A CURIOUS EXPOSITION.
The following curious illustration, which I met with the other day in a book where few would be likely to look for it, seems to me fairly to deserve a place among the Notes of your interesting publication. It forms the moral exposition, by Cornelius à Lapide, of Ex. vii. 22.: "And the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments," &c.
"See here," he says, "how the devil contends with God, the magicians with the prophets, and heretics with the orthodox, by imitating their words and deeds. In our days, as the English Martyrology testifies, Richard White (Vitus) disputed with a wicked English Calvinist, who was more mighty in drinking than in argument, concerning the keys of the Church, and when the heretic pertinaciously asserted that they were given to himself, White wittily and ingeniously replied: 'I believe that they have been given to you as they were to Peter, but with this distinction, that his were the keys of heaven, but yours of the beer-cellar; for this the rubicund promontory of your nose indicates.' Thus do heretics turn water into blood. This is their miracle."
Richard White I presume to have been an ejected Fellow of New College, Oxford, afterwards rector of the University of Douai, and a Count Palatine of the empire, author of sundry antiquarian and theological works; but it is surely strange that this piece of ribaldry, of which he had been guilty, should be thought worthy of being recorded; and still more so, that it should be thus applied by a grave and learned Jesuit commentator.
C. W. B.