THE STRIKING CONTRAST BETWEEN THE ERRORS OF ROME REGARDING THE OLD TESTAMENT, AND ITS FIDELITY REGARDING THE NEW.

616. Fact the Tenth. — Another historical feature will again brilliantly illustrate that secret action of Providence, and shew us, that if, to guard the Scriptures, it has watched over the Jewish people for 3300 years, it has equally kept in obedience, on this point, the most corrupt Churches for these eighteen centuries.

This tenth fact, can it be believed, is the Apocrypha, and the errors of Rome regarding it. We must explain our meaning.

The guardianship of the Old Testament has not been intrusted to it, but only that of the New, as it has to all the other Churches in the world; God having pledged Himself, as we have said, to take care from age to age, on the one hand, that the people of the Jews even in their worst days, and on the other, that the Churches of Christendom, even the most corrupt, shall remain faithful to their trust. The oracles of God have been intrusted to them.

But the historical fact we wish to point out here is the striking contrast between the errors of Rome regarding the Old Testament, and her immovable fidelity regarding the canon of the New.

Has sufficient attention been paid to this surprising fact? How has it happened that neither the fathers of the Council of Trent nor others after them have ever done, or wished to do, for the New Testament what they have effected so easily and so completely for the Old? Humanly speaking, it would have been much more for their advantage in their controversies with us to have mutilated — the volume of the New Testament. Moreover, the undertaking would have been at once more plausible, more easy, and more defensible. How comes it to pass that they have never done it? Who has deprived them of the power, and who of the will?

617. We recollect the astonishing facility with which the attempt of April 8, 1546, was effected, and the still more astonishing servility employed to sanction it, at least by silence, in the whole body of the Latin churches. When Paul III. had sent his three legates to Trent, in March 1545, to open a council, designed, it was thought, to reform the oecumenical Church in its chiefs and its members, they found, as we have said elsewhere,¹ only the bishop of the place and, a few days after, three Italian bishops. Two months more passed away before they were recruited by twenty other prelates; so that, ashamed of opening a general council with twenty-seven persons, they besought the Pope to adjourn it for eight months. But in December, their number being increased by twenty-six ecclesiastics, they ventured at last to open the assembly with three legates, three abbots, four generals of religious orders, and four archbishops, two of whom, however, were pensioners of the Pope, having been sent to Trent only to make a majority in favour of the legates, being only titular bishops.

The three first sessions were devoted solely to preliminaries; but with the fourth, on the Sth of April, the anathemas commenced; and it was then that, in the name of the universal Church, eleven uninspired books, which the whole ancient Church had rejected from the collection of inspired books, though recommending the reading of them, were declared to be infallible, and put on a level with Moses and the Prophets.

These eleven books, or parts of books, composed after the spirit of prophecy had ceased in Israel, rejected by all the Jewish nation, rejected by Jesus Christ and His apostles, rejected by the ancient fathers, and still rejected by the great so-called orthodox Church of the East, as they were fourteen hundred years before by St Jerome himself — that Jerome who is the oracle of the Latins for the Scriptures, and the author of their Vulgate Bible; and while we have seen, in 451, the general Council of Chalcedon, consisting of six hundred and thirty bishops, reject the Apocrypha,² — we see the Council of Trent, which counted only fifty, declare them Divine, fifteen centuries later!

If, then, this enormous alteration in the oracles of God by the leaders of the Church of Rome appears to have succeeded with so little effort and so much promptitude, do we not see that it would have been easy for them, humanly speaking, to have subjected the New Testament to the same outrage as the Old, if God had not checked their thoughts and held back their hands?

And what renders the contrast more wonderful is, that if the facility for committing the outrage was great, the temptation seemed much greater.

618. We know that the principal reasons which impelled the fathers of the council to this attempt were their difficulties in their controversies with us.

When, to defend purgatory, the merit of works, prayers of the dead for the living, and of the living for the dead, by passages of Scripture, they could find only texts from Baruch,³ the Maccabees,⁴ Tobit,⁵ or Ecclesiasticus,⁶ it had always been very embarrassing and painful for them that it could be replied, “But in favour of these new doctrines you have only uninspired (human) books.” It would, therefore, free them from a very great difficulty, to be able to cite an oecumenical decree which “transubstantiated, without alteration of the species,” the eleven apocryphal books into inspired ones, and which invisibly changed all these writings, hitherto human, into infallible Scriptures.

619. But let us here remark how much greater must have been the temptation in reference to the New Testament for Rome to have taken away one of its writings, or to have added some other.

For example, what can be more opposed to the primacy of Rome, or to the doctrine of the mass, than the Epistle of St Paul to the Hebrews? Do we not recollect what trouble it gave to the great Bossuet, to what adroitness of language his admirable talent had recourse, either in his Explanation of the Apocalypse, to elude what St John tells us of Rome under the name of Babylon, or in his Exposition of the Catholic Faith, to escape the overpowering declarations of the Epistle to the Hebrews against an unbloody expiation, or a sacrifice of Christ many times offered, or many times repeated? What an advantage would it have been to the Romanist doctors to get rid of these two books of Scripture? They might have justified the exclusion of one of them by the long hesitation of the Western churches before the fixation of the canon, and, above all, by the long differences of Rome on this subject;⁷ while, on the other hand, they might have justified the exclusion of the Apocalypse by its style, its obscurities, and especially by the long opposition made to it in the Hast by the adversaries of the millennium?

620. But further, besides the thought of curtailing the canon, what a strong temptation existed to make additions to it.

To add, for example, some books favourable to the worship of Mary — another on the power of the bishops — another on the merit of works — another on the primacy of Peter. To add even the excellent Epistle of Clement, the first bishop of Rome. To add the Apostolic Canons, which Eusebius and Jerome appear to have attributed to the same father;⁸ or his pretended Recognitions, called also The Acts of Peter, or some apocryphal Gospel favourable to the worshippers of the Virgin Mary; or, again, the Epistle of Peter to James, contained in the Homilies of the same Clement, and which are to be found inserted in the false decretals of the Popes.⁹

Against all such attempts, as against that of April 8, 1546, no doubt the voice of the Eastern Church would have been raised, with that of the Ancient Church, and of the Reformed Churches.

But at least there would not have been against it, as in the case of the Apocrypha, the direct testimony of Jesus Christ, who, if He could say nothing on the yet future canon of the New Testament, has said much on that of the Old. Besides, there was in its favour the hesitation of the churches, before the final fixation of the canon, while the history of the Old Testament does not furnish, directly at least, any analogous fact as to the formation of its own canon.

621. We see, then, that there was antecedently every reason; humanly speaking, to expect that the doctors of Rome, if they made any attempt against the Scriptures, would undertake it rather against the New Testament than the Old. For what reason has the contrary happened? For what reason has there been such eagerness for the one, such modest abstinence from the other? What has been wanting that they should not dare to do here what they have dared to do elsewhere with so much success? Facility has not been wanting, as we have said; temptation has not been wanting; nor the servility of bishops, nor the servility of their flocks. Let us answer with the Word — the difference comes from on high. The oracles of God contained in the Old Testament were entrusted to the Jews, good or bad, and not to Christians; the oracles of God contained in the New Testament are confided to Christian churches, good or bad.

There is no other answer; let us not attempt any other. In the one case God loosens the reins, in the other He holds them in; and, since the fixation of the canon, He has never permitted any church in Christendom to vacillate in its testimony. However learned or however ignorant it may be, He deprives it of the power or of the will, so that you may almost say of Christian churches what Josephus said of the Jews, “Never did any dare to take away, or add, or transpose anything.”¹⁰ The churches, then, have been faithful to their trust for the last 1500 years, as the Jewish people have been to theirs for the last thirty-four centuries; God controlling on this one point the indocility of both, by an influence to which they are subject without feeling it. And just as God, to render this fidelity of the Jews more manifestly providential, exhibits it to us in the midst of their constant revolt; so, to render the fidelity of the Church of Rome respecting the New Testament more divinely significant, and, at the same time, to confound her foolish assumption of being the infallible interpreter of both Testaments, God has given her up, in regard to the Old Testament, with which she was not intrusted, to a spirit of error; so that, if with one hand she deposits impurity in the collection of Moses and the prophets, with the other she still holds out to us, in their perfect integrity, all the oracles of the New Testament, in which her revolt is found predicted as that of the Jewish people was in the oracles of the Old Testament.

Let us, then, repeat once more, that in this tenth fact God demonstrates afresh that providence which watches over the canon But there is still another fact — the destinies of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

1) Prop. 69. See also Fra Paoli Sarpi Hist. de Concile de Trente, liv. i, § 6, 1736, tom, 1., p. 180, and following.

2) Confirming the Council of Laodicea.

3) Chap. iii. 4, (according to the Vulgate.) See O. B. Fritzsche Handbuch zu den Apokryphen der A, T., i., 188, Leipz., 1851.

4) 2 Maccabees xii. 42.

5) Tobit xii. 11, 12.

6) Ecclesiasticus i. 13, 19; iii. 3.

7) See Propp. 622-625.

8) Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., vi. 13. Jerome, De Script., cap. xv.

9) Cave, Hist. Litt. Scriptor. Eccl., i. p. 30. (Basileæ, 1741.)

10) Contra Apion., i, p. 1037. Aureliae Allob., p. 999. Theopneustia, p. 186, 2d ed.; (1842.) See before, Propp. 435, 457.