2. In the New Law of Christ there are no new moral precepts except such as follow from the truths of faith which our Lord made known to us, and from the institution of the sacraments. We are under moral obligation to believe explicitly in the Blessed Trinity and in the Incarnation, as well as in other articles of the Christian faith. We are bound to receive the holy Eucharist and other sacraments instituted by Christ. But besides such as these, it is the common teaching of theologians that the Christian dispensation contains no new moral precepts. If our Lord called his precept of love new, he did not mean that the great commandment did not bind under the Old Law, but only that he urged it anew, gave us new motives to practise it, and especially his own divine example and wish. He also corrected some false interpretations of the moral law, which were current among the Jews of his time; he developed what was implicitly contained in the moral precepts of the Decalogue, and he added to the precepts counsels of great perfection, which he proposed as the ideal of the Christian life, but which he did not command all to follow under pain of sin. In moral theology we abstain as a rule from treating of what concerns perfection; it is our task to distinguish between what is sinful and what is not, for the use of the confessor in the sacred tribunal of Penance.
3. The law of Christ is meant not for a particular nation, but for all men. Christ commanded his followers to preach to the whole world, to teach all men to observe whatsoever he had commanded, and the new dispensation was not to be merely temporary, like the old, but it was to last to the end of time.[1]
SECTION III
On Ecclesiastical Law
We saw above that the Catholic Church has received from her divine Founder full and independent authority to make laws, binding upon all her children in matters which pertain to religion and the salvation of souls. She has constantly used this power which Jesus Christ gave her. Various collections of Church law were made from an early period in her history, but those which are contained in the Corpus Juris are the most celebrated. The Corpus Juris is usually divided into two volumes. The first contains the Decretum of Gratian, a Benedictine monk, who composed his work about the middle
- ↑ Matt, xxviii 19.
