Excerpt from New Chapters in the Warfare of Science The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to undermine the older structure. Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific methods he proved the famous Letter of Christ to Abgarus a forgery; the Donation of Constantine, one of the great foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the creed attributed to the apostles a creation which post-dated them by several centuries. Of even more per manent influence was his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern method of comparing manuscripts to find what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time, the ruling pontiff and his con temporaries cared much for literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance to the Inquisition. While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic interpretation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.