OF THE RHEMISH TESTAMENT. BY WILLLIAM FULKE, D.D. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY; INCLUDING A COMPLETE TOPICAL AND TEXTUAL INDEX. (977). ENTERED according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1834, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York. JOHN H. TURNEY'S STEREOTYPE. PREFACE. BY THE EDITOR. AMONG "the signs of the times," few events more remarkable and impressive can be cited than the republication by American Protestants, of the original edition of the Rhemish Testament. When that volume was first issued in 1582, it excited in Britain indescribable alarm. "It was considered as a book of very dangerous tendency; being designed to promote the errors, superstitions, and impurities of Popery." In the preface to his "Defence of the English translations of the Bible, Fulke remarks— "The adversaries of our Lord who willeth the holy scriptures to be searched,' perceiving that they cannot prevail to bring in that darkness and ignorance of God's most sacred word and will therein contained, whereby their blind devotion, the daughter of ignorance, as they themselves profess, was won't to make them rulers of the world, they also at last are become translators of the New Testament into English. In which, they leave the pure fountain of the original verity to follow the crooked stream of their barbarous Latin translation, and which beside other manifest corruptions, is pestered with many annotations both false and undutiful, by which they seek to infect the minds of credulous readers with heretical and superstitious opinions." Not one permanent settlement of Europeans, except in Mexico, then existed on this Northern continent. Neither Popery nor Protestantism was known to the aboriginal Indians. Now, the emissaries of Rome are prowling about with all craftiness, and in all the agility and ferocity of the "Beast" to which the Dragon of Hell gave "his power, seat, and great authority." Revelation xiii. 2. That book which Protestants, two hundred and fifty years ago, dreaded as the pestilential "smoke of the bottomless pit," has been republished under the sanction of an efficient portion of Reformed Christians, expressly that it may TESTIFY OF ITSELF. No greater proof of the change which has taken place in reference to Popery, between the days when the impious tyranny of Pope Gregory XIII. raged, and the present era, when the no less insolent assumptions of Gregory XVI. are so openly avowed, can possibly be cited, than these two facts; that the commentary by which it was confidently hoped "the bright and blissful Reformation" would be obliterated, the modern Jesuits dare not print: and that Protestants have published that volume, confident that no reflecting citizen who reads the exhibition of the doctrines and practices of Romanism by the Jesuits of Rheims, will ever become a Papist. Notwithstanding this conviction, it is a duty to avail ourselves of that wisdom and erudition and piety, which have effectually demonstrated the falsifications, ignorance, and wickedness of the Rhemists who so openly perverted the word of God. At the period when the New Testament, so called by the Jesuits of Rheims, appeared in 1582, "it was the opinions |