Sanctuarium profanis occlusum, sive, de ss. bibliorum prohibitione in lingua vulgari seu vernacula tractatus

of glory which is communicated to the Angels and the Blessed: Holy Scripture is also a veiled truth, and a light wrapped in shadows, which hide it from the eyes of the profane; and which cannot be penetrated except through the help of light and grace, which is ordinarily not conferred except to the Saints.

This written Word of God is still more precisely and aptly compared with the Incarnate Word of God; not only because the same Spirit, who formed Jesus Christ within the womb of the Blessed Virgin, also formed that word through the mouth of the Prophets; (for St. Peter in 2 Peter 1 testifies that those great men of God spoke from the inspiration and impulse of the Holy Spirit, whence the mouth of the Prophets in Isaiah 1 and Luke 2 is called the mouth of GOD Himself,) but also just as in the adorable person of the Incarnate Word two natures concur, divine and human, which make Him God at once and man, invisible and visible; and they are the principle of most diverse operations and effects, some of which extolled His glory among mortals, and subject their hearts to Him; others on the contrary produced His contempt and the murmurings of the Jews, and scandals: so also in Holy Scripture it is possible to find two things, the Letter and the Spirit. The latter is invisible, the former visible; the latter edifies, the former destroys by accident and scandalizes. The latter inspires life, the former brings death. So the Apostle testifies in 2 Corinthians 3, verse 7.

FIRST PROOF,

Taken from the Letter, which according to the Apostle kills.

One must attend here, lest we fall into the sense of Philo the Jew and Origen, of whom the former (as St. Augustine reports), because he did not know Him who is the door and the way by which we enter and are led to the truth, precipitated into innumerable errors; the latter however (says St. Jerome in the Prologue to the 10 visions of Isaiah) wanted to foist the deliriums of his own brain as mysteries and sacraments of Scripture. Both despised the Letter, and argued it of error and falsehood. Whence that Symbolic Interpreter (so St. Jerome calls Origen) could not imagine that truth was contained in the beginning of Genesis and other places of Holy History; he wanted the formation of Eve to be nothing but a mystical thing; the virtue of the Angels to be represented to us by the trees of the earthly Paradise; the leather garments, which GOD had prepared for the protoplasts to ward off annoyances and shame, to be nothing but human bodies, in which God