Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The Church’s Discipline. jHE Church has been compared by her Divine Founder to a field in which weeds will grow amidst the wheat until the harvest. Yet if the weeds are tolerated it is for the sake of the wheat, or it is in the hopes that, by a miracle of God’s power and mercy, the weeds may even become wheat. The Church is ever labouring to make her children holy, not by her teaching only, but by her discipline. ” I have written to you,” says St Paul, ” not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother, be … a drunkard: . . . with such an one, not so much as toeat. . . . Put away the evil one from among yourselves” (i Cor. v. 1113). We have seen St Augustin discussing questions of disciplinehow to reform abuses; how to deal with the incorrigible. In the present chapter we have to inquire intothe treatment of drunkenness in later ages and other countries. It will be asked: What advice was given with regard to combating drunkenness ? Was there anything in Catholic antiquity like the modern system of administering the pledge ? I reply that we must here distinguish between the substance and the form. If by “administering the pledge ” we understand a popular or public enrolment of multitudes in societies, having as their special object to promote sobriety, then it is a novelty in the history of the Church.1 But if by taking the pledge we mean abstaining from the use of intoxicating drinks, either as a work of perfection, a remedy, or a penance, then it is by no means a novelty, but has been well known in all ages and countries. I can, perhaps, best explain the whole subject by distinguishing the different states and classes of men and women in the Church, and the different purposes for which abstinence was counselled or prescribed. Discipline…

