Books Fatal to Their Authors | Page 5

imprisoned
for six years in the Castle of St. Angelo. The successor of Pope Pius V.,
Gregory XIII., at length pronounced him guilty of false doctrine. His
catechism was condemned; he was compelled to abjure sixteen
propositions, and besides other penances he was confined for five years
in a monastery. Broken down by his eighteen years' imprisonment and

by the hardships he had undergone, he died sixteen days after his cruel
sentence had been pronounced. [Footnote: Cf. The Church of Spain, by
Canon Meyrick. (National Churches Series.)] On his deathbed he
solemnly declared that he had never seriously offended with regard to
the Faith. The people were very indignant against his persecutors, and
on the day of his funeral all the shops were closed as on a great festival.
His body was honoured as that of a saint. His captors doubtless
regretted his death, inasmuch as the Pope is said to have received a
thousand gold pieces each month for sparing his life, and Philip
appropriated the revenues of his see for his own charitable purposes,
which happened at that time to be suppression of heresy in the
Netherlands by the usual means of rack and fire and burying alive
helpless victims.
A very fatal book was one entitled Opus de anno primitivo ab exordia
mundi, ad annum Julianum accommodato, et de sacrorum temporum
ratione. Augustae-Vindelicorum, 1621, in folio magno. It is a work of
Jerome Wecchiettus, a Florentine doctor of theology. The Inquisition
attacked and condemned the book to the flames, and its author to
perpetual imprisonment. Being absent from Rome he was
comparatively safe, but surprised the whole world by voluntarily
submitting himself to his persecutors, and surrendering himself to
prison. This extraordinary humility disarmed his foes, but it did not
soften much the hearts of the Inquisitors, who permitted him to end his
days in the cell. The causes of the condemnation of the work are not
very evident. One idea is that in his work the author pretended to prove
that Christ did not eat the passover during the last year of His life; and
another states that he did not sufficiently honour the memory of Louis
of Bavaria, and thus aroused the anger of the strong supporters of that
ancient house.
The first English author whose woes we record is Samuel Clarke, who
was born at Norwich in 1675, and was for some time chaplain to the
bishop of that see. He was very intimate with the scientific men of his
time, and especially with Newton. In 1704 he published his Boyle
Lectures, A Treatise on the Being and Attributes of God, and on
Natural and Revealed Religion, which found its way into other lands, a

translation being published in Amsterdam in 1721. Our author became
chaplain to Queen Anne and Rector of St. James's. He was a
profoundly learned and devout student, and obtained a European
renown as a true Christian philosopher. In controversy he encountered
foemen worthy of his steel, such as Spinosa, Hobbes, Dodwell, Collins,
Leibnitz, and others. But in 1712 he published The Scriptural Doctrine
of the Trinity, which was declared to be opposed to the Christian belief
and tainted with Arianism. The attention of Parliament was called to
the book; the arguments were disputed by Edward Wells, John
Edwards, and William Sommer; and Clarke was deprived of his offices.
The charge of heterodoxy was certainly never proved against him; he
did good service in trying to stem the flood of rationalism prevalent in
his time, and his work was carried on by Bishop Butler. His
correspondence with Leibnitz on Time, Space, Necessity, and Liberty
was published in 1717, and his editions of Caesar and Homer were no
mean contributions to the study of classical literature.
In the sixteenth century there lived in Hungary one Francis David, a
man learned in the arts and languages, but his inconstancy and
fickleness of mind led him into diverse errors, and brought about his
destruction. He left the Church, and first embraced Calvinism; then he
fled into the camp of the Semi-Judaising party, publishing a book De
Christo non invocando, which was answered by Faustus Socinus, the
founder of Socinianism. The Prince of Transylvania, Christopher
Bathori, condemned David as an impious innovator and preacher of
strange doctrines, and cast him into prison, where he died in 1579.
There is extant a letter of David to the Churches of Poland concerning
the millennium of Christ.
Our next author was a victim to the same inconstancy of mind which
proved so fatal to Francis David, but sordid reasons and the love of
gain without doubt influenced his conduct and produced his fickleness
of faith. Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, was a shining
light of the Roman Church at the end of the sixteenth century. He was
born