Church is spurious. If there is any class of men for whom the glory must
be vindicated of having given to the world the pure Word of God in a
reliable text, it is the band of textual, or lower, critics who have
gathered and collated all existing manuscripts of the Bible. What an
immense amount of painstaking labor this necessitated the reader can
guess from the fact that for the New Testament alone about 3,000
manuscripts had to be examined word for word and letter for letter. The
men who undertook this gigantic task, arid who are always on the watch
for new finds, do not belong in the Roman fold, and did not receive the
incentive for their work from the Roman Church. This work started soon
after the Reformation, and the intense interest aroused in God's Word by
that movement is the true cause of it. The Protestant Church, not the
Church of Rome, has given back to the world the pure Word of God in more
than one sense.

The official Bible of the Roman Church to-day is the Latin Vulgate. This
Bible, which is a revision by Jerome and others of many variant Latin
texts in use towards the end of the fourth century, has been elevated to
the dignity of the inspired text. The original purpose was good: it was
to remove the confusion of many conflicting texts and to establish
uniformity in quoting the Bible. The errors of the Vulgate are many, but
while it was understood that the Vulgate was merely a translation, the
errors could be corrected from the original sources. Little, however,
was done in this respect before the Reformation, and since then the
Roman Church has become rigid and petrified in its adherence to this
Latin Bible. In its fourth session (April 8, 1546) the Council of Trent
decreed that "of all Latin editions the old and vulgate edition be held
as authoritative in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and
expositions; and that no one is to dare or presume under any pretext to
reject it." "The meaning of this decree," says Hodge, "is a matter of