necessary: when we do easily
admit and follow new words coined in court and in courtly or other
secular writings?"[220]

The points at issue received their most thorough consideration in the
controversy between Gregory Martin and William Fulke. Martin, one of the
translators of the Rhemish Testament, published, in 1582, _A Discovery
of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretics of
our Days_, a book in which apparently he attacked all the Protestant
translations with which he was familiar, including Beza's Latin
Testament and even attempting to involve the English translators in the
same condemnation with Castalio. Fulke, in his _Defence of the Sincere
and True Translation of the Holy Scriptures_, reprinted Martin's
_Discovery_ and replied to it section by section. Both discussions are
fragmentary and inconsecutive, but there emerges from them at intervals
a clear statement of principles. Fundamentally the positions of the two
men are very different. Martin is not concerned with questions of
abstract scholarship, but with matters of religious belief. "But because
these places concern no controversy," he says, "I say no more."[221] He
does not hesitate to place the authority of the Fathers before the
results of contemporary scholarship. "For were not he a wise man, that
would prefer one Master Humfrey, Master Fulke, Master Whitakers, or some
of us poor men, because we have a little smack of the three tongues,
before St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Augustine, St. Gregory, or St.
Thomas, that understood well none but one?"[222] Since his field is thus
narrowed, he finds it easy to lay down definite rules for translation.
Fulke, on the other hand, believes that translation may be dissociated
from matters of belief. "If the translator's purpose were evil, yet so
long as the words and sense of the original tongue will bear him, he
cannot justly be called a false and heretical translator, albeit he have
a false and heretical meaning."[223] He is not willing to accept
unsupported authority, even that of the leaders of his own party. "If
Luther misliked the Tigurine translation," he says in another attack on
the Rhemish version, "it is not sufficient to discredit it, seeing
truth, and not the opinion or authority of men is to be followed in such
matters,"[224] and again, in the _Defence_, "The Geneva bibles do not
profess to translate out of Beza's Latin, but out of the Hebrew and
Greek; and if they agree not