by which they were founded, and thus delivers dogmas to us just as the faith was delivered to her, which the Holy Spirit teaches and has taught her, and she selects that sense of the words which imports the sense intended by the Holy Spirit in teaching such a truth.

XVIII. The more powerful means of judgment for the legitimate interpretation of Sacred Scriptures are (besides right faith in God and holy morals, and an optimal will to find truth) the steady and continuous tradition of the Church, the definitions of Supreme Pontiffs and Councils, and the consenting interpretation of the Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church; and these are purely extrinsic means of correct interpretation. But the intrinsic means, or those more proper for eliciting the sense of Scripture, attend to the reason of its words, the mode of speaking, and the things signified; these are to compare places with places, the Old Testament with the New, and the obscure with the manifest. And yet, intrinsic means, taken precisely or by themselves and in isolation, can indeed be assumed as probable for the understanding and interpretation of Sacred Scriptures, but not as certain and irrefragable unless they are entirely subjected to extrinsic ones and obtain their firmness from them, since they themselves rely on Divine authority and the promises of Christ, and are therefore infallible.

§. III.

THE MARROW OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURE TREE,

THE SUBJECT OF ALL SACRED SCRIPTURE,

AND

Arguments and partitions of the individual Books.

I. The subject, therefore, of every single book of Sacred Scripture is God, even if there were one in which no miracle of God were narrated. And although the same things that are contained in Scripture might be written by some historiographer, philosopher, or poet, the Scripture does not by this fact define itself to be sacred and to have God as its subject; nor would that history or profane book become a part of Scripture, but would remain in its own state.

II. The universal, material, and extensive object of Sacred Scripture, around which the entire work of Sacred Scripture turns, are all those things which God wished to reveal to men in public and authentic Scripture to this end