Monday 29 October 2012

All flesh is dust


A Treatise on Relics - John Calvin
(1870) - Project Gutenburg
© Godric Godricson  





"The first Christians left the bodies of the saints in their graves, obeying the universal sentence, that all flesh is dust, and to dust it must return, and did not attempt their resurrection before the appointed time by raising them in pomp and state. This example has not been followed by their successors; on the contrary, the bodies of the faithful,  in opposition to the command of God, have been disinterred in order to be glorified, when they ought to have remained in their places of repose awaiting the last judgment."

A heap of bones

A Treatise on Relics - John Calvin
(1870) - Project Gutenburg
© Godric Godricson  





"As every, even the smallest Catholic church has a heap of bones and other small rubbish, what would it be if all those things which are contained in two or three thousand bishoprics, twenty or thirty thousand abbeys, more than forty thousand convents, and so many parish churches and chapels, were collected  into one mass? The best thing would be not merely to name, but to visit them. "