“For those who are receptive this blood bestowed and accomplished all that they need to be saved and made perfect. But since its gift of life and grace is in proportion to the soul’s readiness and desire, it deals death to the wicked. So it gives death rather than life to those who receive it unworthily, in the darkness of deadly sins. The fault for this is not in the blood. Nor does it lie in the ministers. The latter may be just as evil or worse, but their sin cannot spoil or contaminate the blood or lessen its grace of power, nor can it harm those they serve. They are, however, bringing on themselves the evil of sin, which will certainly be punished unless they set themselves right through true contrition and contempt for sin. Those who receive the blood unworthily, then, I repeat, are harmed not through any fault in the blood nor because of any fault on the ministers’ part, but because of their own evil dispositions and their own sin. For they have defiled their minds and bodies with such wretched filth, and have been so cruel to themselves of grace, willfully trampling underfoot the fruit of the blood, since it was by virtue of the blood that they were freed in holy baptism from the taint of original sin, which they had contracted when they were conceived by their father and mother.”
