The difficulty being thus set in a tangible shape, if we now trace back the effect to its cause, and pass from the real or imaginary corruption of the Latin Vulgate to the power necessary to produce it, the simplest solution, it will hardly be denied, is supplied by the supposition, that the disputed prologue, and the passage which it defends, have proceeded from the hand which produced the translation. Admitting the verse to be spurious, no man in the Latin Church had equal power with St.Jerome to obtain it a favourable reception, when it was inserted in the Canon. It was,. besides, his custom to prefix prologues to the different parts of Scripture, and that in dispute has taken undisturbed possession of the place in which some such prologue ought to have existed. Nor can I perceive the reason or justice of acquitting him of the act, in order to lay it, with an accumulation of guilt, on the head of Victor, Vigilius, or any other prelate of the Latin Church who is singled out at the caprice or good pleasure of the suggestor. For, however improbable the supposition, there was at least a possibility that Jerome might be deceived in his estimate of the passage; but no man could be unconscious of guilt, in assuming his authority, to fabricate the prologue. The forgery of such a document besides involves a complication of fraud practised against St. Jerome, and of sacrilege committed against St. John, which eventually impeaches the credit of the whole Church, which gave it effect by its criminal acquiescence.

The question is thus fairly balanced between the Eastern and the Western Churches; neither can there be a stroke levelled against the one, which will not recoil against the other. Nor let it be objected, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Burke, that "this is putting things in the posture of an ugly alternative." It behoves those indeed who build

upon the separate testimony of the Greek or Latin, to be prepared for the common fate attendant on those who choose to stand on ground too narrow to sustain them in any position: to him who builds upon the comparative testimony of both, every thing remains firm and secure, until both are proved to be corrupted. And should it be further objected, that he stands in most need of the caution who throws the weight of the question upon a contested prologue of Jerome; my reply is, that I do it for the sake of bringing a principle to the test, which if admitted, would endanger the whole credit of the Canon; as I am told, that though the spuriousness of a passage may be proved, it is not possible to prove its authenticity.

I appeal, in the first place, to the general subject of the prologue, its dedication to Eustochium, and the topics which it handles, in determining the order of the Epistles, and in replying to the objections of impugners, for the first proof, that it has proceeded from the hand of St. Jerome.

The common tenour of St. Jerome's writings would lead even an observant inquirer into the order of his works, to suppose that the Catholic Epistles had been given to the world long previously to the period when he was accustomed to dedicate his works to Eustochium. As. that period is determined by the death of Paula, her mother, who bore an equal share in that honour, the completion of the revisal of the Latin version, is antedated to that event by St. Jerome himself, in stating the order of his writings. He informs us, in one of the most interesting and popular of his works, that "he had restored the New Testament to the fidelity of the Greek, and had translated the Old according to the Hebrew: but of the Epistles to Paula and Eustochium, as they were written daily, the number was uncertain." Yet, had the course been followed which.

was thus obviously pointed out to the sophisticater, and had the work been inscribed either jointly to them, or with the more imposing names of "the venerable Pope" Damasus, or of "the most erudite Pammachius," it would have led to an anachronism which would have detected the imposture.

It may be collected from the whole tenour of St. Jerome's writings, that though his revisal of the version was completed, and the corrected text employed in the commentaries which he was daily compiling, no part of it but the Gospels, elicited from him by Pope Damasus, had been published, until a late period. So far was he from having taken that step, that he ever manifests a dis. position to withhold his critical works, entreats of those whom he furnished with parts of them not to give away copies, and lays this injunction expressly on Paula, Eustochium, and Marcella. How long his papers lay by him without publication, may be seen in the preface to Obadiah; but an epistle addressed to Lucinius (Epist. xxviii. p. 82.) puts the case of the New Testament out of dispute. From this document it appears, that even those friends who furnished him with notaries, to provide themselves with his works, were so far from having a copy of this, which was the most important, that they remained to be apprised of its existence. As that epistle speaks of the Commentary on Isaiah, as already finished, every prologue to that work, and to the Commentary on Ezekiel, which immediately followed it, brings confirmation to that which is in dispute, as they are collectively inscribed to Eustochium. Let an example be taken from the first," Having finished twenty books on the twelve Prophets, and the Commentaries on Daniel, thou compellest me, Eustochium, virgin of Christ, to pass to Isaiah, and, what I had promised thy holy mother, while she lived, to perform to thee; which I indeed,

remember to have promised to thy most erudite brother, Pammachius," &c.

To the general tenour of the prologues of Ezechiel, which succeeded the date of the epistle to Lucinius, I now appeal in the next place, as confirming the authenticity of that in dispute, by informing us of the subjects which predominated in St. Jerome's mind, at the period to which it refers itself, by the dedica-. tion to Eustochium. One or two extracts will show how far the subjects of which it treats, in determining the order of the Epistles, and in replying to detractors, identify the. hand from which it has proceeded. In the prologue to the fifth part of the Comment on Ezechiel, he declares, "lest the number of the books should be confounded, and, through a long space of time, the order of the volumes be vitiated, I have prefixed short prefaces to each; that from the front of the title the reader should at once acknowledge. which book was to be read," &c.. To cite instances of Jerome's complaints of the severity of his oppugners, would be superfluous. The prologue to the second book of Micah, as a general assertion of the fact may not be inappositely cited: "We have always to reply to the invidious, (for envy never ceases,) and the exordiums of our books confute the calumnies of rivals, who commonly boast, that, in a sterile and jejune style, we publish some trifles, and when we know not how, to speak, cannot be silent."

I shall offer but another remark on the general characteristics which authenticate this prologue, as St. Jerome's work, in order to set aside the short-sighted objection, which adjudges it to a later hand and period as not written with his usual spirit. As nothing would have been more easy than to imitate the florid and rhetorical parts of his style, we at least learn from this objection, how far the prologue would have been rendered worthy of its reputed

in his times, had he left no other memorial of his critical acumen, would prove his views to have been profound, accurate, and extensive; for he there bequeathed to us the invaluable information, without which the classification of Greek manuscripts, at the present day, would have been impracticable. In en tering upon subjects similar to those touched upon in the disputed prologue, he was drawn into a field, which though limited, afforded some opportunity for the exercise of his extraordinary powers. A criterion is thus offered, to prove how far that production is worthy of its reputed author; and that it may be brought to the touchstone, under the most trying circumstances, I shall apply the test, in comparison with the sister prologue, prefixed to the Gospels by the undoubted Jerome; that whatever difference exists between them, may be rendered more striking, by an immediate contrast. If the result of the experiment prove that the author of both was not merely possessed of the same learning and modes of thinking, but that he displays information which was wholly beyond the reach of later writers, and which has escaped even the most learned of his modern editors; it may be then easily judged, how far a counterfeit hand could have transferred to a copy, the inimitable lineaments of such an original.

In the opening of the disputed prologue, every particular relative to the subject of arrangement, is collected, and a greater variety of curious and learned allusions brought together, than is to be found, in the same space, in any of the genuine prefaces. We are first informed of the arrangement of the Epistles by the Greeks; of the order adopted by those "who followed the right faith," as distinguished from that adopted by those "who were not sound in their opinion;" the authority of the Epistles as acknowledged as "canonical" is then asserted in REMEMBRANCER, No. 41.

a single epithet; and the disposition, followed in the old Italic, which ascribes the first place to Peter's Epistle is stated; the cause of that arrangement being specified incidentally, "because he was the first Apostle." The course followed in disposing the Gospels is next mentioned, and proposed as a model, in reducing the Epistles to the right order; the seven Epistles are accordingly enumerated, and disposed in the proper order; the rea son of the arrangement being as signed, in the declaration that they were so digested by their authors."

How far the course thus adopted corresponds with the method of Jerome is directly apparent, on inspecting the prologue inscribed to Pope Damasus, to which we are here referred. In it, St. Jerome deserts the arrangement of the old Italic, disposing the Gospels after the manner which is thus pursued with the Epistles; assigning to St. John, in both prologues, the last place, instead of the second, to which his apostolical rank had entitled him in that primitive version.

But it is to the manner in which the subjects of both Epistles and Gospels "were digested," by this new arrangement that we are to look for the strong traits of resemblance existing between the contrasted prologues, and for the striking marks of St. Jerome's mode of thinking, which identify the author. It is obvious that both parts of the Canon were disposed, by the new arrangement, in a form which was better digested. By transferring St. John from the second to the last place in the Gospels, and St. Peter from the first place to the second in the Epistles, the history was more naturally disclosed, the doctrine more systematically unfolded. The Epistle addressed to the ten tribes thus corresponded, in place, with the Gospel which was intended for the Jews; the moral exhortations of James as properly preceded the higher docNn

trines of Peter, and the transition, in both Gospels and Epistles, was natural and progressive to the sublime theology of St. John. The importance annexed by St. Jerome to such a disposition, he has not left to be conjectured; as it is virtually admitted in his prologue to the Epistle to the Galatians.

Nor is it only to the strong marks of St. Jerome's manner of thinking, but to the deep characters of his learning, that we are to look for the criterions by which the question is to be decided. I insist not on the order assigned in the disputed prologue, to the Epistles in the old Italic, though so singularly confirmed by St. Augustine, in a treatise in which he recommends that version: nor on that assigned to them in the Vulgate, which is not less strikingly confirmed by St. Jerome, in his Epistle to Paulinus. Neither shall I lay any particular stress on the confirmation which the prologue receives from the Council of Laodicea, which prescribed the order adopted in it, and suggested the term canonical, which it uses. For these particulars, though they escaped Cassiodorus, and what is niore extraordinary, eluded Martianay, might have been within the reach of a Latin writer, or have been conjectured from a comparison of the old and the new translation. The point on which I insist, as pal. mary in the controversy, is that knowledge which the prologue displays of the Apostolical Canons, in assigning "St. Peter's Epistles the first place among the seven styled canonical;" and in the just estimate which it gives of that particular Canon which commended this order, as refusing it the authority of those "Greeks who followed the right faith, and were sound in their opinions." As this was a piece of information which recent inquiry discovers to have been sufficiently trite in St. Jerome's days, it excites little surprize to find it in a prologue of his composition. But as this low opinion of the Canons termed Aposto

lical soon wore out in the Greek Church, and the civil code, from the times of Theodosius and Justinian, gave the whole compilation, including the eighty-fifth Canon, that legal authority which was equally binding on the Eastern and Western Church; a difficulty lies in accounting for the source from whence the fabricator of such a prologue could have derived his information which decides the contest.

That the disputed prologue conveys St. Jerome's estimate of that compilation, he has himself left us at no loss to decide. If he does not slight it in the Epistle to Lucinius, of which so much use has been. made; he rejects the authority of the eighty-fifth Canon, on the books of Maccabees and the Epistles of Clement, and follows, on both, the Council of Laodicea; the members of which he necessarily included among those "Greeks who were sound in their opinions." But of the Apostolic Canons, the Latin Church knew nothing more than was contained in the translation made by Dionysius Exiguus, about the year five hundred; and as the copy which he followed was ancient and uninterpolated, doubtless from being long preserved in the West, it could give no information on the subject of the order of Scripture. In wanting the interpolated Canons, it necessarily takes no notice of the eighty-fifth, which alone speaks of their arrangement. Had any information been attained on the subject, after this period from the Greeks, it could be no longer re presented as confined to the heterodox; for the orthodox Council of the Trullus at Constantinople, which was voted general by the second Council of Nice, formally ratified the whole compilation, as preserved by Johannes Antiochenus, afterwards Patriarch of Constantinople. Nor was this decision ever disputed until the Reformation brought in greater freedom of inquiry, and an exemption from the