Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children

Namely, it was the Word who was present with them and speaking through them.

Just before this passage, Hippolytus has been explaining the three youths' own apostrophic rhetoric in the Song of the Three Children, and you can see this on screen, where they're addressing all creation as through one mouth.

It's a literary device.

It's as though all creation through one mouth.

Here are some of the specifics.

In the additions to Daniel, you have something called the Song of the Three Young Men.

This event is added between Daniel 2.23 and Daniel 3.24. There's also a section called Susanna, which in a Catholic Bible, I believe, is Daniel 13. and an event called Bell and the Dragon.

And I remember reading this recently.

There's definitely more to it.

So one day, I might come and tell you, we are reading a book from the Song of the Three Holy Children, and you'll start wondering, what is this now? Yeah, that's how it is.

When you're open to learning more, this is the key, you learn

more.

Suppose, for a moment, that that man was gifted with perpetual youth.

This, by the way, is an illustration of W. H. Malick's Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption, Chapter 11. and also with perfect memory and heard all the teaching and explanations of our redeemer and of his apostles and retained them he would be an invaluable witness and authority to consult surely so as to discover exactly what was the doctrine of jesus christ and of the twelve but such undoubtedly is the catholic church not an individual person but a corporate personality who lived with indeed was called into being by our divine saviour in whose hearing he uttered all his teaching who listened to the apostles in their day and generation repeating and expounding the saviour's doctrine who ever young and ever strong has persisted and lived all through the centuries and continues even till our own day fresh and keen in memory as ever and able to assure us without fear of forgetting or mixing things up or adding things out of his own head what exactly our blessed lord said and taught and meant and did suppose again the man we are imagining had written down much of what he heard christ and the apostles say but had not fully reported all and was able to supplement what was lacking by personal explanations which he gave from his perfect memory that again is a figure of the catholic church she wrote down much indeed and most important parts of our lord's teaching and of the apostolic explanation of it in scripture but nevertheless she did not intend it to be a complete and exhaustive account apart from her own explanation of it and as a matter of fact she is able from her own perpetual memory to give fuller and clearer accounts and to add some things that are either omitted from the written report or are only hinted at or partially recorded or mentioned merely in passing such is the catholic church in relation to her own book the new testament it is hers because she wrote it by her first apostles and preserved it and guarded it all down the ages by her popes and bishops nobody else has any right to it whatsoever any more than a stranger has the right to come into your house and break open your desk and pilfer your private documents therefore i say that for protestants to step in fifteen hundred years after the catholic church had had possession of the bible and to pretend that it is theirs and that they alone know what the meaning of it is and that the scriptures alone without the voice of the catholic church explaining them are intended by god to be the guide and rule of faith this i say is the height of absurdity only those who are abysmally ignorant of the history of the sacred scriptures their origin and authorship and preservation could pretend that there is any logic or common sense in such a mode of acting but the absurdity becomes tenfold worse when it is remembered that the protestants did not appropriate the whole of the catholic books but actually cast out some from the collection and took what remained and elevated these into a new canon or volume of sacred scripture such as had never been seen or heard of before from the first to the sixteenth century in any church either in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the waters under the earth let us make good this charge item three open a protestant bible and you will find there are seven complete books a-wanting that is seven books fewer than there are in the catholic bible and seven fewer than there were in every collection and catalogue of holy scripture from the fourth to the sixteenth century Their names are Tobias, Baruch, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, 1st Maccabees, 2nd Maccabees, together with seven chapters of the Book of Esther, and sixty-six verses of the third chapter of Daniel, commonly called the Song of the Three Children, Daniel chapter 3, verses 24 through 90, Douay version.

these were deliberately cut out and the bible bound up without them the criticisms and remarks of luther calvin and the swiss and german reformers about these seven books of the old testament show to what depths of impiety those unhappy men had allowed themselves to fall when they broke away from the true church even in regard to the new testament it required all the powers of resistance on the part of the more conservative reformers to prevent luther from flinging out the epistle of st james as unworthy to remain within the volume of holy scripture an epistle of straw he called it with no character of the gospel in it in the same way and almost to the same degree he dishonored the epistle of st jude and the epistle to the hebrews and the beautiful apocalypse of st john declaring they were not on the same footing as the rest of the books and did not contain the same amount of gospel i e his gospel the presumptuous way indeed in which luther among others poured contempt and doubt upon some of the inspired writings which had been acknowledged and cherished and venerated for one thousand or twelve hundred years and why did he impugn such books as we have mentioned because they did not suit his new doctrines and opinions he had arrived at the principle of private judgment, of picking and choosing religious doctrines, and whenever any book, such as the book of Maccabees, taught a doctrine that was repugnant to his individual taste, as, for example, that it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sins.

2nd Maccabees, chapter 12, verse 46.