The Divine Lamp

I posted this on my other blog some time back.

FIRST REASON

HOLY WRIT

Of the many signs that tell of the adversaries' mistrust of their
own cause, none declares it so loudly as the shameful outrage
they put upon the majesty of the Holy Bible. After they have
dismissed with scorn the utterances and suffrages of the rest of
the witnesses, they are nevertheless brought to such straits that
they cannot hold their own otherwise than by laying violent hands
on the divine volumes themselves, thereby showing beyond all
question that they are brought to their last stand, and are
having recourse to the hardest and most extreme of expedients to
retrieve their desperate and ruined fortunes. What induced the
Manichees to tear out the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the
Apostles? Despair. For these volumes were a torment to men who
denied Christ's birth of a Virgin, and who pretended that the
Spirit then first descended upon Christians when their peculiar
Paraclete, a good-for-nothing Persian, made his appearance. What
induced the Ebionites to reject all St. Paul's Epistles? Despair.
For while those Letters kept their credit, the custom of
circumcision, which these men had reintroduced, was set aside as
an anachronism. What induced that crime-laden apostate Luther to
call the Epistle of James contentious, turgid, arid, a thing of
straw, and unworthy of the Apostolic spirit? Despair. For by this
writing the wretched man's argument of righteousness consisting
in faith alone was stabbed through and rent assunder. What
induced Luther's whelps to expunge off-hand from the genuine
canon of Scripture, Tobias, Ecclesiasticus, Maccabees, and, for
hatred of these, several other books involved in the same false
charge? Despair. For by these Oracles they are most manifestly
confuted whenever they argue about the patronage of Angels, about
free will, about the faithful departed, about the intercession of
Saints. Is it possible? So much perversity, so much audacity?
After trampling underfoot Church, Councils, Episcopal Sees,
Fathers, Martyrs, Potentates, Peoples, Laws, Universities,
Histories, all vestiges of Antiquity and Sanctity, and declaring
that they would settle their disputes by the written word of God
alone, to think that they should have emasculated that same Word,
which alone was left, by cutting out of the whole body so many
excellent and goodly parts! Seven whole books, to ignore lesser
diminutions, have the Calvinists cut out of the Old Testament.
The Lutherans take away the Epistle of James besides, and, in
their dislike of that, five other Epistles, about which there had
been controversy of old in certain places and times. To the
number of these the latest authorities at Geneva add the book of
Esther and about three chapters of Daniel, which their
fellow-disciples, the Anabaptists, had some time before condemned
and derided. How much greater was the modesty of Augustine (_De
doct. Christ. lib._ 2, _c._ 8.), who, in making his catalogue of
the Sacred Books, did not take for his rule the Hebrew Alphabet,
like the Jews, nor private judgment, like the Sectaries, but that
Spirit wherewith Christ animates the whole Church. The Church,
the guardian of this treasure, not its mistress (as heretics
falsely make out), vindicated publicly in former times by very
ancient Councils this entire treasure, which the Council of Trent
has taken up and embraced. Augustine also in a special discussion
on one small portion of Scripture cannot bring himself to think
that any man's rash murmuring should be permitted to thrust out
of the Canon the book of Wisdom, which even in his time had
obtained a sure place as a well-authenticated and Canonical book
in the reckoning of the Church, the judgment of ages, the
testimony of ancients, and the sense of the faithful. What would
he say now if he were alive on earth, and saw men like Luther and
Calvin manufacturing Bibles, filing down Old and New Testament
with a neat pretty little file of their own, setting aside, not
the book of wisdom alone, but with it very many others from the
list of Canonical Books? Thus whatever does not come out from
their shop, by a mad decree, is liable to be, spat upon by all as
a rude and barbarous composition. They who have stooped to this
dire and execrable way of saving themselves surely are beaten,
overthrown, and flung rolling in the dust, for all their fine
praises that are in the mouths of their admirers, for all their
traffic in priesthoods, for all their bawling in pulpits, for all
their sentencing of Catholics to chains, rack and gallows. Seated
in their armchairs as censors, as though any one had elected them
to that office, they seize their pens and mark passages as
spurious even in God's own Holy Writ, putting their pens through
whatever they cannot stomach. Can any fairly educated man be
afraid of battalions of such enemies? If in the midst of your
learned body they had recourse to such trickster's arts, calling
like wizards upon their familiar spirit, you would shout at
them,--you would stamp your feet at them. For instance I would
ask them what right they have to rend and mutilate the body of
the Bible. They would answer that they do not cut out true
Scriptures, but prune away supposititious accretions. By
authority of what judge? By the Holy Ghost. This is the answer
prescribed by Calvin (_Instit. lib._ I, _c._ 7), for escaping
this judgment of the Church whereby spirits of prophesy are
examined. Why then do some of you tear out one piece of
Scripture, and others another, whereas you all boast of being led
by the same Spirit? The Spirit of the Calvinists receives six
Epistles which do not please the Lutheran Spirit, both all the
while in full confidence reposing on the Holy Ghost. The
Anabaptists call the book of Job a fable, intermixed with tragedy
and comedy. How do they know? The Spirit has taught them. Whereas
the Song of Solomon is admired by Catholics as a paradise of the
soul, a hidden manna, and rich delight in Christ, Castalio, a
lewd rogue, has reckoned it nothing better than a love-song about
a mistress, and an amorous conversation with Court flunkeys.
Whence drew he that intimation? From the Spirit. In the
Apocalypse of John, every jot and tittle of which Jerane declares
to bear some lofty and magnificent meaning, Luther and Brent and
Kemnitz, critics hard to please, find something wanting, and are
inclined to throw over the whole book. Whom have they consulted?
The Spirit. Luther with preposterous heat pits the Four Gospels
one against another (_Praef. in Nov. Test._), and far prefers
Paul's Epistles to the first three, while he declares the Gospel
of St. John above the rest to be beautiful, true, and worthy of
mention in the first place,--thereby enrolling even the Apostles,
so far as in him lay, as having a hand in his quarrels. Who
taught him to do that? The Spirit. Nay this imp of a friar has
not hesitated in petulant style to assail Luke's Gospel because
therein good and virtuous works are frequently commended to us.
Whom did he consult? The Spirit. Theodore Beza has dared to carp
at, as a corruption and perversion of the original, that mystical
word from the twenty-second chapter of Luke, _this is the
chalice, the new testament in my blood, which_ (chalice) _shall
be shed for you_ [Greek: potaerion ekchunomenon], because this
language admits of no explanation other than that of the wine in
the chalice being converted into the true blood of Christ. Who
pointed that out? The Spirit. In short, in believing all things
every man in the faith of his own spirit, they horribly belie and
blaspheme the name of the Holy Ghost. So acting, do they not give
themselves away? are they not easily refuted? In an assembly of
learned men, such as yours, Gentlemen of the University, are they
not caught and throttled without trouble? Should I be afraid on
behalf of the Catholic faith to dispute with these men, who have
handled with the utmost ill faith not human but heavenly
utterances? I say nothing here of their perverse versions of
Scripture, though I could accuse them in this respect of
intolerable doings. I will not take the bread out of the mouth of
that great linguist, my fellow-Collegian, Gregory Martin, who
will do this work with more learning and abundance of detail than
I could; nor from others whom I understand already to have that
task in hand. More wicked and more abominable is the crime that I
am now prosecuting, that there have been found upstart Doctors
who have made a drunken onslaught on the handwriting that is of
heaven; who have given judgment against it as being in many
places defiled, defective, false, surreptitious; who have
corrected some passages, tampered with others; torn out others;
who have converted every bulwark wherewith it was guarded into
Lutheran "spirits," what I may call phantom ramparts and parted
walls. All this they have done that they might not be utterly
dumbfounded by falling upon Scripture texts contrary to their
errors, texts which they would have found it as hard to get over
as to swallow hot ashes or chew stones. This then has been my
First Reason, a strong and a just one. By revealing the shadowy
and broken powers of the adverse faction, it has certainly given
new courage to a Christian man, not unversed in these studies, to
fight for the Letters Patent of the Eternal King against the
remnant of a routed foe.

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