the
Bible, it was, after Luther's death, replaced in the German translation,
and has been incorporated into all important editions of it, save one,
since the beginning of the seventeenth century. So essential was it
found in maintaining the dominant theology that, despite the fact that
Sir Isaac Newton, Richard Porson, the nineteenth-century revisers, and
all other eminent authorities have rejected it, the Anglican Church
still retains it in its Lectionary, and the Scotch Church continues to
use it in the Westminster Catechism, as a main support of the doctrine
of the Trinity.

Nor were other new truths presented by Erasmus better received. His
statement that "some of the epistles ascribed to St. Paul are certainly
not his," which is to-day universally acknowledged as a truism, also
aroused a storm. For generations, then, his work seemed vain.

On the coming in of the Reformation the great structure of belief in the
literal and historical correctness of every statement in the Scriptures,
in the profound allegorical meanings of the simplest texts, and even
in the divine origin of the vowel punctuation, towered more loftily and
grew more rapidly than ever before. The Reformers, having cast off the
authority of the Pope and of the universal Church, fell back all the
more upon the infallibility of the sacred books. The attitude of Luther
toward this great subject was characteristic. As a rule, he adhered
tenaciously to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures; his
argument against Copernicus is a fair example of his reasoning in this
respect; but, with the strong good sense which characterized him, he
from time to time broke away from the received belief. Thus, he took
the liberty of understanding certain passages in the Old Testament in a
different sense from that given them by the New Testament, and declared
St. Paul's allegorical use of the story of Sarah and Hagar "too unsound
to stand the test." He also emphatically denied that the Epistle to the
Hebrews was written by St. Paul, and he did this in the exercise of
a critical judgment upon internal evidence. His utterance as to the
Epistle of St. James became famous. He announced to the Church: "I do
not esteem this an apostolic, epistle; I will not have it in my
Bible among the canonical books," and he summed up his opinion in his
well-known allusion to it as "an epistle of straw."

Emboldened by him, the gentle spirit of Melanchthon, while usually
taking the Bib