the sense of admiration and gratitude which must be uppermost in the minds of most readers. For Dr Du Bose's achievement is certainly notable. The aim of the philosopher is to rationalize, to see all life and experience as instinct with reason. To the Christian philosopher, what is not moral is not rational, and his aim, therefore, is to see the facts of the Christian revelation, and all life and experience which they affect, as the direct expression of the character of God. No recent theologian has carried us further forward towards this ideal than Dr Du Bose; and for that reason he has rightly been hailed as not only a philosopher but a prophet. Can there be higher praise?

W. H. MOBERLY.

THE ORIGIN AND AUTHORITY OF THE

BIBLICAL CANON ACCORDING TO THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS.

II. LUTHER, ZWINGLI, LEFÈVRE,
AND CALVIN.

IN my previous paper I urged again the familiar view that the Reform movement on the Continent received its initial impulse from the Humanists or Men of the New Learning who had revolted against Scholasticism. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse the two movements. They had in fact and in essence very little in common, and it has been a quite illogical process by which men like More, Erasmus, and others have been attacked because they did not openly join in the great campaigns led by Luther and Calvin.

It has been forgotten that the Reformers, notwithstanding their language on some occasions, were not really opposed to Scholasticism. What they objected to was the Scholasticism of the writers of the Middle Ages, while they had a scholasticism of their own quite as metaphysical as the other, and one which they clung to with desperation. Erasmus and his friends, on the other hand, were as much opposed to the new scholasticism as they were to the old, and perhaps more so. Hence it is irrational to blame them for refusing to accept this new metaphysic; when it was a priori reasoning and metaphysics of all kinds in theology to which they objected. And at the same time, as I said in my last paper, submission to the Church in the last resort was not contested even by the more daring Humanists.

Nothing can be more plain than the unconditional avowal made by Erasmus on this subject. In my previous paper I quoted his answer to the Sorbonne doctors. It is perhaps more effective to quote what he said in the privacy of correspondence with his friend Pirkheimer. He is protesting against Oecolampadius, the Professor of Theology at the University of Basle, who had written an introduction to his own Greek Testament, and having now joined the Reformers spoke of Erasmus as our Erasmus'. Erasmus felt that the phrase was compromising to him and by no means expressed his views, and he accordingly wrote as follows:

'Illud inter amicos dixi, me posse in illius sententiam pedibus discedere, si probasset eam autoritas Ecclesiae, sed adieci, me nullo pacto ab ea posse dissentire. Ecclesiam autem voco totius populi Christiani consensum. An idem dixerint Hypocritae quorum meministi, nescio. A me certe sine fuco dictum est et ex animo, nec unquam de Eucharistiae veritate vacillavi. Quantum apud alios valeat autoritas Ecclesiae, nescio, certe apud me tantum valet ut cum Arianis et Pelagianis sentire possim, si probasset Ecclesia quod illi docuerunt. Nec mihi non sufficiunt verba Christi, sed mirum videri non debet, si sequor interpretem Ecclesiam, cuius autoritate persuasus credo scripturis canonicis. Fortasse plus vel ingenii, vel roboris est aliis, ego nulla in re tutius acquiesco, quam in certis Ecclesiae iudiciis. Rationum et argumentationum nullus est finis.'

This letter was written from Basle, and is dated 'postrid. Lucae, An. 1527' (Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Basle 1529, p. 732).

This attitude of Erasmus was shared by many of the very prominent Humanists quite honestly, and explains the position they took in the controversies of the early sixteenth century, which has been much misunderstood. They were champions of a new logic, an empirical and inductive logic, and of a new literary culture, and by no means anxious to adopt a new scholastic metaphysics built up by Luther or Calvin and their scholars, which they doubtless deemed to have much less authority than the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and to be quite as much based upon limited premisses and an imperfect a priori logic.

The methods of Biblical exegesis, however, patronized by

the Humanists, were directly adopted and followed by the Reformers. These methods were not new. They and their results were borrowed very largely from those of Saint Jerome.

The first scholar north of the Alps who thus adopted them in a scholar's way in modern times, and must assuredly claim to have been the forerunner of Biblical studies in the modern

sense, was Jacques Lefèvre, of Étaples, a person much too little known to English readers. His importance as a factor in the great changes of the sixteenth century must excuse my devoting some paragraphs to him. He was born at Étaples in Picardy about 1450, of humble parents, took his degree at the University of Paris, and in his early days devoted himself to private teaching. His ardour in pursuit of classical studies took him to Italy, and he soon became a Greek scholar of distinction. He was admitted as a professor at the College of Cardinal Lemoine at Paris, and there proceeded to edit a number of Greek texts, especially devoting himself to Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics. In 1507 he entered the Benedictine abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés at Paris, and from that time he began to abandon his secular studies and to devote himself to theology. His first work in this new line was a parallel edition of the Psalter in five versions, with a commentary. This he finished in 1508, and several editions of it were printed. In his Hebrew studies for this work (Comm. ad Ps. 114-15, &c.), he tells us he was largely indebted to Reuchlin's Rudimenta linguae Hebraicae, which, as we have seen, was such a potent instrument in the initiation of Hebrew studies in Germany. Reuchlin and he, in fact, became close friends and correspondents. In 1512 he published at Paris a very remarkable work, especially remarkable considering its date, which preceded all the critical works on the Bible of Erasmus and the German Reformers. It consisted of a revised Latin translation of St Paul's Epistles, based largely on the Vulgate, with many corrections from the Greek, and printed in a parallel text with the Vulgate. Graf, in his life of Lefèvre, has given numerous examples of his new readings. The most remarkable features of the book, however, were the illuminating and singularly daring commentaries it contained, in which the old methods of scholastic exegesis were completely abandoned, and the text was discussed quite in

a modern way. So novel was it all that Lefèvre found it prudent to conciliate the authorities in a prefatory 'epistle' which was not quite ingenuous, and in which he claimed that he had ventured to some extent to correct the Vulgate, because in these Epistles the accepted Vulgate was not St Jerome's, but the text which that Father had himself corrected.

he says:

Thus

'Nos ad sacri Hieronymi tralationem nihil ausos sed ad vulgatam aeditionem quae longe fuit ante beatum et gloriosum Ecclesie lumen Hieronymum et quam nobiscum ipse suggillat carpit et coarguit et quam veterem et vulgatam appellat aeditionem.'

He professes to prove this elaborately in the Apologia prefixed to the work itself, and headed 'Apologia quod vetus interpretatio Epistolarum Beatissimi Pauli quae passim legitur non sit tralatio Hieronymi '.

In the commentaries following, the importance of which has never been quite appreciated, Lefèvre largely forestalls Luther's main contentions, those indeed with which his name is chiefly associated, namely, his views on Divine Grace and on the Sacrament of the Eucharist. In regard to the former, in his comments on the tenth chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians fol. cxv he says:

'Spem habemus, crescente fide vestra in vobis magnificari secundum regulam nostram abunde in iis quae ultra vos sunt evangelizare non in aliena regula in iis quae prompta sunt gloriari. Qui autem gloriatur: in domino glorietur. Non enim qui seipsum commendat ille probatus est, sed quem dominus commendat. Dei munere nonnulla parata Paulus habebat, quae superioribus Corintho regionibus praedicaturus erat, in quibus evangelizandis gloriari posset secundum mensuram ac normam donationis Christi. Sed id non est in se gloriari: sed in deo qui dat. Qui enim in aliquo gloriatur non quia in se est sed quia ab aliquo est, non propter se sed propter eum qui largitur, non in se sed in largiente. gloriatur, et haec gloriatio vera et sancta est. Quam nobis largiatur Christus in omnia saecula benedictus: in quo solo universus glorietur mundus.'

In regard to the mass, he says, in his commentary on the seventh and thirteenth chapters of the Epistle to the Hebrews, op. cit. fols. cxciii and ccvii: