Appendix
569
to go up and occupy the promised land. The result was a sentence the
Lord passed upon them: “After the number of the days in which ye
searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear
your iniquities, even forty years.”
Numbers 14:34
. A similar method
of computing future time is indicated through the prophet Ezekiel.
Forty years of punishment for iniquities awaited the kingdom of Judah.
The Lord said through the prophet: “Lie again on thy right side, and
thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have ap-
pointed thee each day for a year.”
Ezekiel 4:6
. This year-day principle
has an important application in interpreting the time of the prophecy of
the “two thousand and three hundred evenings and mornings” (
Daniel
8:14
, R.V.) and the 1260-day period, variously indicated as “a time
and times and the dividing of time” (
Daniel 7:25
), the “forty and two
months” (
Revelation 11:2
;
13:5
), and the “thousand two hundred and
threescore days” (
Revelation 11:3
;
12:6
).
Page 56. Forged Writings.—Among the documents that at the
present time are generally admitted to be forgeries, the Donation
of Constantine and the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals are of primary
importance. “The ‘Donation of Constantine’ is the name traditionally
applied, since the later Middle Ages, to a document purporting to have
been addressed by Constantine the Great to Pope Sylvester I, which
is found first in a Parisian manuscript (Codex lat. 2777) of probably
the beginning of the ninth century. Since the eleventh century it has
been used as a powerful argument in favor of the papal claims, and
consequently since the twelfth it has been the subject of a vigorous
controversy. At the same time, by rendering it possible to regard
the papacy as a middle term between the original and the medieval
Roman Empire, and thus to form a theoretical basis of continuity
for the reception of the Roman law in the Middle Ages, it has had
no small influence upon secular history.”—The New Schaff-Herzog
[682]
Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. 3, art. “Donation of
Constantine,” pp. 484, 485.
The historical theory developed in the “Donation” is fully discussed
in Henry E. Cardinal Manning’s The Temporal Power of the Vicar of
Jesus Christ, London, 1862. The arguments of the “Donation” were of
a scholastic type, and the possibility of a forgery was not mentioned
until the rise of historical criticism in the fifteenth century. Nicholas of
Cusa was among the first to conclude that Constantine never made any