TITLE PREFIXED TO S. MATTHEW’S GOSPEL. xxxv
books have false titles, and are inscribed with the names of other authors, as is plain by the works of SS. Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian, and other Fathers. In the same way some Gospels which were compiled by heretics, were inscribed with the names of SS. Bartholomew, Thomas, and Barnabas. By like art and deceit, they might have ascribed a false Gospel to S. Matthew, as in effect the Gnostics did, when they changed and corrupted S. Matthew’s Gospel by their additions. In order, therefore, that we may be sure that this Gospel is rightly ascribed to S. Matthew, and still more, that the whole of it was really dictated by the Holy Ghost, there must needs be the declaration and definition of the Church, which severs it from Apocryphal writings, and pronounces it Canonical. Hence S. Austin, in his book against the Epistle of Manes, which they call Fundamental, wisely says, “I would not believe the Gospel, unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do so.” Not because the authority of the Church is worthier, or of more weight than that of Holy Scripture—for Scripture is the word and the oracle of God Himself—but because it is the office of the Church to separate genuine Scripture from what is false and spurious, and to give its true sense and meaning. “When, therefore, we say,” says a weighty author, “that the Evangelists and other sacred writers have authority from the Catholic Church, according to the sense in which we say it, no one has a right to be offended, as if we set the Church before God. For the sense in which we say that the Church confers authority upon the Scriptures is this, that she declares them to be given by God, and pronounces that they have been dictated by Him. Do they prefer the servant to his master, who say, as is commonly done, that the king’s letters have the chancellor’s authority, because he has attached the great seal to them?
