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 COMMANDMENTS

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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