cil of Florence have unequivocally declared.[1] It is the duty of all Bishops then to adhere most faithfully to the Chair of St. Peter, to preserve their deposit holily and religiously, and to feed God's dock entrusted to them. Priests too, it behoveth to be subject to their Bishops, whom St. Jerome admonishes them, "to regard as the parents of their souls;"[2] and let them never forget, that the earliest canons forbid them to exercise any function of their ministry, or to enter on the task of teaching or of preaching, "without the sanction of the Bishop to whose care the people are entrusted, and from whom the account of their souls will be required."[3] Be it therefore held as a certain truth, that all those who attempt anything in opposition to the order thus marked out, become thereby, as far as their power permits them, refractory members of the Church.
It would moreover be a crime, and entirely at variance with that deep veneration with which the laws of the Church should be received, to censure in the wild spirit of criticism, discipline sanctioned by her, whether as regards the administration of things sacred, the rules of morality, the rights of the Church, or of her ministers, or to cavil at its clashing with the principles of natural law, or to pronounce it lame and imperfect, and subject to the civil tribunal.
Again, as it is evident that the Church, to use the words of the Council of Trent, "was instructed by Christ Jesus, and by his Apostles, and that the Holy Ghost suggests to her every truth to be taught,"[4] it is no less absurd than injurious to her, that anything by way of "Restoration," or "Regeneration," should be forced upon her as necessary for her soundness or increase, as if she could be thought obnoxious to decay, or to obscurities, or to any other such inconveniencies. By such contrivances the innovators hope "to mould the foundations of a modern "human institution," and thus would be at length realized, what St. Cyprian so strongly declaimed against, the conversion of an essentially divine "into a mere human Church."[5] Let the projectors of such a scheme then remember, on the testimony of St. Leo, "that the dispensing with the canons hath been committed to the Roman Pontiff only, and not in any private individual, but in him only resides the power of making decrees touching the ordinances of the Fathers and also as St. Gelasius writes, to balance the decrees of the Canons, and to determine the precepts of their predecessors, so as to direct, after careful considera-
- ↑ Council of Flor. Sess. xxv. In definit apud Labb. Tom. xviii. Col. 528, edit. Ven.
- ↑ St. Jerome, Epis. ii. to Nepotian, i. 24.
- ↑ From Can. Ap. xxxviii. apud Labb. To. 1. page 88, Edit. Mansi.
- ↑ Council of Trent Sess. xiii. de Eucharist in prœm.
- ↑ St. Cyprian, Ep. lii. Edit. Baluz.
