Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/583

 LORENZO VALL4. 567 being only forced to make a general declaration that he believed as Holy Mother Church believed — the sincerity of which appeared when, attacked on a point of dialectics, he defended himself by saying : " In this, too, I believe as Mother Church believes, though Mother Church knows nothing about it." When, in 1443, Alfonso and Eugenius were reconciled, Valla sought to go to Rome, but was unable to do so ; but when the monkish Eugenius was suc- ceeded by the humanist Nicholas Y., the way was opened. Nicho- las not only welcomed him, but gave him a position among the papal secretaries and rewarded his translation of Thucydides with a gift of five hundred ducats. Calixtus III. provided him with a prebend in the pope's own church of St. John Lateran, and here he was honorably buried. So little reverence, indeed, existed at the time for the most sacred subjects that ^Eneas Sylvius relates with admiration, as an illustration of Alfonso's keenness, that when he had been wearied with a sermon by Fra Antonio, a Sicilian Dominican, on some questions concerning the Eucharist, he put to the preacher the following puzzle : A man enclosed a consecrated host in a vase of gold ; a month later, on opening it, he found only a worm ; the worm could not have been formed from the pure gold, nor from the accidents which were there, without the subject ; it was therefore produced from the body of Christ ; but from the substance of God nothing but God can proceed, therefore the worm w r as God. In such a spiritual atmosphere it was in vain that Lorenzo's enemy Poggio, whom he had mercilessly ridiculed and abused, urged that his errors as to the nature of God and the vow of chastity should be reproved by fire rather than by argu- ment. His commentary on the New Testament, in which he cor- rected the errors of the Yulgate by the aid of the Greek text, al- though subsequently put in the index by Paul IY. in 1559, was not condemned at the time. Nicholas Y. saw it, Bessarion con- tributed to it, Nicholas of Cusa begged a copy of it, and Erasmus, in 1505, published it with enthusiastic encomiums, under the pa- tronage of Christopher Fischer, papal prothonotary. "We have seen from Bacon how hopelessly corrupt the text of the Yulgate had become ; Valla's attempt to purify it was warmly contested, but in his controversy over it with Poggio he won the victory, and the right to do so was thenceforth conceded.*
 * Laurent. Valla? in Donat. Constant. Declara. (Fasciculus Rer. Expetendar. I.