COMMANDMENTS
154
COMMANDMENTS
tion, and holding the place of God before them, the
child is bidden to honour and respect them as His law-
ful representatives (Fourth). The precepts which
follow are meant to protect man in his natural rights
against the injustice of his fellows. His life is the ob-
ject of the Fifth ; the honour of his body as well as the
source of life, of the Sixth; his lawful possessions, of
the Seventh ; his good name, of the Eighth. And in
order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment
of his rights, it is declared an offence against God to
desire to wrong him: in his family rights by the Ninth
and in his property rights by the Tenth.
This legislation expresses not only the Maker's posi- tive will, but the voice of nature as well — the laws which govern our being and are written more or less clearly in every human heart. The necessity of the written law is explained by the obscuring of the un- written in men's souls by sin. These Divine mandates are regarded as binding on everj" human creature, and their violation, with sufficient reflection and consent of the will, if the matter be grave, is considered a griev- ous or mortal offence against God. They h.^v^e always been esteemed as the most precious rules of life and are the basis of all Christian legislation.
HuMMELAUER, Comment, in Ex. et Lev. (Paris, 1S97), 196 sqq.; Idem, Comment, in Deul. (Paris. 1901), 230 sqq. — For ex- planations of the Commanilments, see Catechism of the Council of Trent. Pt. HI. ch. i, and other catechisms; Slater. Manual of Moral neology (New York. 190S), I.
John H. Stapleton.
Commandments of the Church. — We shall con- sider: I. the nature of the Commandments of the Church in general; II. the history of the Command- ments of the Church; III. their classification.
L Nature of these Commandments. — The au- thority to enact laws obligatory on all the faithful be- longs to the Church by the very nature of her constitu- tion. Entrusted with the original deposit of Christian revelation, she is the appointed public organ and in- terpreter of that revelation for all time. For the ef- fective discharge of her high office, she must be em- powered to give to her laws the gravest sanction. These laws, when they bind universally, have for their object: (1) the definition or explanation of some doc- trine, either by way of positive pronouncement or by the condemnation of opposing error; (2) the prescrip- tion of the time and manner in which a Divine law, more or less general and indeterminate, is to be ob- served, e. g. the precept obliging the faithful to receive the Holy Eucharist during the paschal season and to confess their sins annually; (3) the defining of the sense of the moral law in its application to difficult cases of conscience, e. g. many of the decisions of the Roman Congregations; (4) some matter of mere dis- cipline serving to safeguard the observance of the higher law, e. g. the Commandment to contribute to the support of one's pastors (Vacant, Diet, de th^ol. cath., s. v.). All these laws when binding on the faith- ful universally are truly commandments of the Church. In the technical sense, however, the table of these Commandments does not contain doctrinal pronounce- ments. Such an inclusion would render it too com- plex. Tlie Commandments of the Church (in this re- stricted sense) are moral and ecclesiastical, and as a particular code of precepts are necessarily broad in character and limited in number.
II. History of the Commandments. — We outline here only in a general way the history of the form and number of the precepts of the Church. The discussion of the content of the several Commandments and of the penalties imposed by the Church for violation of these Commandments will be found under the various subjects to which they refer. We do not find in the early history of the Church any fixed and formal body of Church Commandments. As early, however, as the time of Constantino, especial insistence was put upon the obligation to hear Mass on Sundays and Holy Days,
to receive the sacraments and to abstain from con-
tracting marriage at certain seasons. In the seventh-
century Penitentiary of Theodore of Canterbury we find
penalties imposed on those who contemn the Sundav
and fail to keep the fasts of the Church as well as legis-
lation regarding the reception of the Eucharist; but
no reference is here made to any precepts of the
Church accepted in a particular sense. Neither do we
discover such special reference in one of the short ser-
mons addressed to neophytes and attributed to St.
Boniface, but probably of later date, in which the
hearers are urged to observe Sunday, pay tithes to the
Church, observe the fasts, and receive at times the
Holy Eucharist. In German books of popular in-
struction and devotion from the ninth century on-
wards special emphasis was laid on the obligation to
discharge these duties. Particularly does this appear
in the forms prepared for the examination of con-
science. According to a work written at this time by
Regino, Abbot of Prum (d. 915), entitled "Libri duo de
synodalibus causis et disciplinis ", the bishop in his
visitation is, among other inquiries, to ask " if any one
has not kept the fast of Lent, or of the ember-days, or
of the rogations, or that which may have been ap-
pointed by the bishop for the staying of any plague;
if there be any one who has not gone to Holy Commu-
nion three times in the year, that is at Easter, Pente-
cost and Christmas; if there be any one who has with-
held tithes from God and His saints ; if there be any-
one so perverse and so alienated from God as not to
come to Church at least on Sundays ; if there be any-
one who has not gone to confession once in the year,
that is at the beginning of Lent, and has not done pen-
ance for his sins" (Hafner, Zur Geschichte der KJrch-
engebote, in Theologische Quartalschrift, LXXX, 104).
The insistence on the precepts here implied, and
the fact that they were almost invariably grouped to-
gether in the books already referred to, had the inevi-
table effect of giving them a distinct character. They
came to be regarded as special Commandments of the
Church. Thus in a book of tracts of the thirteenth
century attributed to Celestine V (though the authen-
ticity of this work has been denied) a separate tractate
is given to the precepts of the Church and is divided
into four chapters, the first of which treats of fasting,
the second of confession and paschal Communion, the
third of interdicts on marriage, and the fourth of
tithes. In the fourteenth century Ernest von Pardu-
vitz, Archbishop of Prague, instructed his priests to
explain in popular sermons the principal points of the
catechism, the Our Father, the Creed, the Command-
ments of God and of the Church (Hafner, loc. cit.,
115). A century later (1470) the catechism of Diet-
rich Coelde, the first, it is said, to be written in Ger-
man, explicitly set forth that there were five Com-
mandments of the Church. In his " Summa Theolo-
gica"(part I, tit. xvii, p. 12) St. Antoninus of Flor-
ence (1439) enumerates ten precepts of the Church
universally binding on the faithful. These are: to
observe certain feasts, to keep the prescribed fasts, to
attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, to confess once
a year, to receive Holy Communion during paschal
time, to pay tithes, to abstain from any act upon
which an interdict has been placed entailing excom-
munication, to refrain also from any act interdicted
under pain of excommunication lata; scnlentiw, to
avoid association with the excommunicated, finally
not to attend Mass or other religious f mictions cele-
brated by a priest living in open concubinage. In the
sixteenth century the Spanish canonist, Martin Aspil-
cueta (15S6), gives a list of five principal precepts of
the Church. These are: to hear Mass on Holy Days of
obligation, to fast at certain prescribed times, to pay
tithes, to go to confession once a year and to reeerve
Holy Communion at Easter (Enchiridion, sive man-
uale confessariorum et poenitentium, Rome, 1588,
ch.xxi, n. 1). At this time, owing to the prevalence of
