Later.— On entering the 4th century we find the authority of these Chitzunim on the wane. At Alexandria the far-famed watchdog of dogma, Athanasius, in his 39th Festal Epis tle (367 A.D.) accepts only the Hebrew Old Testament, excluding Esther, but allowing it to be read to catechumens for edification and in struction, along with the two (Wisdoms' and 'Judith' and (Tobias' (also the Shepherd and the Teaching). Similarly Saint Cyril at Jeru salem,—as always a centre of Jewish influence, — nor will he allow any book not read in the Church to be read privately. Eusebius classes them all as ifrtilegomena (Contradicted), as intermediate between the Accepted and the Re jected. Still they maintained their popularity, as shown by their persistent presence in Greek manuscripts and in Oriental versions.
Jerome.— Passing over this we now come to Jerome who, in his °Helmeted Prologue° rejected all but the Hebrew Canon as apocry phal, natning the
Rome.— But Rome had not yet spoken nor did speak till in the so-called Decretal of Gela sins 'Concerning books to he received and not to be received,° dating in substance (it is held) from the synod convoked by Pope Damasus in 382. In this, as well as in the Canon of Inno cent I, *sent in 405 to a Gallican bishop in answer to an enquiry,'" the list is the same as that adopted by the Tridentine Council in 1546, and all the Deuteros are included.
Augustine.— The leading spirit of the Afri can Church, Augustine, would distinguish de grees of inspiration but used the Deuteros freely and the four synods that he guided (Hippo 393, Cartilage 393, 397, 419) on traditional and litur gical grounds included all the Deuteros in their sacred lists. Of these the Carthaginian passed over to the East and there by its mere authority determined the attitude of the Greek Church, which, however, in excess of generosity, added III Maccabees, a Jewish-Greelc patriotic ex travaganza and maintained the canon down to the beginning of the 18th century (Rev. Bibl., April 1901).
The End.— Meanwhile for over 1,000 years in the Latin Church the beam was held trem bling between acceptance by Rome and rejection by Jerome, reminding us of the famous line of Lucan: " Victria causa deia placuit, Bad victa Catoni." The scholars sided with the man, the untu tored mind and all underlings of authority were led by the other; the chief of the schoolmen, St. Thomas Aquinas was hesitant and bewil dered. But the final decision came at last In 1442 the Council of Florence approved the a-Decree for Jacobites'' of Pope Eugenius IV, which declared the Deuteros received by the Church to be inspired, but did not yet say 'ca nonic' ; not until 1546 did *the holy cecumenical and general Council of Trent° by its decree of April 8 establishing the Canon, °the entire books fof the two Testaments] as sacred and canonical with all their parts as wonted to be read in the Catholic Church, and as found in the ancient Latin Vulgate edition,0 stamp authority upon all the Deuteros, including Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, I and II Maccabees, with "(Let him be anathema° on °whoever does not receive.° Herewith all doubts were ex
cluded; and it is again notable that the grounds of canonization did not involve authorship or character of the books, but only tradition and liturgy; they had been accepted and used as canonic, and therefore were established as ca nonical, precisely as at Carthage nearly 1,200 years before. Thus had Trent filled up the gap left by Florence, but in so doing it had opened again the very gap that Florence had closed, for it did not affirm the inspiration ex plicitly. This defect, which had begun to give annoyance, the Vatican Council of 1870 duly amended by stamping all the canonicals as in spired in all their parts— thus closing the dis cussion forever.
Basis.— The Church has thus based both canonicity and inspiration on authority, and in truth with wisdom, for they could be based on nothing else. The difficulty is not theological but psychological, as Hobbes long ago perceived. Though a man might honestly say *the spirit of Jehovah is upon me,° he could never com municate his own consciousness to another, he could never make another know his own self knowledge.
Rejection.— Authority, however, may be either acicnowledged or rejected, and in the stress of controversy with Eck in Leipzig ( June 1519), Martin Luther found it necessary* to reject II Maccabees as outside the Canon, in order to invalidate the argument for Purgatory drawn from the example of Judas (xii, 43-46). Moreover, in the first edition of his translation of the Bible, he gathered together the Deuteros with the other Apocrypha between the Testa ments, as the unholy between two holies, a position of dishonor to which Protestants uni versally consigned them, but which they have not always been able to maintain. Calvinism has shown them all its native sternness, espe cially since the Westminster Confession (1647), which shore them of all authority and reduced them precisely to the low level of 'other human writings.* The Anglican Confession of 1562 had been milder, restating the patronizing posi tion of affierome.* However they were still printed in Protestant Bibles till in 1825, after 12 years of preliminary wrangling, the Edin burgh branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society announced to London that the Scottish societies would withdraw their support unless the British and Foreign Bible Society should finally and entirely desist from distributing Apocrypha. After two more years of warm debate, London yielded, whereupon most of the continental branches withdrew, and the Scot tish branch, on the refusal of the Society to retire all its officers that had championed the Apocrypha, itself withdrew and founded a new Bible Society in Edinburgh.