Definition
In legal usage, indulgence has two distinct meanings:
(1) Forbearance by a creditor or obligee — the grant of additional time, leniency, or delay in enforcing a legal right against a debtor or obligor. A creditor who gives indulgence to a debtor is choosing not to press a claim when entitled to do so. This usage has direct consequences in the law of suretyship: when a creditor gives a principal debtor indulgence without the surety's consent — particularly by binding agreement to extend the time for payment — the surety may be discharged from liability. The rationale is that the surety bargained for the right to pay and seek immediate recourse against the principal; an unconsented delay alters that calculus.
(2) In ecclesiastical and canon law: a remission, granted by the Roman Catholic Church, of the temporal punishment due to sins already absolved. Historical indulgences were not forgiveness of sin itself but relief from the penal consequences attached to sin, particularly in purgatory. Their sale and abuse became a central grievance of the Protestant Reformation.
In modern legal practice, meaning (1) — forbearance to a debtor — is the operative legal sense. Meaning (2) is primarily of historical and ecclesiastical interest, though it surfaces in legal sources discussing the Reformation and in older church-state litigation.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of indulging; tolerance; catering to someone's desires; a wish or whim satisfied; also, in religious usage, a pardon or release from expected punishment in purgatory.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act of indulging or humoring; the quality of being indulgent; forbearance of restraint or control"; also, "an indulgent act; favor granted; gratification."
The common meaning of indulgence suggests personal lenience or self-gratification — concepts without legal consequence. The legal meaning is narrower and more precise: a deliberate, and potentially binding, choice by a creditor to forbear enforcement of a legal right. The legal significance is not the attitude of leniency but its effect on third parties, particularly sureties. A researcher who reads "indulgence" in a surety bond or guarantee dispute should not import the colloquial sense; the term carries specific doctrinal freight about consent, notice, and discharge.
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Common Confusion
Indulgence and forbearance are used interchangeably in several historical dictionaries, and the overlap is real — both denote a creditor's delay in enforcing rights. The distinction worth preserving is that forbearance often appears in contract contexts broadly (including as consideration in a contract), while indulgence, in the surety context, specifically describes the creditor's extension of time to the principal debtor. Giving indulgence without the surety's consent is a recognized ground for discharge; mere passive delay by the creditor without a binding agreement generally is not. The terms should not be treated as identical when analyzing surety discharge questions.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in commercial law, suretyship, or guarantee disputes will encounter indulgence most often in the surety discharge context. The core rule — that indulgence given to a principal debtor without the surety's consent may discharge the surety — is a recurring issue in 19th-century American and English case law and remains relevant in modern guarantee instruments. When reading older decisions, watch for whether "indulgence" is being used loosely (as a synonym for any creditor passivity) or technically (as a binding agreement to extend time). Courts did not always distinguish these, and conflating the two can distort how a historical precedent applies.
The ecclesiastical meaning of indulgence appears in legal sources primarily in two contexts: (a) historical discussions of the Reformation and the church-state tensions that preceded it, and (b) early American and colonial legal texts where canon law vocabulary bled into civil legal writing. Researchers in legal history or law-and-religion scholarship should note that Rapalje & Lawrence preserves the canon law entry for indulto — a related papal dispensation — as a separate subentry, which Black's does not carry forward. That omission reflects the progressive secularization of American legal dictionaries through the 19th century.
Jurisdictional caution: the effect of giving indulgence to a principal debtor on a surety's liability varied by jurisdiction and era. Some courts required a binding agreement to extend time; others treated any express forbearance as sufficient to trigger discharge. When tracing this doctrine, do not assume uniformity across states or across time.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are consistent in their structure but thin on doctrinal content. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence give equal treatment to the ecclesiastical and the legal meanings, reflecting the mid-to-late 19th century moment when canon law vocabulary still warranted coverage in American legal reference works. Anderson's strips the entry to almost nothing — "FAVOR; SURETY. See FORBEARANCE" — treating indulgence as purely cross-referential rather than defining it independently. This is editorially reasonable but unhelpful for a researcher who encounters the term without context.
Bouvier is the most practically useful of the historical sources. Its entry — "Forbearance (q.v.); delay in enforcing a legal right. As to the effect on the discharge of a surety of giving indulgence to a debtor, see SURETYSHIP" — correctly identifies the surety discharge issue as the operative legal question and points the reader toward the substantive doctrine. That cross-reference to the SURETYSHIP entry in Bouvier's is the right move; the definition of indulgence alone cannot carry the doctrinal weight.
None of the historical dictionaries address the question of what makes an indulgence binding on the surety versus mere passive delay — the distinction courts actually litigated. That gap is significant. Researchers should not assume the historical dictionaries resolve the hard question; they locate the issue, not the answer.
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Jurisdictional Note
In English common law, binding indulgence to the principal debtor — typically an agreement to extend time for payment in exchange for consideration — was a well-established ground for surety discharge. American courts generally followed this rule but diverged on what constituted sufficient consideration and on whether equitable sureties were treated differently from compensated (commercial) sureties. Modern guarantee instruments frequently include clauses expressly preserving the guarantor's liability notwithstanding indulgence or extensions of time, which has significantly altered the practical reach of the old common-law rule.
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