To Reverend Father in Christ and the Lord, Lord Raymond, by divine providence Bishop of the holy see of Valencia, Guido of Monte Rochen, the least of your devoted servants, entrusts to you all his services with devout and humble recommendation. The fount of the wisdom ordaining and disposing all things with a miraculous disposition, the word of God, has ordered and disposed the church militant toward the image of the church triumphant. This was figuratively shown by the lawgiver Moses when the command was given to him to build the tabernacle in the desert according to the model which...

Because according to what the prophet Malachi says in chapter 2, or rather what the Lord says through Malachi, “the lips of the priest preserve wisdom and knowledge, and they ask for the law from his mouth”² (C.11 q.1 c.41). Indeed, “he is an angel of the Lord of hosts.”³ Concerning this, lest that which the Lord threatened to a certain priest of the Mosaic law through the same prophet, saying, “Since you have rejected knowledge, I will drive you away; you do not perform the duties of the priesthood for me,”⁴ happen to priests of the evangelical law, I...

Know that all the sacraments of the new law were directly instituted by Christ, which the doctors prove this way: To whom belongs the giving of any law belongs the instituting of its sacraments. Since Christ was the direct founder, institutor, and giver of the new law, as the Apostle amply proves in the epistle to the Galatians, and is given by Isaiah, saying, “The Lord is our king, the Lord is our lawgiver; he himself will come and save us,”¹ therefore it belongs to Christ alone to institute the sacraments of the new law. Hence he instituted the sacrament...

Here begins the second principal part in which penance is dealt with as well as those things which pertain to hearing confession and imposing penances. It is divided into four tracts.

Sweet Jesus, the true God and pious Samaritan, who poured wine and oil on the wounds of the injured man who happened among robbers going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, declared the man’s state of ruin and sin and its cure and remedy in this parable with signs and wonders.¹ Indeed Jerusalem, which means “vision of peace,” is baptismal innocence. Hence Beersheba, which is called the “well of healing,”...

Here begins the third part about the articles of the faith and those things which pertain to the teaching of the people.

Because our Lord and master Jesus Christ was about to ascend from the world to the Father, he said, instructing his disciples how to conduct themselves toward the faithful whom he had redeemed with his blood, “Go into the whole world and teach all nations.”¹ With these words, he instructed and admonished the leaders of churches, the disciples’ successors, that they should teach his salvific doctrine to their subordinates. This was beautifully figured in the old law, where...