Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/373

which men unwillingly feel, are true disobedience to the law. 52. Every wickedness is of that condition, that it may infect its author and all posterity in that manner in which, the first transgression infected. 53. As far as it depends on the force of transgression, so much of bad deserts do they contract from the parent who are born with lesser vices, as those who are born with greater. 54. This decisive sentence, that God commanded nothing impossible to man, is falsely attributed to Augustin, whilst it belongs to Pelagius. 55. God could not from the beginning create man such as he is now born. 56. In sin there are two things, act and guilt; but the act passing away, nothing remains but the guilt, or the obligation to punishment. 57. Whence in the sacrament of baptism or the absolution of the priest, the guilt of sin only is taken away, and the ministry of the priests alone frees from sin. 58. The penitent sinner is not enlivened by the ministering of the priest absolving, but by God alone, who, suggesting and inspiring penitence, quickeneth and resuscitates him, but by the ministry of the priest the guilt is only taken away. 59. When by almsgivings and other works of penitence, we satisfy God for temporal punishments, we do not offer to God a condign price for our sins, as some erring persons think (for otherwise we should be, at least in some measure, redeemers), but we do something in regard of which the satisfaction of Christ is applied and communicated to us. 60. Through the sufferings of the saints, communicated in indulgences, our transgressions are strictly redeemed, but by the communion of charity their sufferings are imparted to us, that we may be worthy to be free from the punishments due for sins by the price of Christ's blood. 61. That distinction of doctors, that the commands of the divine law are fulfilled in two ways,—in one way with respect merely to the substance of the works enjoined; in the other, in reference to a certain manner, according to which they may be conducive to lead the person performing them to the eternal kingdom (that is, after the manner of merits), is fictitious and to be exploded. 62. That distinction, also, by which a work is said to be good in two ways, either because from the object and all the circumstances it is directly good (which they used to call morally good), or because it is deserving of the eternal kingdom for