How to disceme the false interpretation of Sacred Scripture from the true : proving also, that it cannot be the soule Iudge

Taken out of the Apology of that right excellent learned, man Fredericus Staphlius, Counsellor to the late Emperour Ferdinandus, almost word for word: and exceeding profitable for this perillous tyme.

Notwithstanding ail the enormities and absurdities ensuing of appealing to the bare text of Scripture, heretikes seeing themselves on every side entrapped and convicted, yet ever they play, Fox to the hole, and runne to this impudent shift to say that the text of holy Scripture is sufficient for all instruction and doctrine : that it may be understood of all men, and need no glosses nor expositions.

Is not this, I beseech thee, good reader, a captious and subtill shift, to thrust only the written text to the people, defrauding them of the true meaning and interpretation of the text? Even so did the Sadduces, heretickes of the old law before Christs tyme, as Iosephus in his Chronicle witnesseth. So did after Christ, the Arrians, Dimerits, Apostolici, and many such like other heretickes, as is to be seene in S. Basil, Epiphanius, and S. Augustine.

If the text of holy writ, needeth no exposition, what ment our Saviour, when after his resurrection, begining at Moyses and all the Prophets, he expounded into them, in all the Scriptures, the thinges concerning himselfe? Luc. 24, 25.