human
With the power of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly powers find their limit and end,--a might, I say, which is able to break the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission of heavy sin. Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally can forgive sins. And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly might: his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve him. How so? When the priest approaches the altar, in order to bring there the holy mass-offering, there, at that moment, lifts himself up Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, upon his throne, in order to be ready for the beck of his priests upon earth. And scarcely does the priest begin the words of consecration, than there Christ already hovers, surrounded by the heavenly host, come down from heaven to earth, and to the altar of sacrifice, and changes, upon the words of the priest, the bread and wine into his holy flesh and blood, and permits himself then to be taken up and to lie in the hands of the priest, even though the priest is the most sinful and the most unworthy. Further, his power surpasses that of the highest archangels, and of the Queen of Heaven. Right did the holy Franciscus say, 'If I should meet a priest and an angel at the same time, I should salute the priest first, and then the angel; because the priest is possessed of far higher might and holiness than the angel.'
gpt
and, the day after quoting it, adds a charge that must be still more annoying to the Herr Kooperator Hiring than that of blasphemy: it accuses him of plagiarism; and, to substantiate the charge, quotes almost the very same language from a sermon preached in 1785--In this it is boldly claimed that
human
And then, in words which I do not care to translate, the priest is made greater than the Virgin Mary, because Christ was only born of the Virgin once, while the priest
gpt
can