charged, as a fault, against the human government which inflicts them.

"Not man alone, all rationals. heav'n arms
With an illustrious, but tremendous pow'r
To counteract its own most gracious ends;
And this, of strict necessity, not choice:
That pow'r denied, men, angels, were no more
But passive engines, void of praise or blame.
A nature rational implies the pow'r

Of being blest, or wretched, as we please;
Else idle reason would have nought to do:
And he that would be barr'd capacity

Of pain, courts incapacity of bliss."

Before closing, we wish to point to the bearing of all we have said, on the doctrine that punishment is disciplinary; a doctrine which rests on a basis cognate to that of the one we have been opposing, and is equally crude. Punishment (i. e. the governmental infliction of deserved penalties), is aimed exclusively, as we think has been made apparent, at protecting and upholding the universal or public good, which has been assailed and injured by those upon whom it is inflicted; and hence, just as much as that good requires, so much must they be punished, irrespective of any conceivable amendatory effect it may have on them. If, therefore, all the lost should, at some future period, repent and become as holy as the angels, it could have no effect whatever to release them from their sufferings, so far as they are the result of governmental penalties, however it might arrest or mitigate the natural consequences of their sin. To say that punishment is disciplinary, is really a contradiction in terms and in sense, and is virtually to say that God has no moral government; and to say this, is to stand in the presence-chamber of Atheism.

ARTICLE III.

THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, AND THE REASONS FOR THEIR EXCLUSION FROM THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE.

By C. E. Stowe, D. D., Professor at Andover.

I. THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. THE books pertaining to the Old Testament which the Romish church holds to be sacred and canonical, in addition to the original Hebrew canon, are the following: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Maccabees I and II., additions to Daniel, additions to Esther. Besides these, there are generally printed, as an appendix to the Vulgate, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Esdras III. and IV. In the English Apocrypha these two books of Esdras are designated as I. and II. The reason of the Vulgate numeration is, that the canonical Esdras is in that translation called Esdras I., and the canonical Nehemiah, Esdras II. In this it differs from the Septuagint, which retains for Nehemiah the Hebrew canonical name.

Before the time of the Council of Trent, the books above mentioned had not been received as canonical by the Christian church; most of them had been positively and very pointedly condemned by some one or more of the eminent church fathers; those who had received them to be read a churches made a marked distinction between them and the books of the original Hebrew canon, assigning to them a much lower place; and those who called any of them canonical, generally assigned the most trivial and unsatisfactory reasons for so doing. For example, Hilary (Proleg. in Psalm.) mentions, that the Hebrews had twenty-two canonical books of the Old Testament corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; but as the Greeks have twenty-four letters in their alphabet, they ought to have twenty-four books in their Old Testament canon, and he, therefore, in order to make out the number twenty-four, would add to the Hebrew canon the books of Tobit and Judith, for the Greek Bible. According to this principle, the Old Testament for the Arabs, Ethiopians, Cherokees, and many other nations,

ought to be enlarged by a number of books greater than all the apocryphal writings, numerous as they are, would be able to supply. Augustine, though the greatest man of his time intellectually, was a very poor critical scholar. He was disposed to receive all the books usually included in the Septuagint as canonical, because he ignorantly supposed that the Septuagint as a whole had the sanction of the apostles (quae etiam ab Apostolis approbata est.-Epist. 32. ad Hieron. n. 35); yet, though he called all the Septuagint books canonical, he made a marked distinction among them in respect to their authority. He says: In canonicis Scripturis ecclesiarum catholicarum quamplurium auctoritatem sequatur, ut eas, quae ab omnibus accipiuntur ecclesiis catholicis, praeponat eas, quas quaedam non accipiunt. In eis vero, quae non accipiuntur ab omnibus, praeponat eas, quac plures gravioresque accipiunt.-Doctr. Christ. II. 3. Here is license enough for the most liberal Protestant; and it is by such statements as these that Jahn and other enlightened Roman Catholic scholars endeavor to vindicate the Council of Trent for their decree respecting the canon, on the ground that there was an understood and admitted distinction among the sacred books between the deuterocanonical and the proto-canonical. If Augustine and some other fathers made such a distinction, it is clear enough that the Council of Trent did not.

Jerome was greatly superior to Augustine in scholarship, so far as a critical knowledge of languages and books is concerned, though greatly inferior in almost all other respects. Jerome knew that the apocryphal books had no claim to canonical authority, and he said so very plainly, and when exasperated by opposition, very bitterly. He in one place declares: Sapientia, quae vulgo Salomonis inscribitur, et Jesu Sirach liber, et Judith et Tobias et Pastor non sunt in canone. In another place he says of these books very sharply: Apocryphorum nacnias mortuis magis haerticis quam ecclesiasticis vivis canendas.-Proleg. Gal. et Prol. in Com. Mutt. Augustine was often at variance with Jerome, as the theologian is apt to be at variance with the scholar. He strongly condemned Jerome's Latin translation of the Old Testament, because it varied so much from the Septuagint; though it departed from the Septuagint only by coming nearer to the divine original in the Hebrew; but Augustine was not scholar enough to know or appreciate a fact of this kind. (Compare Marheinecke's Symbolik, Band II. S. 224, ff. first edition, 1810.)

This is a subject of deep interest at the present time. Romanists among us are continually objecting to our Bible, calling it a mutilated Bible and furiously resisting, wherever they can, its introduction into schools and families. In the following pages, we shall give a review of the debates and decisions on this subject in the Council of Trent, that the reader may see on what very shallow and insufficient grounds that decision was made on which so much was depending; and then we shall show the grounds on which we pronounce that decision to be totally wrong, by exhibiting in full the reasons why the books in question ought to be excluded from the canon of Scripture. The following is a summary of the points which will be stated and proved in the ensuing discussion:

(1) These books never had the sanction of Christ or his apostles or of any of the writers of the New Testament.

(2) They formed no part of the original Hebrew canon, and were not written till after inspiration had ceased and the canon was closed.

(3) They were rejected with singular unanimity by the early Christian churches and by the best of the church fathers.

(4) The books themselves, examined individually, can be proved, each one by itself, to be unworthy of a place in the canon of Scripture.

Under this last head we shall give, in regard to each book: (a) a description of the book; (b) we shall examine its internal evidence in regard to its having a place in the canon, and (c) state the external testimony in respect to it.

II. DEBATES AND DECISIONS IN THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.

The Council of Trent for its fourth session, which was held in the spring of the year 1546, collected several propositions respecting the Scriptures from the writings of Luther, which they alleged to be erroneous. These propositions were earnestly discussed in the several congregations which preceded the session; as was also the question, whether canons with anathemas annexed, in the usual manner, should be issued against these errors. Two of the alleged errors were these: (a) That no books ought to be received into the canon of the Old Testament except those which were found in the original Hebrew canon, and (b) That the original text, the Hebrew for the Old

Testament and the Greek for the New, is the only ultimate appeal as the pure word of God, and that the Latin Vulgate ♦ used in the churches, abounds in erroneous translations. We give not the words but only the substance, because it is only with these two points that we are concerned in the present dis cussion; and it would lead us too far out of our track to follow the exact order and method of the treatment of the several topics in the council. We propose to give, and that too in a very condensed form, only what pertains to the Old Testament canon, and the authority of the Latin Vulgate as compared with the original text.

In regard to the canon, they were generally agreed, that a catalogue of the sacred books should be made out, after the example of the ancients; and that all the books usually read in the Roman churches should be admitted into it, and that the Old Testament canon should not be limited to those books only which were received by the Hebrews. The catalogues of the Council of Laodicea, of Pope Innocent I., of the third Council of Carthage, and of Pope Gelasius, were proposed as models. As to the form of the catalogue there were four opinions: (1) Some proposed that the books should be separated into two divisions, the first of which should consist of those only which had always and without dispute been regarded as canonical, the ópoloyovμévor of Eusebius; and the second, of those which had been by some rejected, and in regard to which there was more or less of doubt, the artikeyouévoor. (Compare Euseb. Hist. Eccl. III. 25.) They argued that, though this distinction had not been formally and expressly recognized by any pope or council, yet it had been in fact tacitly and universally acknowledged; that Augustine makes this distinction, and that it is received, and the authority of Augustine in respect to it confirmed by the Canon in canonicis. Gregory, also, who lived after Gelasius, declares, in his Exposition of Job, that the Books of Maccabees were written for edification and adapted to it, but yet they were not canonical.

Aloysius of Catanea, a Dominican Friar, affirmed that this distinction was made by Jerome, and that the church had accepted it as the rule and standard for establishing the canon of the Holy Scriptures. He also quoted Cardinal Cajetan, who, following Jerome, had made the same distinction, and, in the dedication to Clement VII. of his treatise on the historical books