[70] Though the clergy now and then made use both of the Justinian and Theodosian Codes, the former body of law, as such, was notwithstanding from the reign of the Emperor Justinian, or about the year of our Lord 560, till the beginning of the 12th century, or the year of Christ, 1230 or thereabouts, of no force in the west in matter of government. Seldon.—Dissertation on Fleta, p. 112.
[71] The codification of the laws under Justinian were largely due to his wife the Empress Theodosia, who having risen from the lowest condition in the empire, that of a circus performer, to the throne of the East, proved herself capable in every way of adorning that high position.
[72] By the Code Napoleon, all research into paternity is forbidden. The Christian Church was swamped by hysteria from the third to the sixteenth century. Canon Charles Kingsley.—Life and Letters.
[73] Although under law the entire property of the wife became that of the husband upon marriage.
[74] A treatise on Chastity, attributed to Pope Sixtus III., barely admits that married people can secure eternal life, though stating that the glory of heaven is not for them.
[75] The Romish religion teaches that if you omit to name anything in confession, however repugnant or revolting to purity which you even doubt having committed, your subsequent confessions are thus rendered null and sacrilegious. Chiniquy.—The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional, p. 202. Study the pages of the past history of England, France, Italy, Spain, etc., and you will see that the gravest and most reliable historians have everywhere found instances of iniquity in the confessional box which their order refused to trace. Ibid, p. 175. It is a public fact which no learned Roman Catholic has ever denied that auricular confession became a dogma and obligatory practice of the church only at the Lateran Council, in the year 1215, under Pope Innocent III. Not a single trace of auricular confession as a dogma can be found before that year. Ibid, p. 239. Auricular confession originated with the early heretics, especially with Marcius. Bellarmin speaks of it as something to be practiced. But let us hear what the contemporary writers have to say on this question: “Certain women were in the habit of going to the heretic Marcius to confess their sins to him. But as he was smitten with their beauty, and they loved him also, they abandoned themselves to sin with him.”—Ibid, p. 234.
[76] Disraeli, who is most excellent authority, declared the early English edition of the Bible contained 6,000 errors, which were constantly introduced and passages interpolated for sectarian purposes or to sustain new creeds; sometimes, indeed, they were added for the purpose of destroying all scriptural authority by the use of texts.
The revisors of the New Testament found 150,000 errors, interpolations, additions and false translations in the King James or common version.
[77] Cardinal Wolsey complained to the Pope that both the secular and regular priests were in the habit of committing actions for which if not in orders, they would have been promptly executed.