NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 161 



hard, Calovius, Cocceius, and multitudes of others, wrote scores of 

 quartos to further this system, and the other branch of the Protes- 

 tant Church emulated their example. The pregnant dictum of St. 

 Augustine " Greater is the authority of Scripture than all human 

 capacity " was steadily insisted upon, and toward the close of the 

 seventeenth century Voetius, the renowned professor at Utrecht, 

 declared, " Not a word is contained in the Holy Scriptures which 

 is not in the strictest sense inspired, the very punctuation not ex- 

 cepted." But unfortunately it was very difficult to find what the 

 " authority of Scripture " really was. To the greater number of 

 Protestant ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning 

 in the text which they had the wit to invent and the power to 

 enforce. 



To increase this vast confusion came, in the older branch of 

 the Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of St. Jerome's Latin 

 translation of the Bible the Vulgate. It was insisted by leading 

 Catholic authorities that this was as completely a product of 

 divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong men arose 

 to insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin differed, the 

 Hebrew should be altered to fit Jerome's mistranslation, as the 

 latter, having been made under the new dispensation, must be 

 better than that made under the old. Even so great a man as 

 Cardinal Bellarmine exerted himself in vain against this new tide 

 of unreason.* 



* For Valla, see various sources already named ; and, for an especially interesting account, 

 Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, the Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269 ; and, for the opinion 

 of the best contemporary judge, see Erasmi Opera, Ley den, 1*703, torn, iii, p. 98. For 

 Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London, 1825, pp. 179-182; 

 but especially, for the general subject, Bishop Creighton's History of the Papacy during the 

 Reformation. 



For the attack by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, 

 Life and Character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223 ; also pp. 230-239. As to the text of 

 the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxxvii, notes 

 116-118 ; also Dean Milman's note thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evi- 

 dence against the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an elaborate 

 discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays and Reviews, p. 307. For a 

 very full and impartial history of the long controversy over this passage, see Charles Butler's 

 Horse BiblicEe, reprinted in Jared Spafks's Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For Luther's 

 ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, 

 p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140 ; for some of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, 

 vol. xi, p. 1448, vol. xi, p. 1089 ; also, Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston, 1867, 

 citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also, the Vorreden zu der deutschen 

 Bibelubersetzung, in Walch's edition, as above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and 146-150. 

 As to Melanchthon, see especially his Loci Communes, 1521 ; and, as to the enormous growth 

 of commentaries in the generations immediately following, see Charles Beard, Hibbert Lec- 

 tures for 1883, on the Reformation, especially the admirable chapter on Protestant Scho- 

 lasticism ; also Archdeacon Farrar, History of Interpretation. For the Papstesel, etc., see 

 Luther's Sammtliche Schriften, edit. Walch, vol. xiv, pp. 2403 ct seq. ; also Melanchthon's 



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