de St. Cyran speaks of the
sacrifice of the mass as "the most excellent" of all others, in the
following terms? "Let there be presented to God, daily and in all
places, the sacrifice of the body of his Son, who could not find a
more excellent way than that by which he might honour his Father." And
afterwards: "Jesus Christ has enjoined us to take, when we are
dying, his sacrificed body, to render more acceptable to God the
sacrifice of our own, and to join himself with us at the hour of
dissolution; to the end that he may strengthen us for the struggle,
sanctifying, by his presence, the last sacrifice which we make to
God of our life and our body"? Pretend to take no notice of all
this, fathers, and persist in maintaining, as you do in page 39,
that he refused to take the communion on his death-bed, and that he
did not believe in the sacrifice of the mass. Nothing can be too gross
for calumniators by profession.
Your second proof furnishes an excellent illustration of this.
To make a Calvinist of M. de St. Cyran, to whom you ascribe the book
of Petrus Aurelius, you take advantage of a passage (page 80) in which
Aurelius explains in what manner the Church acts towards priests,
and even bishops, whom she wishes to degrade or depose. "The
Church," he says, "being incapable of depriving them of the power of
the order, the character of which is indelible, she does all that
she can do: she banishes from her memory the character which she
cannot banish from the souls of the individuals who have been once
invested with it; she regards them in the same light as if they were
not bishops or priests; so that, according to the ordinary language of
the Church, it may be said they are no longer such, although they
always remain such, in as far as the character is concerned- ob
indelebilitatem characteris.
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