Unfortunately, it was very difficult
to find what the "authority of Scripture" really was. To the
greater number of Protestant ecclesiastics it meant the authority
of any meaning in the text which they had the wit to invent and the
power to enforce.
To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the
Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin translation
of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate. It was insisted
by leading Catholic authorities that this was as completely a
product of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong
men arose to insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin
differed, the Hebrew should be altered to fit Jerome's
mistranslation, as the latter, having been made under the new
dispensation, must be better than that made under the old. Even so
great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted himself in vain against
this new tide of unreason.[[308]]
Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text
confined to western Europe.
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