the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament, and in 1633 Jean Morin,
a priest of the Oratory, pointed out clearly many of the most glaring
of these. Seventeen years later, in spite of the most earnest Protestant
efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus gave forth his Critica Sacra,
demonstrating not only that the vowel pointing of Scripture was not
divinely inspired, but that the Hebrew text itself, from which
the modern translations were made, is full of errors due to the
carelessness, ignorance, and doctrinal zeal of early scribes, and that
there had clearly been no miraculous preservation of the "original
autographs" of the sacred books.

While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and alarm thus caused,
appeared a Critical History of the Old Testament by Richard Simon, a
priest of the Oratory. He was a thoroughly religious man and an acute
scholar, whose whole purpose was to develop truths which he believed
healthful to the Church and to mankind. But he denied that Moses was the
author of the Pentateuch, and exhibited the internal evidence, now so
well known, that the books were composed much later by various persons,
and edited later still. He also showed that other parts of the Old
Testament had been compiled from older sources, and attacked the
time-honoured theory that Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind.
The whole character of his book was such that in these days it would
pass, on the whole, as conservative and orthodox; it had been approved
by the censor in 1678, and printed, when the table of contents and
a page of the preface were shown to Bossuet. The great bishop and
theologian was instantly aroused; he pronounced the work "a mass of
impieties and a bulwark of irreligion"; his biographer tells us that,
although it was Holy Thursday, the bishop, in spite of the solemnity of
the day, hastened at once to the Chancellor Le Tellier, and secured an
order to stop the publication of the book and to burn the whole edition
of it. Fortunately, a few copies were rescued, and a few years later
the work found a new publisher in Holland; yet not until there had been
attached to it, evidently by some Protestant divine of authority, an
essay warning the reader against its dangerous doctrines. Two years
later a translation was published in England.

This first work of Simon was followed by others, in which he sought, in
the interest of scriptural truth, to throw a new and purer light upon
our sacred literature;