apostle, (1 Cor. xi.,) adding, "Do not you tremble when you hear,
he shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord? One guilty of the
blood of a man would not rest, and can he escape who has profaned the
body of the Lord? What do you do by deceiving the priest, or hiding part
of your load? I beseech you no longer to cover your wounded conscience.
Rogo vos etiam pro periculo men, per illum Dominum quem occulta non
fallunt, desinite vulneratam tegere conscientiam. Men sick are not
backward to show their sores to physicians, and shall the sinner be
afraid or ashamed to purchase eternal life by a momentary confusion?
Will he draw back his wounds from the Lord, who is offering his hand to
heal them? Peccator timebit? peccator erubeseet perpetuam vitam praesenti
pudore mercari? et offerenti manus Domino vulnera male tecta subducet?"
In his third part he speaks to those who confessed their sins entirely,
but feared the severity of the penance. He compares these to dying men
who should not have the courage to take a dose which would restore their
health, and says, "This is to cry out, behold I am sick, I am wounded;
but I will not he cured." He deplores their delicacy, and proposes to
them king David's austere penance. He describes thus the life of a
penitent. "He is to weep in the sight of the church, to go meanly clad,
to mourn, to fast, to prostrate himself, to renounce the bath, and such
delights. If invited to a banquet, he is to say, such things are for
those who have not had the misfortune to have sinned; I have offended
the Lord, and am in danger of perishing forever: what have I to do with
feasts? Ista felicibus: ego deliqui in Dominum, et periclitor in aeternum
perire: quo mihi epulas qui Dominum laesi? You must moreover sue for the
prayers of the poor, of the widows, of the priest, prostrating yourself
before them, and of the whole church; to do every thing rather than to
perish. Omnia prius tentare ne pereas." He presses sinners to severe
penance, for fear of hell, and paints a frightful image of it from the
fires of Vesuvius and aetna. His treatise or Sermon On Baptism, is an
instruction on original sin, and the effects of this sacrament, by which
we are reborn, as by chrism or confirmation we receive the Holy Ghost by
the hands of the bishop. He adds a moving exhortation that, being
delivered from sin, and having renounced the devil, we no more return to
sin; such a relapse after baptism being much worse. "Hold,