that the bishops had not accounted for that sum to the Papal treasury," defraudantes Ecclesiam Romanam" (p. 199). After defending the abbey for so many years, it became the duty of Thomas one day to accept the dignity of abbot, to which he was raised by the unanimous voice of his brethren. During his rule the lawsuit lingered, and he was not disposed to move in it. He had gone to his eternal rest before the bishops of Worcester finally retired from the contest, and the jurisdiction of the Valley was vested, beyond dispute, in the monks, after a struggle of nearly half a century. At the dissolution of the abbeys, the contested jurisdiction was still held by the monastery; and even then it was not given to the bishop, nor, at a later time, to the protestants who entered in upon the possessions of the church. That jurisdiction was given away-if given away it was to Christ Church, Oxford, together with the churches of the Vale: "For six hundred years the diocesan remained deprived of his jurisdiction," says Mr. Macray (p. xxvii., note), but on what principle passes our understanding. The diocesan never had a church in the Valley that owned his rule; for when S. Egwyn obtained the land, it was a barren and waste place; the bishop's jurisdiction was, by S. Egwyn's own act, excluded before a stone of the abbey was laid, or a single church raised in that desolate country. Mr. Macray is also, in our opinion, very unfair in his appreciation of the monks, whom he blames for seeking the deposition of Roger Norreys for his "injustice and harshness to themselves" rather than for his "notorious immorality." They were certainly not anxious to reveal the turpitudes even of Roger, who had but small claim on their forbearance, because he was not one of them, but had been thrust upon them by the power of the king and the archbishop; and surely this is to their credit. They spared the abbot, who never spared them; held their tongues from detraction; and were satisfied, in the pursuit of justice, to obtain it with as little scandal as possible, and in a way that would leave Roger the amplest means of mending his life without making public the great sins that stained it. The monks saw things in the light of charity as well as in that of justice, and we do not think that Mr. Macray perfectly appreciates their position, T ART. III. THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE EPISTLE The Greek Testament. By HENRY ALFORD, D.D. London: HE controversy about the authorship and writership of the Epistle to the Hebrews comes down from ancient times, and it may fairly be called a vexed question if ever there was one. Various opinions obtained in different portions of the early Church, and after being laid to rest for a thousand years they have been resuscitated and still further multiplied by Protestant criticism from Luther downwards. Germany, as might be expected, takes a leading part in the controversy, and we can discover every phase and shade of opinion with some German name attached, from the ultra-Pauline views of Bengel to the most anti-Pauline (at least, in principle, if not in expression) of Michaelis in his later days. Bengel, followed by many, held that the Greek, as we have it, is S. Paul's own. Michaelis, on second thoughts, considered it more probable that S. Paul was not the author; and this opinion, strange to say, he combines with the conviction that the Epistle was originally written in Hebrew, though the argument, which in all ages has weighed most against the Authorship of S. Paul, is founded upon the different style of the Greek; and to allow that the Greek is a translation would have seemed to most commentators like a concession that the original was the work of S. Paul. Michaelis * is worth quoting, if only to show the "desolating" effect of severe research. He seems to have reasoned himself into a state of nicely-balanced doubt about the author, and into the downright denial of our having even so much as heard the name of the translator. "The arguments, therefore," he says (c. xxiv., sec. 16), on both sides of the question are nearly of equal weight; but, if there is any preponderance, it is in favour of the opinion that S. Paul was not the author.' And of the translator he remarks (c. xxiv., sec. 14):-" Neither in any other book of the New Testament, nor in the works of any Christian writer of the first century, is there any resemblance to the style of this Epistle; it must have proceeded, therefore, from a person of whom we have no other writings now extant." Of the modern Germans, and they are many, who withhold the * Introduction to the New Testament. By John David Michaelis. Translated from the Fourth Edition of the German by Herbert Marsh, B.D. Cambridge. 1801. Epistle from S. Paul, some say, with Luther, that Apollos was the author; some support Barnabas or others of the ancient claimants; some are content to ascribe it to a disciple of the Apostle, without venturing upon any closer determination. Dean Alford, in his interesting Prolegomena to the Epistle, reminds us that Catholics no longer enjoy the same liberty of discussion as formerly. We give his words :-" Finally, the Council of Trent, in 1546, closed up the question for Romanists by declaring, Testamenti Novi quatuordecim epistolæ Pauli Apos., ad Rom. &c., ad Hebræos.' So that the best divines of that church have since then had only that way open to them of expressing an intelligent judgment, which holds the matter of the Epistle to be S. Paul's, but the style and arrangement that of some other person: so Bellarmine, &c. ; so Estius, in his introduction to the Epistle, which is well worth reading, as a remarkable instance of his ability and candour." The introductory dissertation from which we borrow these words, for lucid arrangement and compendious treatment, commands our admiration and even our gratitude, though we are too often forced to dissent from its conclusions. If the learned Dean had not, as we take it, grievously misapprehended the meaning of a passage from Origen, which he quotes at length, and from which he selects a sentence for the text of his discovery, he would no doubt have gone on to say, that the only way now open to Catholic divines of expressing an intelligent judgment is the very way which the great Alexandrian freely chose from all other ways long centuries before the infallible decree of Trent had been put forth to hamper the intelligence of the faithful. We willingly, nay thankfully, admit that the field of discussion has been made much narrower by the definition of the Council. We only regret that it has not been made far more narrow, and that all the minor questions have not been "closed up" by a competent judge as satisfactorily as the main point at issue. Estius thinks that it would be impossible, without temerity, to deny that S. Paul is, at all events, the primary author of the Epistle. If, after some fourteen centuries of unanimity, and a few plain words from a General Council, we Catholics are unable to meet Protestant critics on their own ground of universal scepticism, or, as it would be phrased, unbiassed inquiry, we cannot consent to receive commiseration on that account. Men who are in possession of the truth need not lament that they are no longer obliged to go forth in quest of it. Still Catholics are not debarred by this foregone conclusion from their full right to investigate facts and to scrutinize arguments, and, while adhering upon higher motives to a conclusion which has been tendered to them ready formed for their unconditional acceptance, to judge for themselves with perfect freedom how far history and criticism seem to bear it out. In matters of dogma Catholics certainly do not profess to be impartial, for faith and doubt cannot co-exist; but neither are they prepared to admit what is often quietly assumed, that impartiality and private judgment always go hand in hand. There is a partiality inspired by love, but there is a partiality also which springs from hatred; there is a mental bias produced by habits of obedience, but there is also a mental bias coming from natural antagonism, prejudice, the spirit of contradiction. What stanch, unflinching Protestant, for instance, of the good old Newdegate type, would or could for one brief moment hesitate to pin his faith on that solution of our present question which asserts Apollos for the author, did he but know that it was Luther who invented the idea, and that this one alone among all the rival theories had never been contaminated by the suffrage of a single Catholic name? It will be well, first, to examine into the history of the doubt; and, secondly, to endeavour to account for its existence, and to trace it back to the origin. S. Clement of Rome, the helper of S. Paul, whose name was written in the Book of Life (Phil. iv. 3), quotes largely from the Epistle to the Hebrews, and cannot well have failed to know who its author was; but unfortunately he had a habit of introducing all his Scripture texts with terribly indeterminate formulas: "For the Scripture says For the Scripture says"; "For so it is written"; "And again elsewhere (Holy Scripture) sayeth." Only once does he mention an Epistle of S. Paul's with his name, and that is in chap. xlvii. of his letter to the Corinthians, where, without quoting any text, he reminds his readers of the Epistle which they had received from S. Paul. Certainly we cannot argue from this solitary passage that he would have been sure to tell us that S. Paul wrote to the Hebrews if only he had been aware of the fact. We can derive no argument one way or another from S. Clement; neither can we argue back to S. Clement from Roman writers of a later date, and say that these could not have been ignorant that S. Paul was the author, and could still less have rejected him, unless S. Clement either had not known, or had not transmitted his knowledge. That S. Clement should not have known the Epistle as S. Paul's is difficult to conceive; that, knowing this, he should not have imparted the knowledge to others is more difficult to conceive; but that a tradition of the Pauline authorship of a letter, albeit perhaps started under the fairest auspices, should have been obscured, or even lost, in the hundred years intervening between Clement and Caius, interrupted as they were by persecution and hiding in catacombs, this assuredly no one need feel any difficulty in admitting as possible, not to say probable. Because a Roman priest, about A.D. 200, says that S. Paul was not the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we cannot, therefore, infer that the silence of S. Clement, about A.D. 100, was necessarily the silence of ignorance. Eusebius of Cæsarea is the first who mentions the testimony of Caius, or Gaius, and speaks of the feeling in the Roman Church. S. Jerome repeats the account, and brings down to his own time the observations of Eusebius, made some half a century before. In his "Catalogue of Illustrious Men," he says (c. 59) :— In the Pontificate of Zephyrinus, Bishop of Rome, that is, in the time of Antoninus, son of Severus (or about A.D. 200), Gaius had a very famous dispute with a follower of Montanus, Proculus by name, whom he accused of rashness in defending the New Prophecy. In his work he enumerates only thirteen Epistles of Paul, saying that the fourteenth, commonly styled the Epistle to the Hebrews, is not one of his. And indeed, among the Romans to this day, it is not regarded as belonging to the Apostle Paul. He says the same of the Romans in his letter to Dardanus, which we shall have occasion to quote soon. He says the same in his commentary on Isaias (1. 3 in Is. vi. 2), and again in his commentary on Zacharias (1. 2 in Zach. viii. 1). There can be no doubt that the Roman Church, down to S. Jerome's time, gave little sign of accepting this Epistle as S. Paul's; indeed, the Romans seemed to have looked upon its canonicity as not fully established until after the time of S. Ambrose. But it is important for our future argument to remark, that the earliest testimony is purely negative. It avails to prove the existence of a doubt, but does not attain the dignity of a counter tradition. To S. Clement of Rome we may add S. Irenæus, who belongs alike to East and West, whose genuine writings contain no reference to the Epistle; and Novatian, the heresiarch, who was a priest of the Roman Church, though his influence was greatest in Africa. It is indeed a strong argument that S. Paul was not recognized in Rome for the author of the Epistle, to find even Novatian silent on the subject; for it would have served his purpose well to have found in the 6th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews an unquestioned Apostolic declaration in his favour; and his followers were not slow to discover, or scrupulous in making the most of their discovery, that some of the difficult things which S. Paul there says lend great countenance, at first sight, to their Jansenist-like rigorism. Still, even Novatian's silence can prove nothing more than what has been freely granted, the existence of grave doubt; and if these negative arguments, in which the main strength of the AntiPauline cause is found, are to be deemed conclusive against S. Paul's authorship, they must be deemed no less conclusive against the canonicity of the Epistle. Ipsi viderint. Our German Pro |