Adversaries press recognition of books and Protestant discord as against immediate Spirit persuasion
But the adversaries keep pressing. If the faithful received Scripture immediately by the Spirit's inward illumination and persuasion, and not because of the Church's teaching and testimony as their rule of faith, then — they say — those who have God's Spirit could, without the Church's authority and testimony, infallibly and certainly tell divine books from ones that are not. Experience, they claim, says otherwise.
Before the Church judged and determined, many truly divine books were doubted — for example the Epistle to the Hebrews, John's Apocalypse, and several other New Testament books. Others that were not Canonical or divine were ignorantly taken as such even by pious people.
And to press harder: You Protestants, they say, who boast you have that Spirit of God by which sacred and divine books are told from the apocryphal, are not agreed among yourselves; Lutherans doubt the Epistle of James and some others that Calvinists admit.
To set the matter before the eyes and refute us among our own by experience, they read someone from our common people a chapter of an Apocryphal book and a chapter of a Canonical book with the author's and book's name hidden, then ask whether he can tell by the Spirit's help which is divine.
Latin
XI. Sed urgere nos pergunt adversarii. Nam, inquiunt, si fideles immediate Scripturam reciperent per internam Spiritus illuminationem et persuasionem non vero propter Ecclesiae doctrinam et testimonium, tanquam suae fidei regulam, futurum esset ut fideles, qui Spiritum Dei habent, absque authoritate et testimonio Ecclesiae, possent infallibiliter et certo dignoscere libros divinos sibi propositos ab iis qui divini non sunt. At contra est experientia. Siquidem, ante Ecclesiae judicium et determinationem, de multis libris qui vere divini sunt dubitatum fuit; ut ex. gr. de Epistola ad Hebraeos et Joannis Apocalypsi, et de pluribus aliis Novi Testamenti libris. Alii vero qui non erant Canonici et divini pro talibus ignoranter a piis etiam viris habiti sunt. Utque magis nos urgeant. Vos, inquiunt, Protestantes, qui jactatis vos habere illum Dei Spiritum quo libri sacri et divini ab apocryphis dignoscuntur, non estis inter vos de his libris concordes; siquidem Lutherani de Epistola Jacobi, aliisque nonnullis dubitant, quas admittunt Calviniani. Atque ut rem quasi oculis subjiciant, et sententiam nostram apud nostros redarguant ipsa experientia, alicui ex plebe nostra praelegunt caput libri Apocryphi, itemque caput libri Canonici, celato authoris et libri nomine. Tum rogant an possit ope Spiritus discernere, utrum divinum sit, utrum non.