I first take the ground, that the word of God received on authority (of men), is a rejection of God's testimony. If I receive an account of another because you put your name to it, it is because I do not believe the person who gives the account. God may providentially make it to be received where this genuine faith is not, but then it is not saving. To be saving it must be faith in God; "he that hath received his testimony, has set to his seal that God is true:" he who demands the church's authority to receive it has not. God may have used all manner of means of preserving, and even authenticating the testimony, and so He has in many as we might expect; and I believe that the scriptures were committed to the church to keep - not to authorise, but to keep, as I keep a document safe. I give it no authority. It has its own. But I keep it safe. Now God, I believe, providentially has done this. But then the Roman body has decidedly failed in this, because at the Council of Trent, which is with them of divine authority, (it) has declared that to be scripture which declares itself not to be so. That is for example the [second book of] Maccabees, which concludes by saying, If I have done well, it is as befits the subject; if ill, it is according to my ability. Now it is profane to suppose for an instant that that is the Holy Ghost's inditing. The Prologus Galeatus indeed of Jerome, generally prefixed to the Vulgate, declares that the Apocryphal books are not scripture. Many other passages from the Apocrypha could be adduced, such as that the offerings for the dead were those dead in mortal sin - that there are three contrary accounts of the death of Antiochus - but I prefer the fact that one book of the Maccabees declares it is not scripture, as above. Moreover, it is well known, that Sixtus V., acting under the authority of the Council of Trent, promulgated as the only authentic word of God an edition of the Vulgate, which was suppressed, because his successor Clement altered it in two thousand places; five copies only of it are in existence. Clement's bears in appearance its name. It has been in no sense, what the church ought to be, a faithful keeper of the "oracles of God committed" to it.

Letter of JND to WK