The Christian religion loyalty to Christ.
But this was not the faith of Colet and Erasmus. With them the Christian religion consisted not in gulping a creed upon any authority whatever, but in loving and loyal devotion to the person of Christ. They sought in the books which they found bound up into a Bible not so much an infallible standard of doctrinal truth as an authentic record of his life and teaching. Where should they go for a knowledge of Christ, if not to the writings of those who were nearest in their relations to Him? They valued these writings because they sought and found in them a ‘living and breathing picture of Him;’ because ‘nothing could represent Christ more vividly and truly’ than they did; because ‘they present a living image of his most holy mind,’ so that ‘even had we seen Him with our own eyes we should not have had so intimate a knowledge as they give of Christ speaking, healing, dying, rising again as it were in our own actual presence.’ It was because these books brought them, as it were, so close to Christ and the facts of his actual life, that they wished to get as close to them as they could do. They would not be content with knowing something of them secondhand from the best Church authorities. The best of the Fathers were ‘men ignorant of some things, and mistaken in others.’ They would go to the books themselves, and read them in their original languages, and, if possible, in the earliest copies, so that no mistakes of copyists or blunders of translators might blind their eyes to the facts as they were. They would study the geography and the natural history of Palestine that they might the more correctly and vividly realise in their mind’s eye the events as they happened. And they would do all this, not that they might make themselves ‘irrefragable’ doctors—rivals of Scotus and Aquinas—but that they might catch the Spirit of Him whom they were striving to know for themselves, and that they might place the same knowledge within reach of all—Turks and Saracens, learned and unlearned, rich and poor—by the translation of these books into the vulgar tongue of each.
The ‘Novum Instrumentum’ of Erasmus was at once the result and the embodiment of these views.
Works of St. Jerome.
Hence it is easy to see the significance of the concurrent publication of the works of St. Jerome. St. Jerome belonged to that school of theology and criticism which now, after the lapse of a thousand years, Colet and Erasmus were reviving in Western Europe. St. Jerome was the father who in his day strove to give to the people the Bible in their vulgar tongue. St. Jerome was the father against whom St. Augustine so earnestly strove to vindicate the verbal inspiration of the Bible. It was the words of St. Augustine used against St. Jerome that, now after the lapse of ten centuries, Martin Dorpius had quoted against Erasmus. We have seen in an earlier chapter how Colet clung to St. Jerome’s opinion, against that of nearly all other authorities, in the discussion which led to his first avowal to Erasmus of his views on the inspiration of the Scriptures. Finally, the Annotations to the ‘Novum Instrumentum’ teem with citations from St. Jerome.
The concurrent publication of the works of this father was therefore a practical vindication of the ‘Novum Instrumentum’ from the charge of presumption and novelty. It proved that Colet and Erasmus were teaching no new doctrines—that their work was correctly defined by Colet himself to be ‘to restore that old and true theology which had been so long obscured by the subtleties of the Schoolmen.’
Under this patristic shield, dedicated by permission to Pope Leo, and its copyright secured for four years by the decree of the Emperor Maximilian, the ‘Novum Instrumentum’ went forth into the world.
