Page:Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent Buckley.djvu/378

Rh any degree other opinions, which are contained in the aforesaid book of Cornelius Jansenius.

Given at Rome, at Saint Mary Major's, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord 1653, the day before the calends of June, the ninth year of our pontificate.  

Clement, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to all the faithful in Christ, health and apostolical benediction.

The only-begotten Son of God, for our salvation and that of the whole world, having become the son of man, whilst he was instructing his disciples in the doctrine of truth, and educating his whole Church in the apostles, arranging the present and providing for the future, by a splendid and most wholesome lesson admonished us, that we should take heed from false prophets, who come to us in sheep's clothing, in whose name chiefly are pointed out those lying masters, and dealers in deception, who lurkingly insinuating their perverse dogmas under the splendid garb of piety, introduce sects of perdition under the show of sanctity, and that they may steal the more easily on the incautious, as if laying aside the wolf's skin, and wrapping themselves up in the sentences of the divine law, as in the fleeces of sheep, wickedly abuse the words of the holy Scriptures, and accordingly those of the New Testament itself, which they wrest in many ways to their own destruction and that of others; taught forsooth by the example and tutorage of the old father of lies, from whom they are descended, that there is no shorter or readier way to deceive, than that where the fraud of nefarious error is surreptitiously introduced, there the authority of the divine word should be held out as a pretext.

Instructed by these truly divine admonitions, as soon as we heard, not without the innermost bitterness of our heart, that a certain book some time since printed in the French language, and distributed into several volumes, entitled, "Le Nouveau Testament en François, avec des reflexions morales sur chaque vers, etc., à Paris, 1699:" otherwise:  "Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile, des Actes des Apôtres, des Epîtres de S. Paul, des Epîtres canoniques et de l'Apocalypse; ou Pensées 