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,[1] 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.[2]
- ↑ Huss refers to the six inscriptions on the walls of Bethlehem chapel, Mon., 1: 237–243, which were intended to counteract six errors about the mass—namely, that the priest creates the body of Christ; faith—namely, that faith is exercised in Mary, etc., and not in God only; absolution from sin—namely, that the priest absolves whomsoever he will; obedience—namely, that subjects are bound to obey all commands issued by superiors; excommunication; and simony, which, so the inscription read, "the clergy for the most part, alas! practise." In regard to the fifth, excommunication, the inscription ran: "It is an error that every excommunication, just or unjust, binds the excommunicated person and separates him from the communion of Christ's faithful and deprives him of the sacraments." Epinge's name I do not find in Schulte or Chevalier.
- ↑ These six reasons for standing in fear even of an unjust sentence of excommunication, Huss quotes from memory, leaving out one which he had given in his de sex Erroribus, Mon., 1: 240. Some of these reasons he sets forth
