# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S197
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Martin Chemnitz on Extreme Unction. 197

that the Church has a special sacrament of anointing for the dying, and
that this anointing is the surest safeguard in the hour of death against
the weakness of the flesh and against the assaults and power of the devil,
so that a man, equipped with this anointing, may pass through death into
life — this, I say, cannot be shown in the whole history of the true and
pure antiquity. For we are not now speaking of the Roman popes.

But it is objected: at least Jerome, in his exposition of Mark 6, bears
witness to this anointing. But who is that Jerome? They themselves know
well enough that the commentary on Mark is not a work of Jerome of
Stridon, but was written long after his time.

So too they urge: does not Augustine expressly reckon anointing among
the necessary comforts of those who are departing from this world? But
where does he do this? In the second book "On Visiting the Sick," they
say; likewise "On the Correctness of Catholic Practice." Yet they
themselves know quite well that these books were not written by
Augustine, but long after him by others, and afterward falsely ascribed
to Augustine.

From this alone the reader can gather what sort of a matter this last
anointing is, for the proof of which the support of spurious writings
must be begged. And indeed, at the time when those books were written,
the anointing of the sick had not yet received those additions which now
make up the essence and, as it were, the soul of the papist anointing. It
is not there commanded that the five organs of sense be anointed; nothing
is there said of sins being forgiven through that anointing; it is not
there taught that this anointing is the surest safeguard of the dying
against death and the devil; there was as yet, at that anointing, no
invocation of the angels, the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the
martyrs, etc., which now makes up a chief part of the rite in the last
anointing. Rather, in those days, the sick were still led to Christ the
Mediator.

In what follows, Chemnitz shows how all the passages to which the
papists appeal for their sacrament of the last anointing (Theophylact on
Mark 6; Oecumenius on James 5; Chrysostom, Book 3, On the Priesthood)
furnish not the slightest shadow of proof for it, and then continues as
follows:

"It can nevertheless be shown that not long after the times of the
apostles, the apostolic anointing of the sick — without the gift of
making well — was reshaped and perverted by the heretics into another
use. For Irenaeus says, Book 1, Chapter 18, that some among the
Valentinians anoint their dying, pouring oil and water upon their heads
under certain invocations, in the belief that by this anointing they are
redeemed. The report is —