Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/422

Rh the right, which it says it is convinced is in the bishop's power regarding ecclesiastical discipline in order to things merely spiritual, and, therefore, that of abrogating the precept of hearing mass on days on which that precept still prevails according to an ancient law of the Church; and also in this, which it superadds, of transferring to Advent, by episcopal authority, fasts to be kept every year according to the precept of the Church,—inasmuch as it attaches to the bishop that it is lawful, by his own right, to transfer days prescribed by the Church for celebrating festivals or fasts, or to abrogate the precept once introduced of hearing mass: A proposition false, detrimental to the right of general councils and sovereign pontiffs, scandalous and favouring schism.

LXXV. The doctrine which states, that in the times of the Church, at its birth, oaths appeared so foreign to the teachings of the divine preceptor, and to the golden evangelical simplicity, that the very swearing, without extreme and inevitable necessity, was deemed an irreligious act, unworthy of a Christian man; moreover, that the continued series of the fathers demonstrated that oaths were considered as forbidden by the general feeling; and thence it proceeds to disapprove of the oaths, which the ecclesiastical court, following the standard, as it says, of feudal jurisprudence, has adopted in the investitures and in the very sacred ordinations of the bishops, and has laid it down that a law is therefore to be implored from the secular power for abolishing oaths, which are exacted even in ecclesiastical courts for undertaking duties and offices, and generally for every act relating to the court: False, injurious to the Church, detrimental to ecclesiastical right, subversive of the discipline introduced and approved by the canons.

LXXVI. The vituperation, with which the synod attacks the school, as that "which opened the way for introducing novel systems, disagreeing the one with the other, as to truths of greater value, and at length brought matters to