Selected Quotes from Jean Hardouin
1
Hardouin, Jean. Prolegomena to a Censure of Old Writers. 1766.
2010 Dr. Hermann Detering Print & Publishing:
Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt.
2010 Dr. Hermann Detering Print & Publishing:
Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt.
Soon, unless God avert the ill, the whole Christian world will become atheist against its will.”(6)
In the point of fact, the fellow who assumed and bares the name “Augustine” teaches absolute atheism under the guise of Christian language. (9)
God they have none, except for the ‘Nature of Things;’ others call it mere ‘Ens,’ or ‘Essence...or formal Reality, Unity, and Truth of essences, and their Permanence in that unity and truth... apart from any metaphysical composition. (13)
Thence they founded a metaphysical system of religion, dealing with the doctrine of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the other Sacraments--of Grace, Justification, and other capital points of religion, as far as men could do so who had no true God. (12)
They desired it to be believed that there was no God but Nature; who was the framer of the Universe by necessary and immutable laws of motion, and also the ruler of minds by natural light--the light of Truth, as they call it. (13)
God is either...’the All,’ or the necessary rectitude of ‘the All,’ according to the rules of Mechanics, Geometry, Prudence, and Truth, so that they might be reckoned Christians who cultivated and preached Truth. (13)
The Christian Religion is the religion of the true God. It ought, therefore, in all its doctrines show the characters of a religion which worships the true God...They ought not to be such as they would be if there were no true God at all; if there were but Nature instead of God, or the natural Light of Reason or of Truth. (14)
For example: We believe Christ to be in the Eucharist...the impious Sect to whom I have referred teaches that this transmutation takes place in the mind of believers by pious thought, which they call the ‘operation of the Holy Spirit.’ And why? Because these sectarians do not believe there is any God! (14)
First and above all, the careful desires of the impious gang was to deprave the Sacred Scriptures, because it utterly made an end of their impious principles. They had to make it agree with them. (51)
And so their first and chief task was to learn the Sacred Scriptures by heart, to weave Concordances and to make out Commentaries, to corrupt the text, to leave no jot or tittle intact that might be opposed to their principles; to depart as far as possible from the Vulgate Edition; and because they could not adulterate that Book, because they knew it was against them... they had to feign that it was recent, as compared with the Greek Books (Codices), which they declared to be far more ancient! (51)
The impious band, having no hope of corrupting the sacred Latin Books, which were in everybody’s hands, turned their attention to the making of Greek Books, and to the adulteration of Hebrew copies, which they wrote in elegant calligraphy. (52)
They also corrupted Latin books, which they hid in Libraries; because the old Vulgate could not be snatched from the hands of the whole Christian people, everywhere diffused...their design being to take them out thence at suitable times, like weapons from armouries, with the object of attacking the Catholic faith. (52)
They also invented various readings in the Greek Codices (or Manuscripts) that they might persuade readers that there had been the like in Latin books in days of yore; and that these Various Readings existed in books which they had laid up in Libraries. And now any rogue or liar may invent the like various readings, as they call them! (53)
The wicked faction invented the suspicions against the accuracy and certainty of the Vulgate Edition, intact and sound though it may be; hoping that their forged MSS., laid up on the shelves of the Libraries, might obtain authority partly from their alleged antiquity, partly from the testimony of other books. (54)
In that impious hypothesis from which it follows that the written word of God is nothing but the word of universal Reason…(56)
If there is no God, as the impious crew would have you believe, but the Nature of things, and the natural light, which is Right Reason; and there is no other Christian Religion than obedience to Right Reason, which may be (123) called philosophy, since Right Reason is also Truth and Wisdom; it follows that all those who obey Right Reason and natural light are Christians. (124)
Therefore very many pagans were Christian, although without God, as Paul affirms. For this reason the forgers found it expedient to write Greek and Roman History, full of the vices of Princes and People, full of homicides, slaughter, impurities of every kind, their object being to prevent readers from supposing them to have been Christians. They must therefore be represented as not having lived under the guidance of reason. (124)
Numberless Codices still lie hid in the Libraries of perhaps four hundred years old (there are none, except a few sacred Codices, older) ; they have not yet seen the light. Tell me, because they have been in the shade for four hundred years, have they any authority from the fact that through so many years none has convicted them of falsehood? It would be a folly to say so! (145)
The gang of forgers had Alphabets and Inks in both tongues, Greek and Latin, and parchments to suit every age….show the same form of writing, the same character; simply because the writers had the same alphabet before their eyes... (152)
So alike is the character everywhere, you might swear that that all these Codices came, not only out of one workshop, but from one hand; of if from many, certainly from those who had the same alphabet before their eye--or form of letters which they accurately preserved in painting each… (152)
“What you read of in books as Heresies are fictions, invented for the purpose of being opposed, and so establishing Atheism.” (154)
It is, again, clear that these heresies were feigned and fabulous, from that fact they nowhere existed in the world; none renew them, and this because they are fatuous and insane, and invented with the sole object that, by opposing them in definitions of Councils, and in special controversial writings, impiety may be suggested. (155)
Ought not every one to wonder at the alleged fact that the Heresies sprang up in the order in which divers tracts on Religion may be arranged in schools? (155)