IT is notorious that at the time of the Reformation, certain uninspired writings commonly called the Apocrypha were still printed with the canonical books of the O.T. It was a relic not only of Popery but of the Catholic declension that set in strongly after the apostles. The so-called fathers, Greek and Latin, winked at the dishonor done to scripture by incorporating inspired and non-inspired in the Bible. But even in the darkest ages none of the least intelligence confounded the false with the true, though there they were together read for example of life and instruction in manners, heedless of the leveling up man or leveling down God which must be the result. The reformers were more or less aware that these merely human books were a bad example of life and a spurious instruction of manners, and above all a standing shame put on God's word; but they compromised, partly through the ignorance of high and low, partly through the politic influence of worldly potentates who sought to conciliate their contumacious subjects. Popery at the Council of Trent apostatized as never before so arrogantly and defiantly by binding the uninspired equally with the inspired. on its besotted votaries. But Protestants abroad and at home allowed the old compromise.
More than eighty years ago controversy sprung up in the British and Foreign Bible Society about allowing the Apocrypha to be mixed up with the scriptures: and in the course of some five years it was decided by the Society to exclude it from their printed Bibles. Indeed for years after the dispute continued and even led to the Trinitarian Bible Society. But within and without the older Society, and of course the new, no doubt can exist that the favorers of the Apocrypha were defeated, including H. Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough, who had been educated in Germany, and more rationalist than superstitious; a man wholly ignorant of divine grace.
It appears from a circular sent to the Bible Treasury that the Bp. of Winchester has now become President of the newly formed International Society of the Apocrypha, the avowed object of which is to make more widely known “the spiritual! ecclesiastical!! and literary value” of this incubus on, the Bible; and not a few learned men are the associated instruments of this movement. It seems to be deplorable, but not surprising that it should follow the wide-spread faithless and wicked effort to destroy the assured claim of scripture to be the only God-breathed testimony to man; a further working of the spirit of the age to subject His word to pretentious science, which is no science but a letting loose of human will and imagination to destroy divine authority, under the pretext “of literary and historical investigation.” Thus when these men are doing all they can to degrade scripture from its unique place, if we believe the Son of God, they and others are seeking the more general study of writings altogether human as Deutero-Canonical; though confessedly the Maccabeean books are ridiculously unhistorical and even self-contradictory; and use language incompatible with any divine character (2 Mace. ii. 23, &c., xv. 37-38), to say nothing of the silliness of Tob. iv. 18. How little any of these zealots for the Apocrypha are so instructed in scripture as to be a man of God complete, fully fitted to every good work!