in their own familiar tongue, and is, next to the Psalter, the chief feeder of public and private
devotion. In this body of evangelical hymns the choicest Greek and Latin hymns in various
translations, reproductions, and transformations occupy an honored place and serve as connecting
links between past and modern times in the worship of the same God and Saviour.
§ 97. The Seven Sacraments.
Mediaeval Christianity was intensely sacramental, sacerdotal and hierarchical. The ideas of
priest, sacrifice, and altar are closely connected. The sacraments were regarded as the channels of
all grace and the chief food of the soul. They accompanied human life from the cradle to the grave.
The child was saluted into this world by the sacrament of baptism; the old man was provided with
the viaticum on his journey to the other world.
The chief sacraments were baptism and the eucharist. Baptism was regarded as the sacrament
of the new birth which opens the door to the kingdom of heaven the eucharist as the sacrament of
sanctification which maintains and nourishes the new life.
Beyond these two sacraments several other rites were dignified with that name, but there
was no agreement as to the number before the scholastic period. The Latin sacramentum, like the
Greek mystery (of which it is the translation in the Vulgate), was long used in a loose and indefinite
way for sacred and mysterious doctrines and rites. Rabanus Maurus and Paschasius Radbertus count
four sacraments, Dionysius Areopagita, six; Damiani, as many as twelve. By the authority chiefly
of Peter the Lombard and Thomas Aquinas the sacred number seven was at last determined upon,
and justified by various analogies with the number of virtues, and the number of sins, and the
necessities of human life.^506
But seven sacraments existed as sacred rites long before the church was agreed on the
number. We find them with only slight variations independently among the Greeks under the name
of "mysteries" as well as among the Latins. They are, besides baptism and the eucharist (which is
a sacrifice as well as a sacrament): confirmation, penance (confession and absolution), marriage,
ordination, and extreme unction.
Confirmation was closely connected with baptism as a sort of supplement. It assumed a
more independent character in the case of baptized infants and took place later. It may be performed
in the Greek church by any priest, in the Latin only by the bishop.^507
Penance was deemed necessary for sins after baptism.^508
Ordination is the sacrament of the hierarchy and indispensable for the government of the
church.
(^506) Otto, bishop of Bamberg (between 1139 and 1189), is usually reported to have introduced the seven sacraments among
the Pomeranians whom he had converted to Christianity, but the discourse on which this tradition rests is of doubtful genuineness.
The scholastic number seven was confirmed by the Council of Florence (the Greek delegates assenting), and by the Council of
Trent which anathematizes all who teach more or less, Sess. VII. can. I. The Protestant churches admit only two sacraments,
baptism and the Lord’s Supper, because these alone are especially commanded by Christ to be observed. Yet ordination and
marriage, and in some churches confirmation also, are retained as solemn religious ceremonies.
(^507) The Lutheran church retains confirmation by the minister, the Anglican church by the bishop.
(^508) See above, § 87.