208

THE SCRIPTURES CIRCULATED.

every thing necessary was provided for this work, and supplied two public carriages to convey them to him at Constantinople, at his expense. This order was immediately executed, and the fifty copies were sent to him in volumes magnificently adorned.' 13 He also established a library in the imperial city, into which he gathered nearly seven thousand volumes, chiefly of Christian books. This grew to a hundred thousand in the days of the younger Theodosius, most of which were destroyed by the Emperor Leo III. Tischendorf conjectures that the Sinaitic MS., which he discovered in the Monastery of St. Katharine, on Mount Sinai, A. D. 1854-59, night have formed One of the fifty copies of the Bible which, in the year 331, the Emperor Constantine ordered to be executed for Constantinople.' 14

The people had no power to resist the decisions of Councils, now enforced by the Emperor; and their free use of the Scriptures may have greatly pacified them to bear more patiently the many innovations which had crept into the Church. Possibly with this in view, the Council of Nicæa ordained that No Christian should be without the Scriptures,'-that of Antioch, A. D. 341, that those who stayed at public worship only to hear the Scriptures read, without partaking of the eucharist, should be excommunicated; and that of Laodicea, A. D. 343-381, 'That the Gospels, with the other Scriptures, ought to be read on the Sabbath day.' The monks of those days were diligent students of the Scriptures; for Chrysostom not only exhorts the servant, the rustic and the widow,' to read them, but he asks, Are the Scriptures to be read only by monks?' And the common people used them freely, even the women and children hanging the Gospels about their necks, a fact proving that something more is needful to a pure Christianity than free access to the Bible. A Bible possessed but neglected, or used and distorted, leads to the same result in substance; on the principle understood and adopted by Julian the Apostate, when he forbade Christian educators to teach Gentile learning: 'Lest, being furnished with our armor, they make war upon us with our own weapons.'

This century was likewise very active in the revision and circulation of the Scriptures in several languages. Jerome, the crabbed monk of whom we have already spoken, devoted his life chiefly to the revision of the already existing Latin versions, known as the Ante-Hieronymian, that is, those made before his time, as the word denotes. This most learned of all the Latin fathers, A. D. 331-420, undertook his work at the request of Damasus, the Bishop of Rome. Much of the Old Testament he translated from the original Hebrew, but his revision of the New was based upon the old Latin version known as the Itala, compared with the Greek text. His work is now known as the Vulgate, or current Latin text of the Bible, and is declared by the Papal Constitution to be 'authentic, and unquestioned, in all private discussion, reading, preaching and explanation.' By 'authentic,' here, is meant authoritative, and Sixtus V. threatened to excommunicate all who should vary from that text. Yet, the Vulgate as we have it to-day is not the unchanged text that Jerome left, for some of its renderings have been corrupted and made to fit

into certain dogmas, as Fulke has shown in countless instances in his Confutation of the Rhemish Testament.' Whether these were made by Pope Sixtus, or by Clement VIII., it is not easy to decide, as both of them changed Jerome's version. Clement charged that the edition of Sixtus swarmed with errors, and made two thousand changes therefrom. But Jerome himself introduced, or at least sanctioned the system of Latinizing Greek words by introducing them into the Latin Bible; the obvious effect of which was to render his version obscure, or, as the historian, Fuller, says, his translation needed to be translated over again.' And of the Vulgate as rendered in the Rhemish New Testament, the same writer quaintly says: 'They could no longer blindfold the laity from the Scriptures, resolved to fit them with false spectacles.' 15

But Jerome said of his own version, that he had 'Corrected only those errors which seemed to change the sense, and had permitted the rest to remain;' and that he had used for the purpose 'Greek copies which did not much differ from the usual Latin reading.' Amongst many Greek words which he transferred instead of translating them, was the family of words relating to baptism, making them cluster around the verb 'baptizo;' so that, those who knew the Latin only, could not possibly tell what those words meant. This new coined method of keeping back the meaning of God's commands has debauched the consciences of translators, and perverted many versions from Jerome's time to our own, by copying his pernicious example, and refusing to translate the exact sense of these words into the mother-tongues of those for whom their translations have been made. And what has rendered this practice the more blameworthy has been, the common pretense, either that these words were too holy to be translated, that their meaning was immaterial, that it was indefinite, or that they were incapable of translation, for want of proper equiva lents in the tongues in which these versions were made. The soul of a translator who attempts to pull that sort of wool over the eyes of honest folk, would suffer no injury by a very literal rendering from the Greek, of Rev. xxi, 8, especially if he made it when alone on his knees before God. Possibly, Cartwright and Fulke had some such thought in mind when they said of the Rhemish Testament: That, compared with the authentical Greek text, it is, in many places, ridiculous, insincere, untrue; and, consequently, of no authority.' This conduct of Jerome in forming the Vulgate, justly brought upon him the censure of Baillet, when he says: It is agreed that Jerome may be the greatest saint of all translators, but that he is not the most exact. He hath taken liberties which the laws of translation will not admit, and his adversary, Rufinus, fails not to charge him with it.' 16

But this was not the character of all the versions made in the fourth century. For example, the Gothic,' by Ulphilas, is pronounced by scholars to be very faithful and accurate. This able and devout bishop of the Goths had induced his countrymen to become Christians, and they reposed boundless confidence in him, saying that whatever he did was well done. He was of Cappadocian ancestry, but was a

native Goth; still, as his people had no written dialect, he found it necessary to construct a language for them, and first framed an alphabet of the Gothic language from the Greek, Latin and Runic characters, suited to his work. Into this he made a translation of the Old and New Testaments, excepting the Books of Kings and Chronicles; and tradition says, that these were omitted lest they should increase the fierce passions of his people for war. The relics which are left of his version are amongst the most valuable of antiquity, as it was made from the Greek text. These fragments cover the larger part of the New Testament, and he translates the verb baptizo by the word 'daupjan,' which means to dip. Tregelles thinks this to have been the vernacular Bible of a great part of Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. Ulphilas lived A. D. 311-381, and after the ninth century his translation was lost until the sixteenth, when the Gospels were recovered; in the nineteenth, his Epistles of Paul were found. German scholars find the Gothic of this version superior to the German language, of which it is the parent, in richness and dignity of expression, as well as harmony and purity of tone.

The Ethiopic version, mentioned by Chrysostom in his second homily on John's Gospel, was made in the ancient and vernacular tongue of Abyssinia, but by whom is not known. It is commonly referred to Frumentius, who first preached Christianity in that country; but at the best this is only tradition. It is generally ascribed to this century, and is regarded as the oldest monument of Ethiopic literature. Dillman declares it to be very faithful; being for the most part a verbal rendering of the Greek, and yet readable and fluent, and in the Old Testament often hitting the ideas and words of the Hebrew in a surprising manner.' It also renders the word which defines the act of baptisin by 'tamaka,' to dip.

6

A number of different creeds are found in this century, but they did not by any means push the Bible aside. Basil is a fair example of his brethren in his love for scriptural truth who, when Valens, the Emperor, promised him promotion if he would embrace Arianism, replied: That such fair promises were fit only to entice children, but that he was taught and nourished by the Holy Scriptures, and was ready rather to suffer a thousand deaths, than to suffer one syllable or iota of the Scriptures to be altered.' Then the Emperor fell into a rage, and threatened him with death; to which Basil answered, that 'If he put him to death, it was only to set him at liberty.'. The prince then sat down to write an edict for his banishment, but at last tore up the paper and cast it from him; the great divine was left to labor and die in peace.

D

URING this period the unity of the Roman Empire was broken, and it was divided into the Eastern and Western Empires; after which followed the migration of the barbarous Northern peoples. Then the Western Empire fell to pieces, and new nations sprang up out of the barbarian forests. The Church also was rent by controversies of every kind, chiefly those concerning the person and work of our Lord. This age is marked by the total eclipse of true justifying faith and the simple method of Gospel salvation. A dramatic salvation pushed it entirely aside, and our Lord's beautiful ordinance of baptism was used to push him aside, to take his place as the great remedy for sin. The absurd doctrine of baptismal regeneration had long been growing; but from this time it not only changed the whole current of Christianity for centuries, but corrupted its foundation truths.

True, a few individuals still.held saving faith in Christ as a precedent to baptism. Athanasius declared, A. D. 360, that Our Lord did not slightly command to baptize, for first of all he said, "teach, and then baptize;" that true faith might come by teaching, and baptism be perfected by faith.' So Jerome of Dalmatia, 378: 'It cannot be that the body shall receive the sacrament of baptism unless the soul have before received the true faith.' In the same year Basil urges: One must first believe and then be sealed with baptism. Faith must needs precede and go before. None are to be baptized but the catechumens and those who are duly instructed in the faith.' Several others taught the same thing, but for a long time there had been a strange admixture of error with this doctrine. In the last half of the second century even clear-headed Hippolytus had said of the baptized man, that he 'Goes down with faith into the bath of regeneration, . . . comes up from baptism bright as the sun, flashing with the rays of righteousness; but greatest of all, he comes up a son of God.' The Council of Nicæa had actually decreed that he who goes down into the waters of baptism is 'obnoxious to sins;' but he ascends free from their slavery, 'a son of God, an heir, yea co-heir with Christ.' And the Christian writers of the fifth century generally speak of baptism as intrinsically holy, 'ineffable' and 'astounding' in its results. Chrysostom preaches this dangerous heresy on the subject: "Although a man should be foul with every vice, the blackest that can be named; yet should he fall into the baptismal pool, he ascends from the divine waters purer than the beams of noon. . . . As a spark thrown

into the ocean is instantly extinguished, so is sin, be it what it may, extinguished when the man is thrown into the laver of regeneration.' Then he solemnly exhorts those who are deferring baptism to make haste and be thus regenerated, as they were liable, in his judgment, to eternal torment; for he calls trine immersion ‘The pool of regeneration and justification.'1

But some of the writers of that age went even beyond this extreme, insisting that immersion in baptism wrought miracles on the body as well as grace in the soul. Socrates, the Christian historian, tells of a Jew, at Constantinople, who had been bedridden for years with the palsy; after trying all sorts of physicians he resolved to receive baptism, was brought to Atticus the bishop, on a bed, and when dipped in the water was perfectly cured. This was even worse than paganism. Ovid, the old Roman poet, had ridiculed the idea that lustrations in water washed away sin

'O, easy fools, to think that a whole flood
Of water e'er can purge the stain of blood!'

Yet Christians clung to this heathen thought, and incorporated it into Christianity. Blondus tells us that at Rome, Mercury's Well purified from perjury and lying. But Ovid laughed at Peleus, who had murdered his brother Phocus, and thought himself absolved because Acastus had lustrated him in river water. A twin thought was perfected by the Christians of the fifth period, namely, that sin committed after baptism was unpardonable, without the severest penance; hence baptism was delayed as near to the hour of death as possible. Gratus was So troubled by this question that he asked the Council of Carthage, A. D. 348, whether a man so sinning did not need a second baptism. This notion wrought such mischief that as few as possible came to baptism; and many sought to bring this state of things to an end. For this reason even Chrysostom pressed that men should follow this duty for duty's sake-as sudden death might cut off the opportunity for baptism; then its neglecters would be lost, and those who were baptized at the last would only shine in heaven as stars, whereas, had this duty been done earlier they would have been like suns. Gibbon says on this subject:

'The sacrament of baptism was supposed to contain a full and absolute expiation of sin; and the soul was instantly restored to its original purity and entitled to the promise of eternal salvation. Among the proselytes to Christianity there were many who judged it imprudent to precipitate a salutary rite which could not be repeated; to throw away an inestimable privilege which could never be recovered. By the delay of their baptism they could venture freely to indulge their passions in the enjoyment of the world, while they still retained in their hands the means of a sure and easy absolution.'

He attributes the conduct of Constantine to this presumption in pursuing his ambition through the dark and bloody paths of war and policy;' and charges that:

As he gradually advanced in the knowledge of truth, he proportionably declined in the practice of virtue, and the same year of his reign in which he con