[Footnote 133:  Dejob, op. cit. p. 43.]

During the period of the Counter-Reformation it was the cherished object of the Popes to restore ecclesiastical and theological learning.  They gathered men of erudition round them in the Vatican, and established a press for the purpose of printing the Fathers and diffusing Catholic literature.  But they were met in the pursuance of this project by very serious difficulties.  Their own policy tended to stifle knowledge and suppress criticism.  The scholars whom they chose as champions of the faith worked with tied hands.  Baronio knew no Greek; Latini knew hardly any; Bellarmino is thought to have known but little.  And yet these were the apostles of Catholic enlightenment, the defenders of the infallible Church against students of the caliber of Erasmus, Casaubon, Sarpi!  An insuperable obstacle to sacred studies of a permanently useful kind was the Tridentine decree which had declared the Vulgate inviolable.  No codex of age or authority which displayed a reading at variance with the inspired Latin version might be cited.  Sirleto, custodian of the Vatican Library, refused lections from its MSS. to learned men, on the ground that they might seem to impugn the Vulgate.[134] For the same reason, the critical labors of all previous students, from Valla to Erasmus, on the text of the Bible were suppressed, and the best MSS. of the Fathers were ruthlessly garbled, in order to bring their quotations into accordance with Jerome’s translation.  Galesini takes credit to himself in a letter to Sirleto for having withheld a clearly right reading in his edition of the Psalms, because it explained a mistake in the Vulgate.[135] We have seen how Latini’s Cyprian suffered from the censure; and there is a lamentable history of the Vatican edition of Ambrose, which was so mutilated that the Index had to protect it from confrontation with the original codices.[136] This dishonest dealing not only discouraged students and paralyzed the energy of critical investigation; but it also involved the closing of public libraries to scholars.  The Vatican could not afford to let the light of science in upon its workshop of forgeries and sophistications.

[Footnote 134:  Dejob, op. cit. p. 50.  Also his Muret, pp. 223-227.]

[Footnote 135:  Dejob, De l’Influence, p. 49.]

[Footnote 136:  Id. op. cit. pp. 96-98.]

A voice of reasonable remonstrance was sometimes raised by even the most incorruptible children of the Church.  Thus Bellarmino writes to Cardinal Sirleto, suggesting a doubt whether it is obligatory to adhere to the letter of the Tridentine decree upon the Vulgate.[137] Is it rational, he asks, to maintain that every sentence in the Latin text is impeccable?  Must we reject those readings in the Hebrew and the Greek, which elucidate the meaning of the Scriptures, in cases where Jerome has followed a different and possibly a corrupt