breathing-forth of the Spirit that echoes Genesis 2:7, and delivers the power in the institutional context of the gathered apostles. If John 20:23 is not the institution of sacramental confession, the alternative readings owe an account of (a) why Christ breathes the Spirit specifically for this commission, (b) why the verbs are transitive real-action verbs rather than declaratory verbs, and (c) why the power is conferred on a circumscribed group rather than on all believers.

Matthew 16:18–19 and Matthew 18:18 — the power of the keys

The juridical grammar of John 20 is not novel in the Gospels; it is the fulfilment of an earlier promise. "And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven."[7] The keys-plus-binding/loosing language is not ornamental. It draws directly on Isaiah 22:22 — the giving of the key of the house of David to Eliakim — and, more proximately, on rabbinic halakhic usage: to "bind" (Heb. asar, Gr. dēsēte, δήσητε) was to declare something forbidden or a person obligated; to "loose" (Heb. hittir, Gr. lysēte, λύσητε) was to declare something permitted or a person released. Protestant New Testament commentators regularly concede this lexical point; what the Reformers contest is not the rabbinic meaning but the claim that the authority resides in a successor-office rather than exclusively in the preaching of the gospel.

Two chapters later the same verbs are repeated, this time to the collegial body: "Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven."[8] The binding-and-loosing power is exercised personally by Peter and collegially by the apostolic body; the context in Matthew 18 is explicitly disciplinary, concerning the sinner who has offended against a brother and refused the Church's correction. That the same verbs attach to post-baptismal correction of sin is not a Catholic imposition on the text; it is what the text says.

James 5:14–16 — the presbyteral locus

"Is any man sick among you? Let him bring in the priests of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick man: and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he be in sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess therefore your sins one to another: and pray one for another, that you may be saved."[9] The decisive word in the Greek is presbyterous (πρεσβυτέρους), the accusative plural of πρεσβύτερος, the technical New Testament noun for the ordained officer of the local church. James does not say "call in a trusted friend" or "summon any mature believer"; he specifies the presbyters of the church (τῆς ἐκκλησίας), situating forgiveness of sins within a ministerial structure that already existed by the time the epistle was composed. When James in v. 16 then turns to mutual confession, the ministerial frame of v. 14 is the governing setting — not a footnote attached to it.

2 Corinthians 5:18–20 — the ministry of reconciliation

Paul describes his apostolic office in explicit ministerial-deposit language. God, he writes, "hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation." The Greek is dontos hēmin tēn diakonian tēs katallagēs (δόντος ἡμῖν τὴν διακονίαν τῆς καταλλαγῆς). A diakonia is not a general disposition distributed among all believers but a deposited office. "For Christ therefore we are ambassadors, God as it were exhorting by us. For Christ, we beseech you, be reconciled to God."[10] Reconciliation is not floating undifferentiated over the body of believers; it has been placed in (ἔθετο ἐν) a specific apostolic ministry that Paul is exercising as he writes.

1 John 1:9 — the Protestant counter-text, read in context

The Reformed reading of 1 John 1:9 is not denied by the Catholic tradition; it is entailed by it. Every confession of sin is ultimately to God, because every sin is ultimately against God, and because absolution is effective by divine action, not priestly authority. Trent will say exactly this: the priest's absolution is "the dispensation of another's bounty."[11] What 1 John 1:9 does not say — and what the Reformed reading then imports into it — is that confession to God excludes the instrumental means Christ instituted in John 20. The two verses are not in competition; they describe the same movement from two angles. The Catholic position is that 1 John 1:9 is fulfilled, not bypassed, in sacramental confession.

III. The Fathers: continuous practice from Tertullian to Leo the Great

The Reformed historical claim is that sacramental confession is a medieval Catholic development, imposed first at Lateran IV in 1215 and defined at Trent against the Reformers. The primary sources make this claim difficult to sustain. The earliest detailed Christian treatise devoted to penitential discipline was written around the year 203, more than a century before the Edict of Milan, by a North African presbyter who would later leave the Catholic communion — which makes his testimony to what the Catholic Church taught before his departure unusually clean.

Tertullian, De Paenitentia (c. 203)

Tertullian's On Penitence is written to catechumens and penitents in the Catholic Church at Carthage. Having described the one-time baptismal remission of sins, he turns in chapters 9 and 10 to the second remission available to the baptised Christian who has fallen into grave post-baptismal sin — the public penitential discipline known as exomologesis: "Exomologesis, moreover, is the discipline of man's prostration and humiliation, enjoining such conversation as invites mercy."[12] He describes, in concrete terms, the penitent prostrating before the presbyters, the public acknowledgment of sin to the community of the faithful, the imposed penance, and the final reconciliation by the bishop. Chapter 10 urges the embarrassed penitent not to avoid the rite for fear of shame: better the mortification of public penance now than the mortification of eternal loss later.

Two things matter here. First, the discipline is already fully formed by 203 — a century before Constantine, under recurrent persecution, with no political pressure to invent a ritual of institutional power. Second, Tertullian frames the rite not as a novelty of his own Carthaginian church but as the established practice inherited from the apostolic tradition; his point in writing is pastoral, not polemical. The Reformed thesis that Catholic confession is a post-Constantinian medieval accretion collapses at this single witness.

Cyprian of Carthage, De Lapsis and Epistles (251)

Fifty years later, the Decian persecution had forced thousands of Christians to apostatise by offering civic sacrifice; when the persecution abated, the question of what to do with the lapsi — the fallen — dominated North African ecclesial life. Cyprian of Carthage's De Lapsis, written in 251, is the primary source. The pastoral answer he gives is unambiguous: reconciliation is possible, but only through a specified penitential discipline mediated by the bishop and the presbyterate.

Concerning those who sinned only in intention but did not actually sacrifice, Cyprian writes: "Let each confess, I beseech you, brethren, his sin, while he who has sinned is still in this world, while his confession may be received, while the satisfaction and remission made through the priests are pleasing with the Lord."[13] The confession is made in life, through the priests (per sacerdotes), and issues in "satisfaction and remission." The structure of contrition, confession, satisfaction, absolution — which Trent will later ratify as doctrine in 1551 — is already present, fully articulated, in Carthage in 251.

In Epistle 15 (and throughout his episcopal correspondence), Cyprian defends this discipline against the laxists who wanted the lapsi restored without penance, and against the rigorists (the Novatianists) who denied that the Church had any power to restore them at all.[14] His correction in both directions presupposes that the normative pattern is discipline administered through the presbyterate and completed by episcopal absolution. The practice is the settled ecclesial inheritance; the only dispute is about its pastoral application.

Ambrose of Milan, De Paenitentia (c. 384)

A century and a quarter later, the Bishop of Milan wrote a sustained treatise against the Novatianists in his own day. The argument — that the Church has received from Christ the power to forgive post-baptismal sin — is answered by appeal to the same John 20 passage that grounds the Catholic claim: "To whom else did He say: Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall remit, they are remitted unto them, but to the apostles alone, to whom also, and to those who have succeeded them in their office, He hath given the power of forgiving sins?"[15] Ambrose makes the structural argument explicit: the Novatianist denial that the Church has the power to forgive grave post-baptismal sin is heresy, because the Lord Himself deposited that power in the apostles and their successors by the words of John 20:23. The exact structural argument the Reformers would revive eleven centuries later had already been answered by the Catholic Church in 384.

In Book II, chapter 7, Ambrose addresses the question of whether confession belongs to the sinner's private relation to God or must pass through the Church: "In each [case] — that is, both in baptism and in penance — God is the author, Who of His own bountifulness has conferred upon us what we have done; and the Church is the minister."[16] God is author; the Church is minister. The distinction pre-answers the Reformed objection that to assign absolution to a priest is to infringe on God's sole prerogative.

John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio III (c. 390)

The late-fourth-century Antiochene and Constantinopolitan tradition frames the priest's role in the confessional with a striking tone of awe. John Chrysostom's On the Priesthood, Book III, writes of the power of the keys exercised in penance: "If any one will consider how great a thing it is for one, being a man, and compassed with flesh and blood, to be enabled to draw nigh to that blessed and pure nature; he will then clearly see what great honor the grace of the Spirit has vouchsafed to priests."[17] A few sections later he specifies the priestly power that is owed this awe: "For they who inhabit the earth and make their abode there are entrusted with the administration of things which are in heaven, and have received an authority which God has not given to angels or archangels. For it has not been said to them, 'Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.' Those who are lords on earth have indeed the power of binding, but only the body: but this binding lays hold of the very soul and penetrates the heavens."[18]

Augustine, Enchiridion 64–83 (c. 420)

Augustine's Enchiridion, written to Laurentius about twenty years before the Bishop of Hippo's death, treats the remission of sins in chapters 64 through 83. The organising distinction is one the Reformation would later reject but that Trent will formalise as doctrine: not every post-baptismal sin destroys the soul's charity, and the remedies differ accordingly. For lesser daily sins, Augustine teaches, the Lord's Prayer itself — "forgive us our trespasses" — serves as the ordinary remedy, provided the petitioner also forgives those who have sinned against him. For grave sins, by contrast, the Church's penitential discipline is required.

On the lesser sort Augustine writes in chapter 71: "For the daily sins, from which no one in this life, however great his advance in holiness, is altogether free — the Lord's Prayer is the appointed remedy... For he does not say, If ye forgive not, your Father will not forgive you your great sins... He said simply, your sins. Accordingly the daily prayer avails for the daily and short and trifling sins of daily life."[19] For the graver kind, the case is otherwise. Chapter 65 sets the principle: "For even the penitence of such as are justly subjected to the discipline of the Church, is frequently of so feeble a character, that the satisfaction of it is not accepted... yet from this very discipline of the Church ought such penitents to learn that this is the only remaining remedy."[20] The distinction between daily-lighter and grave-requiring-sacerdotal-penance sins is what Trent XIV will much later call the distinction between venial and mortal sin; the penitential locus is what Trent will call the sacrament of penance. The doctrine is not invented in 1551. It is inherited.

Leo the Great, Epistle 168 (459)

Finally, to the letter by which Leo the Great, writing to the bishops of Campania in 459, settled the form of penance in the Western Church. The concern is pastoral: public confession of secret sins has in some places been required, and Leo finds this contrary to apostolic practice. "I decree also that the custom contrary to the apostolic rule, which I have learnt that some have undertaken, must by all means be abolished — that in the matter of penance what is in the sinner's hidden conscience should not be published in a written statement read aloud. For it is enough that the guilt of consciences be disclosed to priests alone in secret confession."[21] The significance of the letter for this article is not what it regulates but what it presupposes: private sacramental confession to a priest is already in 459 the ordinary form; Leo is merely correcting a local abuse. The Reformed thesis that private auricular confession is a medieval invention is, once again, difficult to sustain when the form is being defended against a local deviation fourteen centuries before the Reformation.

IV. Catholic reception: Lateran IV, Florence, Trent, Catechism, canon law

What Scripture commissions and the Fathers exercise, the conciliar and Magisterial tradition receives. The major conciliar moments are not the origin of the practice but its regularisation and, against particular errors, its definition.

Lateran IV, canon 21 (Omnis utriusque sexus, 1215)

The famous twenty-first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, Omnis utriusque sexus, establishes the binding annual minimum for confession in the Western Church: "All the faithful of both sexes shall after they have reached the age of discretion faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own priest, and let them take care to fulfil according to their strength the penance imposed on them, reverently receiving at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist."[22] The text does not claim to institute confession; it presupposes it and establishes an annual minimum. Trent XIV will explicitly note this interpretive point: the Church did not, through Lateran, ordain that the faithful confess — "a thing which it knew to be necessary, and to be instituted of divine right" — but that the precept of confession be complied with at least once a year.

Council of Florence, Decree for the Armenians (1439)

The Ecumenical Council of Florence, in the Decree for the Armenians issued in 1439, articulates the four standard sacramental parameters (matter, form, minister, effect) for each of the seven sacraments, including penance. The act and intention of the penitent — contrition, confession, satisfaction — stand as the quasi-matter; the absolution pronounced by the priest in the form "I absolve thee" is the form; the minister is a priest having authority to absolve; the effect is absolution from sins.[23]

Council of Trent, Session XIV (25 November 1551)

Against the Reformers, Trent Session XIV defined what had been taught: penance is a sacrament of divine institution; its matter consists in contrition, confession, and satisfaction; its form is the priest's Ego te absolvo; its minister is a priest with authority to absolve; its proper object includes every mortal sin known to the penitent. The doctrinal chapters ground each of these in the biblical and patristic sources.

On institution, Trent begins at John 20:23: "The Lord then principally instituted the sacrament of penance, when, being raised from the dead, He breathed upon His disciples, saying: Receive ye the Holy Ghost, whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them, and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained. By which action so signal, and words so clear, the consent of all the Fathers has ever understood, that the power of forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the apostles and their lawful successors, for the reconciling of the faithful who have fallen after baptism."[24]

On the necessity of confession of each grave sin — the specific Reformed target — chapter 5 states: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, when about to ascend from earth to heaven, left priests His own vicars, as presidents and judges, unto whom all the mortal crimes, into which the faithful of Christ may have fallen, should be carried, in order that, in accordance with the power of the keys, they may pronounce the sentence of forgiveness or retention of sins."[25] The canons attached to the doctrine anathematise the Reformed denial point by point. Canon I: "If any one saith, that in the Catholic Church Penance is not truly and properly a sacrament, instituted by Christ our Lord for reconciling the faithful unto God, as often as they fall into sin after baptism; let him be anathema."[26] Canon VI: "If any one denieth, either that sacramental confession was instituted, or is necessary to salvation, of divine right; or saith, that the manner of confessing secretly to a priest alone, which the Church hath ever observed from the beginning, and doth observe, is alien from the institution and command of Christ, and is a human invention; let him be anathema."[27]

CCC and the 1983 Code of Canon Law

The current Magisterial synthesis is set out in the Catechism §§1422–1498. "Those who approach the sacrament of Penance obtain pardon from God's mercy for the offense committed against him, and are, at the same time, reconciled with the Church which they have wounded by their sins and which by charity, by example, and by prayer labors for their conversion."[28] "Only priests who have received the faculty of absolving from the authority of the Church can forgive sins in the name of Christ."[29] The Catechism §1465 frames the priest's role precisely in the language Trent used: he is not a competing mediator but Christ's instrument, acting in persona Christi capitis.[30]

The Code of Canon Law restates the canonical obligation: "Individual and integral confession and absolution constitute the only ordinary means by which a member of the faithful conscious of grave sin is reconciled with God and the Church."[31]

V. Two questions Protestant readers most often ask

"But 1 Timothy 2:5 — one mediator"

"For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus."[32] The Reformed objection holds that to confess sins to a priest is to erect a second mediator between God and the sinner, in direct contradiction to Paul's clause. The Catholic response — set out at Trent and summarised in the Catechism — does not deny the premise but denies the inference. The priest is not a second mediator in the sense Paul excludes (a separate source of salvific grace or a parallel channel of divine reconciliation); the priest acts in persona Christi capitis, as the instrumental means through which the one Mediator's reconciliation is applied to a particular sinner. The priest no more competes with Christ than the preacher of the gospel competes with Christ when the preached word saves, or than the hand that baptises competes with Christ when the baptismal water regenerates. Trent XIV ch. 6 states the point directly: the absolution of the priest is "the dispensation of another's bounty."[33] The instrument is Christ's; the benefit is Christ's; the mediation is Christ's. The priest dispenses; he does not originate.

"The Fathers were corrupted by Constantine"

The historical objection that sacramental confession is a post-Constantinian development — imported into the Church when imperial patronage replaced apostolic purity — is defeated by a single date. Tertullian's De Paenitentia was written around the year 203, describing a fully-formed penitential discipline of prostration, presbyteral discernment, imposed satisfaction, and ecclesial reconciliation. Cyprian's De Lapsis was written in 251, defending the discipline of reconciliation "through the priests" against both laxism and Novatianist rigour. The Edict of Milan was issued in 313. Both primary witnesses are pre-Constantinian by decades, composed under active Roman persecution by Christians with no imperial patronage to gain. The historical claim that the discipline was a later imperial imposition is falsifiable by the dates alone.

VI. Closing

This is what the Catholic Church teaches about sacramental confession to a priest and where to read the evidence. Christ deposited the power to remit and retain sins in the apostles in John 20:23. The apostles and their successors exercised it — continuously, pre-Constantinian, through persecution and peace — as attested in Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, and Leo. The annual obligation was regularised at Lateran IV in 1215. The four sacramental parameters were articulated at Florence in 1439. The full doctrine was defined, against the Reformers, at Trent Session XIV in 1551. The current Catholic synthesis is the Catechism's §§1422–1498 and canons 959–988 of the 1983 Code.

The Protestant reader who reaches this page after reading Calvin, the Westminster Confession, or a contemporary Reformed treatment may still conclude that the Catholic position is wrong. The purpose of this article is not to prevent that conclusion; it is to report the Catholic position, and its primary sources, so that the conclusion is reached by engagement with the actual evidence rather than with a paraphrase of it. Every citation on this page opens to a source the reader can read in full. LumenVeritatis reports the Church's teaching from primary sources. The reader decides what to do with it.

Sources

  1. Scripture. Douay-Rheims 1899 with Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Clementine) in Latin. Cited: John 20:21–23; Matthew 16:18–19; Matthew 18:18; James 5:14–16; 2 Corinthians 5:18–20; 1 John 1:9; 1 Timothy 2:5.
  2. Council of Trent, Session XIV (25 Nov 1551). Doctrine on the Sacrament of Penance, chapters 1–9; Canons 1, 6 (and cross-reference to canons 2–15). J. Waterworth tr., The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (Dolman, London 1848), Session 14.
  3. Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 21 (Omnis utriusque sexus). N. P. Tanner ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Sheed & Ward / Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1.
  4. Council of Florence (1439), Decree for the Armenians. Bull Exsultate Deo, 22 Nov 1439. Tanner vol. 1; Denzinger-Schönmetzer 1323.
  5. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997, editio typica). §§1422, 1461, 1484, and (as cross-referenced) §§1422–1498.
  6. Code of Canon Law (1983). Canon 960 (with cross-references to cc. 959–988). Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
  7. Tertullian, De Paenitentia (c. 203), ch. 9. S. Thelwall tr., Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 3 (CCEL ed.).
  8. Cyprian of Carthage, De Lapsis 29 (251); Epistles 15. R. E. Wallis tr., Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5 (CCEL ed.).
  9. Ambrose of Milan, De Paenitentia I.2.7, II.7 (c. 384). H. de Romestin tr., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series II vol. 10 (CCEL ed.).
  10. John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio III.4, III.5 (c. 390). W. R. W. Stephens tr., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series I vol. 9 (CCEL ed.).
  11. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion 65, 71 (c. 420). J. F. Shaw tr., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series I vol. 3 (CCEL ed.).
  12. Leo the Great, Epistles 168 (459), ch. 2. C. L. Feltoe tr., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series II vol. 12 (CCEL ed.).
  13. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.19.15, IV.19.17 (1559 final Latin; 1845 Beveridge English). CCEL plain-text edition. Cited as a primary Reformed source, tier TX.
  14. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), Chapter XV (Of Repentance unto Life), §§I and VI. P. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom vol. 3. Tier TX.