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Rh cate themselves when they put excommunication on others, or publish it, and especially the clerics who, as it were, every day at prime sing: "Cursed are they who depart from thy commandments."

This much, in brief, with respect to excommunication, in regard to which that good Christian of holy memory and that great zealot of Christ's law, Master Frederick Epinge, bachelor of canon law, treating of the first article, said: "No prelate ought to excommunicate anybody unless he first knows that the person has been excommunicated by God." Of this I have written in another place. And, if thou wilt not believe it, learn it on the wall in Bethlehem, and there thou wilt find how excommunication does not injure the righteous but profits and why even the righteous ought to fear unjust prelatic or Pilatic excommunication, and for these reasons, (1) that he may not be guilty at some other place or time. (2) The danger to him who unjustly excommunicates. (3) The injury to the brethren which may follow from a foolish application of censures; (4) that they may not become an occasion of stumbling by going back from the truth; (5) that they may not suffer an injury by an excommunicated person's curses; (6) that he by impatience may not fall from merit or depart from righteousness—and also for other reasons explained more fully and pertinently in another place.