All this happened while the Roman Church, according to Catholic writers, was keeper of the Bible.  The honor which these writers assert for their Church is spurious.  If there is any class of men for whom the glory must be vindicated of having given to the world the pure Word of God in a reliable text, it is the band of textual, or lower, critics who have gathered and collated all existing manuscripts of the Bible.  What an immense amount of painstaking labor this necessitated the reader can guess from the fact that for the New Testament alone about 3,000 manuscripts had to be examined word for word and letter for letter.  The men who undertook this gigantic task, arid who are always on the watch for new finds, do not belong in the Roman fold, and did not receive the incentive for their work from the Roman Church.  This work started soon after the Reformation, and the intense interest aroused in God’s Word by that movement is the true cause of it.  The Protestant Church, not the Church of Rome, has given back to the world the pure Word of God in more than one sense.

The official Bible of the Roman Church to-day is the Latin Vulgate.  This Bible, which is a revision by Jerome and others of many variant Latin texts in use towards the end of the fourth century, has been elevated to the dignity of the inspired text.  The original purpose was good:  it was to remove the confusion of many conflicting texts and to establish uniformity in quoting the Bible.  The errors of the Vulgate are many, but while it was understood that the Vulgate was merely a translation, the errors could be corrected from the original sources.  Little, however, was done in this respect before the Reformation, and since then the Roman Church has become rigid and petrified in its adherence to this Latin Bible.  In its fourth session (April 8, 1546) the Council of Trent decreed that “of all Latin editions the old and vulgate edition be held as authoritative in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions; and that no one is to dare or presume under any pretext to reject it.”  “The meaning of this decree,” says Hodge, “is a matter of dispute among Romanists themselves.  Some of the more modern and liberal of their theologians say that the council simply intended to determine which among several Latin versions was to be used in the service of the Church.  They contend that it was not meant to forbid appeal to the original Scriptures, or to place the Vulgate on a par with them in authority.  The earlier and stricter Romanists take the ground that the Synod did intend to forbid an appeal to the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, and to make the Vulgate the ultimate authority.  The language of the council seems to favor this interpretation.”  We might add, the practise of Romanists, too.  At the debate in Leipzig Eck contended that the Latin Vulgate was inspired by the Holy Ghost. (Koestlin, I, 455.)