W here W e Got the Bible: Our Debt to the Catholic Church

by The Right Rev. HENRY G. GRAHAM,

Author of "Hindrances to Conversion," etc.

Twenty-second Print ing

Nihil Obstat et Im prim atur JOANNES RITCHI E, Vic. Gen. Glasguae.

Originally published by B. Herder Book Co., St . Louis, Missouri.

TAN BOOKS AND PUBLI SHERS, INC. P.O. Box 424 Rockford, I llinois 61105

Dedicated to all lovers of the writ ten word.

’I n which are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest , as they do also the other scriptures, t o t heir own dest ruct ion.’ 2 Peter iii. 16

’I would not believe the Gospel unless m oved thereto by the authority of the Church.’ - St . August ine (Cont ra Epis. Manich., Fund., n. 6.)

CONTENTS

Preface Int roduct ion Chapter I . Som e Errors Rem oved Chapter I I . The Making of the Old Testam ent Chapter I I I . The Church Precedes the New Testam ent Chapter IV. Catholic Church Com piles the New Testam ent Chapter V. Deficiencies of the Protestant Bible Chapter VI . The Originals and their Disappearance Chapter VI I . Variat ions in the text Fatal to the Protestant Theory Chapter VI I I . Our Debt to the Monks Chapter IX. Bible Reading in the ’Dark Ages’ Chapter X. Where then are all the Mediaeval Bibles? Chapter XI . Abundance of Vernacular Scriptures before Wycliff Chapter XI I . Why Wycliff was Condem ned Chapter XI I I . Tyndale’s Condem nat ion Vindicated by Posterit y Chapter XIV. A Deluge of Erroneous Versions Chapter XV. The Catholic Bible (Douay) Chapter XVI . Envoi

PREFACE TO THE FI RST EDI TI ON

This lit t le book about the Bible grew out of lectures which the writer delivered on the subject to m ixed audiences. The lectures were afterwards expanded, and appeared in a series of art icles in the Catholic press 1908-9, and are now with slight alterat ions

reprinted. Their origin will sufficient ly account for the colloquial style em ployed throughout .

There is, therefore, no pretence either of profound scholarship or of eloquent language; all that is at tem pted is a popular and, as far as possible, accurate exposit ion along fam iliar lines of the Catholic claim historically in regard to the Bible. I t is candidly cont roversial without , however, let us hope, being uncharitable or unfair.

Friends had m ore than once suggested the reissue of the art icles; and it appeared to the writer that at last the proper m om ent for it had com e when the Protestant world is j ubilat ing over the Tercentenary of the Authorised Version. Am idst the flood of literature on the subject of the Bible, it seem ed but r ight that som e statem ent , however plain and sim ple, should be set forth from the Catholic side, with the object of bringing hom e to the average m ind the debt that Britain, in com m on with the rest of Christendom , owes to the Catholic Church in this connect ion. Probably the m ot ive of the present publicat ion will be best understood by a perusal of the following let ter from the writer which appeared in the Glasgow Herald, 18th March, 1911: —

THE BI BLE CENTENARY AND THE CATHOLI C CHURCH.

AMID the general j ubilat ion over the three hundredth anniversary of the appearance of King Jam es's version of the Bible, I think it would be a pity if we did not m ake m ent ion of that great Church to which, under God, we owe our possession of the sacred Scriptures—I m ean of course, the Rom an Catholic Church. Without st r iking one single jarr ing note, I hope, in the universal chorus, yet I feel it would be rather ungenerous, and indeed historically unjust , did we not turn our eyes at least in passing to that venerable figure standing in the background surveying our celebrat ions, and, as it were, saying, 'Rejoice over it , but rem em ber it was from m e you got it '. As a Scotsm an, who cannot forget t hat it is the Bible that has m ade Scot land largely what she is today, I yield to no one in venerat ion of the inspired Scriptures and in adm irat ion of the incom parably beaut iful Authorised Version. St ill, honour t o whom honour. We shall only be awarding a just m eed of praise and grat itude if we frankly and thankfully recognise that it is to a council (or councils) of the R.C. Church that we owe the collect ion of the separate books into our present Canon of the New Testam ent , and that to the loving care and devoted labour of the m onks and scholars of t hat Church all through the ages we are indebted, not only for the m ult iplicat ion and dist r ibut ion of the sacred volum e am ong the faithful when as yet no print ing press existed, but even for the preservat ion of the Book from corrupt ion and dest ruct ion. I t is, then, undoubtedly t rue to say that , in the present order of Providence, it is owing to the Rom an Catholic Church that we have a Bible at all. And no one will be a bit the worse Christ ian and Biblelover if he rem em bers this notable year that it is to the Mother Church of Christendom he m ust look if he would behold the real preserver, defender, and t ransm it ter of the 'Word that endureth for ever. '—

HENRY GREY GRAHAM.

I NTRODUCTI ON

IF all were t rue that is alleged against the Catholic Church in her t reatm ent of Holy Scripture, then the proper t it le of these papers should be ‘How we got ' , but 'How we have not got the Bible'. The com m on and received opinion about the m at ter am ong non-Catholics in Britain, for the m ost part , has been that Rom e hates the Bible- that she has done all she could to dest roy it—that in all count ries where she has held sway she has kept the Bible from the hands of the people—has taken it and burned it whenever she found anyone reading it . Or if she cannot altogether prevent it s publicat ion or it s perusal, at least she renders it as nearly useless as possible by sealing it up in a dead language which the m ajorit y of people can neither read nor understand. And all this she does, (so we are told) , because she knows that her doct r ines are absolutely opposed to and cont radicted by the let ter of God's writ ten Word—she holds and propagates dogm as and t radit ions which could not stand one m om ent 's exam inat ion if exposed to the searching light of Holy Scripture. As a m at ter of fact , is it not known to everybody that , when the Bible was for the first t im e brought to the light and printed and put into the peoples' hands in the sixteenth century, suddenly there was a great revolt against the Rom an Church—there was a glorious Reform at ion? The people eagerly gazing upon the open Bible, saw they had been befooled and hoodwinked, and been taught to hold 'for doct r ines the com m andm ents of m en', and forthwith throwing off the fet t ers, and em ancipat ing them selves from the bondage of Rom anism , they em braced the pure t ruth of the Word of God as set forth in Protestant ism and Protestant Bibles. I s not this the tale that history t ells about Rom e? Has she not always waged a cruel and relent less war against the Holy Book—issued prohibit ions and fram ed decrees against reading it , or having it in the house—som et im es even in her deadly hat red going the length of m aking bonfires of heaps of Old and New Testam ents, as Tunstall, Bishop of London, did to William Tyndale's? Has she not burned at the stake, or at least banished from their hom e and count ry, servants of the Lord like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale for no other crim e than that of t ranslat ing and print ing and put t ing into lay folk's hands the sacred text of the gospel of Jesus Chr ist? Who does not know instances, even in our own days, of pious old wom en (especially in I reland) chancing to light upon a Bible (which they have never seen before) and reading it (especially St John's Gospel iii, 16) , and going to the priest about the new light they had received through the blessed words, and then the priest snatching it out of their hands and throwing it into the fire? This is not at all uncom m on ( it is said) in Catholic lands, where the poor people som et im es chance to get a copy of God's Word through the devoted labours of Bible-wom en and t ract -dist r ibutors. A Scotch lady in Rom e, now happily a Catholic but then a m em ber of a Protestant congregat ion there which supports a Bible—dist ributor, once inform ed m e of the account that this gent lem an gravely related to a m eet ing of the congregat ion, as to how an old wom an in a sm all I talian town, accept ing one of his Testam ents and being illum inated by the Gospel of St John (which she never saw before, of course, though part of it is read every day at Holy Mass) , st raightway went and confuted her priest and silenced him , so that he had no word to say in reply. This I repeat , is the com m only accepted idea about Rom e and her at t itude towards Holy Scripture am ong the m asses of non-Catholic people.

I have said advisedly 'am ong the m asses', for happily there are now a goodly num ber of enlightened and im part ial persons, and of scholars who have studied the m at ter fair ly for them selves, m en, for exam ple, of the stam p of the late Dr S. R. Mait land, am ong whom the idea is quite exploded. And one m ay not blam e the m asses too severely for entertaining the not ion above alluded to: how indeed, we m ay ask, could they possibly think otherwise in face of the t radit ion handed down to them from their forefathers since the 'Reform at ion', by m inister, t eacher, and parents, through serm on, catechism , newspaper, books of t ravel, fict ion, and

history? They have believed the t radit ion as naturally as they believed that the sun rose in the east and set in the west ; or that m onasteries and convents were sinks of iniquity and dens of corrupt ion; or that there was once a fem ale Pope called Joan; or that Catholics pay m oney to get their sins forgiven. You cannot blam e them altogether, for they had, hum anly speaking, no opportunity of knowing anything else.

The Protestant account of pre- reform at ion Catholicism has been largely a falsificat ion of history. All the faults and sins that could possibly be raked up or invented against Rom e, or against part icular bishops or priests, were presented to the people of this unhappy land, and all her best acts m isconst rued, m isjudged, m isrepresented, and nothing of good told in her favour. She has been painted as all black and hideous, and no beauty could be seen in her. Consequent ly people cam e to believe the t radit ion as a m at ter of course, and accepted it as history, and no m ore dream ed of enquiring whether it was t rue or not than they dream ed of quest ioning whether Mary wrote the Casket Let ters or blew up Darnley at Kirk o’ Field. Add to this the further fact that , Catholicism being alm ost totally wiped out in Scot land, the people had no m eans of m aking them selves personally acquainted with either it s doct r ines or it s pract ices, and being very im perfect ly educated t ill the beginning of the nineteenth century, were as incapable of arr iving at a t rue knowledge of the interior life of the Catholic Church as of the internal organism of an antediluvian tadpole. Hence one can easily understand how it cam e about that , am ong the m ass of the people in Bible- loving Scot land, the Pope was recognised as the Ant i-Christ foretold by St John, and Rom e herself, that sit teth upon the seven hills, ident ified as ’Babylon, the Great , the m other of harlots, and abom inat ions of the earth’, and the ’wom an drunken with the blood of the saints’. The story goes that one day the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second, propounded to t he learned and scient ific m en about the Court the following profound problem : How is it that a dead fish weighs less than a living one? The learned and scient ific m en discussed the grave difficulty and wrote elaborate t reat ises on it to please the Royal enquirer, but cam e to no sat isfactory conclusion. Finally it occurred to one of them to test whether it really was, as the King had said; and of course he discovered that the thing was a joke; the fish weighed exact ly the sam e dead as living, and all the t im e the Merry Monarch had been ’having them on’. People have been act ing m uch in the sam e way in regard to the assert ion so glibly m ade that Rom e hates the Bible, and persecutes it , and t r ies to blot it out of existence. But nowadays m any are enquir ing—Is it really so? Are we sure of our facts? Are we not building up m ountains of abuse and calum ny on a false suppositon? Just as all have com e to know that the sun, as a m at ter of fact , does not r ise or set but stands st ill, that there never was a Pope Joan but his nam e was John, that m onasteries and convents are hom es of learning and sanct it y and charity, and that no Catholic ever pays or ever could pay a single farthing to get his sins rem it ted—and all this through the spread of knowledge and educat ion and enlightenm ent and study—so also I venture to t hink that people will now be r ight ly considered ignorant and blam eworthy, and at the least behind the t im es, if they do not learn that the not ion I have alluded to above about the Catholic Church and the Bible is false and nonsensical—historically false and inherent ly nonsensical. By a calm considerat ion of the fact s of history and a m ind open to convict ion on genuine evidence, they will be driven by sheer force of honesty to the conclusion that the Catholic Church, so far from being the m onster of iniquity that she is painted, has in very t ruth been the parent , the author and m aker under God, of the Bible; that she has guarded it and defended it all through the ages, and preserved it from error or dest ruct ion; that she has ever held it in highest venerat ion and esteem , and has grounded her doct r ines upon it ; that she alone has the r ight to call it her book; that

she alone possesses the t rue Bible and the whole Bible, and that copies of the Scriptures exist ing outside of her pale, are part ly incorrect and part ly defect ive, and that whatever in them is t rue, is t rue because derived from her who alone possesses the Book in it s fulness and it s t ruth. I f they were Catholics, they would love God’s Holy Word m ore and m ore; they would understand it bet ter; they would adore the Divine Providence that t ook such a wise and sure m eans of preserving and perpetuat ing it ; and they would profoundly adm ire the Catholic Church for her ceaseless vigilance, unt ir ing zeal, and unswerving fidelit y to the com m ission ent rusted to her by Alm ighty God.

CHAPTER I . Som e Errors Rem oved

Now, in order t o understand properly the work of the Catholic Church in creat ing and defending and perpetuat ing the Holy Scriptures, we m ust say a few prelim inary words as to the hum an m eans used in their product ion, and as to the collect ing of the Books of the Bible as we have it at present . There are som e com m on erroneous ideas which we would do well to clear away from our m inds at the very outset .

1. To begin with, the Bible did not drop down from Heaven ready-m ade, as som e seem to im agine; it did not suddenly appear upon the earth, carried down from Alm ighty God by the hand of angel or seraph; but it was writ ten by m en like ourselves, who held in their hand pen (or reed) and ink and parchm ent , and laboriously t raced every let ter in the original languages of the East . They were divinely inspired certainly, as no others ever have been before or since; nevertheless they were hum an beings, m en chosen by God for the work, m aking use of the hum an inst rum ents that lay to their hand at the t im e.

2. I n the second place we shall do well to rem em ber that the Bible was not writ ten all at once, or by one m an, like m ost other books with which we are acquainted, but that 1500 years elapsed between the writ ing of Genesis ( the first Book of the Old Testam ent ) and the Apocalypse or Revelat ion of St John ( the last Book of the New) . I t is m ade up of a collect ion of different books by different authors, form ing, in short , a library instead of a single work, and hence called in Greek, ‘Biblia', or the Books. I f you had lived in the days im m ediately succeeding the death of Moses, all you would have had given to you to represent the Bible would have been the first five books of the Old Testam ent , writ ten by that pat r iarch him self; that was the Bible in em bryo, so to speak—the lit t le seed that was to grow subsequent ly into a great t ree, the first stone laid on which was gradually to be erected the beaut iful tem ple of the writ ten Word throughout the centuries that followed. From this we can see that the preacher extolling the Bible as the only com fort and guide of faithful souls was slight ly out of his reckoning when he used these words: 'Ah, m y brethren! what was it that com forted and st rengthened Joseph in his dark prison in Egypt? What was it that form ed his daily support and m editat ion? What but that blessed book, t he Bible! ' As Joseph existed before a line of the Old Testam ent was penned, and about 1800 years before the first of the New Testam ent books saw the light , the worthy evangelist was guilt y of what we call a slight anachronism .

3. Nor will it be out of place to rem ark here that the Bible was not writ ten originally in English or Gaelic. Som e folks speak as if they believed that the Sacred Books were first com posed, and the incom parable Psalm s of David set forth, in the sweet English tongue, and that they were afterwards rendered into barbarous language such as Lat in or Greek or Hebrew, for the sake of inquisit ive scholars and crit ics. This is not correct ; the original language, broadly speaking, of the Old Testam ent was Hebrew; that of the New Testam ent was Greek. Thus our Bibles as we have them today for reading are ’t ranslat ions’—that is, are a rendering or equivalent in English of the original Hebrew and Greek as it cam e from the pen of prophet and apost le and evangelist . We see this plainly enough in the t it le-page of the Protestant New Testam ent , —which reads 'New Testam ent of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ , t ranslated out of the original Greek.'

4. A last point m ust always be kept clearly in m ind, for it concerns one of the greatest delusions entertained by Protestants and m akes their fierce at tacks on Rom e appear so silly and irrat ional—the point , nam ely that the Bible, as we have it now, was not printed in any language at all t ill about 1500 years after the birth of Christ , for the sim ple reason that there was no such thing as print ing known before that date. We have becom e so accustom ed to the use of the print ing press that we can scarcely conceive of the ages when the only books known to m en were in handwrit ing; but it is the fact that , had we lived and flourished before Mr. John Gooseflesh discovered the art of print ing in the fifteenth century, we should have had to read our Testam ents and our Gospels from the m anuscript of m onk or fr iar, from the pages of parchm ent or vellum or paper covered with the handwrit ing, som et im es very beaut iful and ornam ental, of the scribe that had undertaken the slow and laborious task of copying the Sacred Word. Protestants in these days send shiploads of printed Bibles abroad, and scat ter t housands of Testam ents hither and thither in every direct ion for the purpose of evangelising the heathen and convert ing sinners, and declare that the Bible, and the Bible only, can save m en's souls. What , then, cam e of those poor souls who lived before the Bible was printed, before it was even writ ten in it s present form ? How were nat ions m ade fam iliar with the Christ ian religion and converted to Christ ianity before the fifteenth century? Our Divine Lord, I suppose, wished that the unnum bered m illions of hum an creatures born before the year 1500 should believe what He had taught and save their souls and go to Heaven, at least as m uch as those of the sixteenth and twent ieth centuries; but how could they do this when they had no Bibles, or were too poor t o buy one, or could not read it even though they bought it , or could not understand it even if they could read it? On the Catholic plan (so to call it ) of salvat ion through the teaching of t he Church, souls m ay be saved and people becom e saints, and believe and do all that Jesus Christ m eant them to believe and do,—and, as a m at ter of fact , this has happened—in all count ries and in all ages without either the writ ten or the printed Bible, and both before and after it s product ion. The Protestant theory, on the cont rary, which stakes a m an's salvat ion on the possession of t he Bible, leads to the m ost flagrant absurdit ies, im putes to Alm ighty God a total indifference to the salvat ion of the count less souls that passed hence to eternity for 1500 years, and indeed ends logically in the blasphem ous conclusion that our Blessed Lord failed to provide an adequate m eans of conveying to m en in every age the knowledge of His t ruth. We shall see, as we proceed, the ut ter im possibility of the survival of Christ ianity, and of it s benefit s to hum anity, on the principle of 'the Bible and the Bible only'. Meanwhile we can account for the fact that intelligent non-Catholics have not awakened to it s hollowness and absurdity only by supposing that they do not sufficient ly realise, 'read, m ark, learn, and inwardly digest ' (as the English Prayer-Book says) this single item of history—the Bible was not printed t ill at least 1400 years after Christ .

CHAPTER I I . The Making of the Old Testam ent

Now, looking at the Bible as it stands today, we find it is com posed of 73 separate books—46 in the Old Testam ent , and 27 in the New. How has it com e to be com posed precisely of t hese 73 and no others, and no m ore and no less? Well, taking first the Old Testam ent , we know that it has always been divided into three m ain port ions—the Law, the Prophets, and the Writ ings. ( I ) The Law, as I rem arked before, was the nucleus, the earliest substant ial part , which at one t im e form ed the sole Book of Scripture that the Jews possessed. Moses wrote it , and placed a copy of it in the Ark; that was about 3300 years ago. (2) To this were added, long afterwards, the Prophets and the Writ ings, form ing the com plete Old Testam ent . At what date precisely the volum e or 'canon' of the Old Testam ent was finally closed and recognised as com pleted for ever is not absolutely certain.

When was the Old Testam ent com piled? Som e would decide for about the year 430 B.C., under Esdras and Nehem iah, rest ing upon the authority of the fam ous Jew, Josephus, who lived imm ediately after Our Lord, and who declares that since the death of Ataxerxes, B.C. 424, 'no one had dared to add anything to the Jewish Scriptures, to take anything from them , or to m ake any change in them .' Other authorit ies, again, contend that it was not t ill near 100 B.C. that the Old Testam ent volum e was finally closed by the inclusion of the 'Writ ings'. But whichever content ion is correct , one thing at least is certain, that by this last date—that is, for 100 years before the birth of Our Blessed Lord—the Old Testam ent existed precisely as we have it now.

Of course, I have been speaking so far of the Old Testam ent , in Hebrew, because it was writ ten by Jewish authority in the Jewish language, nam ely, Hebrew, for Jews, God's chosen people. But after what is called the 'Dispersion' of the Jews, when that people was scat tered abroad and set t led in m any other lands outside Palest ine, and began to lose their Hebrew tongue and gradually becam e fam iliar with Greek, which was then a universal language, it was necessary to furnish them with a copy of their Sacred Scriptures in the Greek language. Hence arose that t ranslat ion of the Hebrew Old Testam ent into Greek known as the Septuagint . This word m eans in Lat in 70, and is so nam ed because it is supposed to have been the work of 70 t ranslators, who perform ed their task at Alexandria, where there was a large Greek-speaking colony of Jews. Begun about 280 or 250 years before Christ , we m ay safely say that it was finished in the next century; it was the acknowledged Bible of all the 'Jews of the Dispersion' in Asia, as well as in Egypt , and was the Version used by Our Lord, His Apost les and Evangelists, and by Jews and Gent iles and Christ ians in the early days of Christ ianity. I t is from this Version that Jesus Christ and the New Testam ent writers and speakers quote when referr ing to the Old Testam ent .

But what about the Christ ians in other lands who could not understand Greek? When the Gospel had been spread abroad, and m any people em braced Christ ianity through the labours of Apost les and m issionaries in the first two centuries of our era, naturally they had to be supplied with copies of the Scriptures of the Old Testam ent (which was the inspired Word of God) in their own tongue; and this gave r ise to t ranslat ions of the Bible into Arm enian and Syriac and Copt ic and Arabic and Ethiopic

for the benefit of the Christ ians in these lands. For the Christ ians in Afr ica, where Lat in was best understood, there was a t ranslat ion of the Bible m ade into Lat in about 150 A.D., and, later, another and bet ter for the Christ ians in I taly; but all these were finally superseded by the grand and m ost im portant version m ade by St Jerom e in Lat in called the ’Vulgate’—that is, the com m on, or current or accepted Version. This was in the fourth century of our era. By this t im e St Jerom e was born, t here was great need of securing a correct and uniform text in Lat in of Holy Scripture, for there was danger, through the variety and corrupt condit ions of m any t ranslat ions then exist ing, lest the pure scripture should be lost . So Jerom e, who was a m onk, and perhaps the m ost learned scholar of his day, at the com m and of Pope St Dam ascus in 382 A.D., m ade a fresh Lat in Version of the New Testam ent (which was by this t im e pract ically set t led) correct ing the exist ing versions by the earliest Greek MSS. he could find. Then in his cell at Bethlehem , between (approxim ately) the years 392-404, he also t ranslated the Old Testam ent into Lat in direct ly from the Hebrew (and not from the Greek Septuagint )—except the Psalter, which he had previously revised from exist ing Lat in Versions. This Bible was the celebrated Vulgate, the official text in the Catholic Church, the value of which all scholars adm it to be sim ply inest im able, and which cont inued to influence all other versions, and to hold the chief place am ong Christ ians down to the Reform at ion. I say the 'official' text , because the Council of Trent in 1546 issued a decree, stam ping it as the only recognised and authoritat ive Version allowed to Catholics. 'I f anyone does not receive the ent ire books with all their part s as they are accustom ed to be read in the Catholic Church, and in the old Lat in Vulgate Edit ion, as sacred and canonical ... let him be anathem a.' I t was revised under Pope Sixtus V in 1590, and again under Pope Clem ent VI I I in 1593, who is responsible for the present standard text . I t is from the Vulgate that our English Douai Version com es; and it is of this sam e Vulgate that the Com m ission under Cardinal Gasquet , by com m and of the Pope, is t rying to find or restore the original text as it cam e from the hands of St Jerom e, uncorrupted by and st r ipped of subsequent adm ixtures with other Lat in copies.

CHAPTER I I I . The Church Precedes the New Testam ent

So far, we have been dealing with rather dry m aterial. We have seen how the Old Testam ent books cam e to be collected into one volum e; now it rem ains to see how the Catholic Church also com posed and selected and form ed into another volum e the separate books of the New Testam ent .

1. Now you will rem em ber what I said before, that the New Testam ent was not , any m ore than the Old, all writ ten at one t im e, or all by one m an, but that at least 40 years passed away between the writ ing of the first and the writ ing of the last of it s books. I t is m ade up of the four Gospels, 14 Epist les of St Paul, 2 of St Peter, I of St Jam es, I of St Jude, 3 of St John, t ogether with the Apocalypse of St John, and the Acts of Apost les by St Luke, who also wrote the third Gospel; so that we have in this collect ion works by at least eight different writers, and from the year that the earliest book was com posed (probably the Gospel of St Mat thew) to the year that St John com posed his Gospel about half a century had elapsed. Our Blessed Lord Him self never, so far as we know, wrote a line of Scripture—certainly none that has been preserved. He never told His Apost les to write anything. He did not com m and them

to com m it to writ ing what He had delivered to t hem : but He said, ’Go ye and teach all nat ions’, ’preach the Gospel to every creature’ , ’He that heareth you heareth Me’. What He com m anded and m eant them to do was precisely what He had done Him self, viz.—deliver the Word of God to the people by the living voice—convince , persuade, inst ruct , convert them by addressing them selves face to face to liv ing m en and wom en; not int rust their m essage to a dead book which m ight perish and be dest royed, and be m isunderstood and m isinterpreted and corrupted, but adopt the m ore safe and natural way of present ing the t ruth to them by word of m outh, and of t raining others to do the sam e after they them selves were gone, and so by a living t radit ion, preserving and handing down the Word of God as they had received it , to all generat ions.

2. And this was, as a m at ter of fact , the m ethod the Apost les adopted. Only five out of the twelve wrote down anything at all that has been preserved to us; and of that , not a line was penned t ill at least 10 years after the death of Christ , for Jesus Christ was crucified in 33 A.D., and the first of the New Testam ent books was not writ ten t ill about 45 A.D. You see what follows? The Church and the Faith existed before the Bible; that seem s an elem entary and sim ple fact which no one can deny or ever has denied. Thousands of people becam e Christ ians through the work of the Apost les and m issionaries of Christ in various lands, and believed the whole t ruth of God as we believe it now, and becam e saints, before ever t hey saw or read, or could possibly see or read, a single sentence of inspired Scripture of the New Testam ent , for the sim ple reason that such Scripture did not then exist . How, then, did they becom e Christ ians? In the sam e way, of course, that Pagans becom e Catholics nowadays, by hearing the t ruth of God from the lips of Christ 's m issionaries. When the twelve Apost les m et together in Jerusalem , and port ioned out the known world am ong them selves for purposes of evangelisat ion, allot t ing one count ry t o one Apost le (such as India to St Thom as) , and another t o another, how did they propose to evangelise these people? By present ing each one with a New Testam ent? Such a thing did not exist , and, we m ay safely say, was not even thought of. Why did Our Lord prom ise them the gift of the Holy Ghost , and com m and them to be 'witnesses' of Him ? and why, in fact , did the Holy Ghost com e down upon the Twelve and endow them with the power of speaking in various languages? Why but that they m ight be able to 'preach the Gospel to every creature' in the tongue of every creature.

3. I have said that the Apost les at first never t hought of writ ing the New Testam ent ; and neither they did. The books of the New Testam ent were produced and called forth by special circum stances that arose, were writ ten to m eet part icular dem ands and em ergencies. Nothing was further from the m inds of the Apost les and Evangelists than the idea of com posing works which should be collected and form ed into one volum e, and so const itute the Holy Book of the Christ ians. And we can im agine St Paul staring in am azem ent if he had been told that his Epist les, and St Peter's and St . John's, and the others would be t ied up together and elevated into the posit ion of a com plete and exhaust ive statem ent of the doct r ines of Christ ianity, to be placed in each m an's hand as an easy and infallible guide in faith and m orals, independent of any living and teaching authority to interpret them . No one would have been m ore shocked at the idea of his let ters usurping the place of the authoritat ive teacher—the Church, than the great Apost le who him self said, 'How shall they hear without a preacher? how shall they preach unless they be sent? Faith com eth by hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ . ' The fact is that no religion yet known has been effectually propagated am ong m en except by word of m outh, and certainly everything in the natural and spir itual posit ion of the Apost les on the

one hand, and of the Jews on the other, was ut terly unfavourable to the spread of Christ ianity by m eans of a writ ten record.

The Jewish people were not used to it , and the Gent iles could not have understood it . Even Protestant authors of the highest standing are com pelled to adm it that the living teaching of the Church was necessarily the m eans chosen by Jesus Christ for the spread of His Gospel, and that the com m it t ing of it to writ ing was a later and secondary developm ent . Dr. Westcot t , Bishop of Durham , than whom am ong Anglicans there is not a higher authority, and who is reckoned, indeed, by all as a standard scholar on the Canon of Scripture, says (The Bible in the Church, —pp. 53 and seqq.) : —'In order t o appreciate the Apostolic age in it s essent ial character, it is necessary to dism iss not only the ideas which are drawn from a collected New Testam ent , but those also, in a great m easure, which sprung from the several groups of writ ings of which it is com posed. The first work of the Apost les, and that out of which all their other funct ions grew, was to deliver in living words a personal test im ony to the cardinal facts of the Gospel—the Minist ry, the Death and the Resurrect ion of Our Lord. I t was only in the course of t im e, and under t he influence of external circum stances, that they com m it ted their test im ony, or any part of it , to writ ing. Their peculiar duty was to preach. That they did, in fact , perform a m ission for all ages in perpetuat ing the t idings which they delivered was due, not to any conscious design which they form ed, nor to any definite com m and which they received, but to that m ysterious power ', etc. 'The repeated experience of m any ages has even yet hardly suff iced to show that a perm anent record of His words and deeds, open to all, m ust co-exist with the living body of the Church, if that is to cont inue in pure and healthy vigour. ' And again: 'The Apost les, when they speak, claim to speak with Divine authority, but they nowhere profess to give in writ ing a system of Christ ian Doct r ine. Gospels and Epist les, with the except ion, perhaps of the writ ings of St John, were called out by special circum stances. There is no t race of any designed connect ion between the separate books, except in the case of the Gospel of St Luke and the Acts (also by St Luke) , st ill less of any outward unity or com pleteness in the ent ire collect ion. On the cont rary, it is not unlikely that som e Epist les of St Paul have been lost , and though, in point of fact , the books which rem ain do com bine to form a perfect whole, yet the com pleteness is due not t o any conscious co-operat ion of their authors, but to t he will of Him by whose power they wrote and wrought . ' What a cont rast there is, in these clear words of the great scholar, t o the com m on delusion that seem s to have seized som e m inds—that the Bible, com plete and bound, dropped down am ong the Christ ians from Heaven after the day of Pentecost : or , at the least , the Twelve Apost les sat down together in an upper room , pens in hand, and wrote off at a sit t ing all the Books of the New Testam ent ! And allow m e to give one m ore short quotat ion to drive hom e the point I am labouring at , that the writ ten New Testam ent could never have been intended as the only m eans of preaching Salvat ion. 'I t was som e considerable t im e after Our Lord's Ascension,' (writes the Protestant author of Helps to the Study of the Bible, p. 2) , 'before any of the books contained in the New Testam ent were actually writ ten. The first and m ost im portant work of the Apost les was to deliver a personal test im ony to the chief facts of the Gospel history. Their teaching was at first oral, and it was no part of their intent ion to create a perm anent literature. ' These, I consider, are valuable adm issions.

4. But now, you m ay say, 'What was the use of writ ing the Gospels and Epist les then at all? Did not God inspire m en to write them ? Are you not belit t ling and despising God's Word?' No, not at all; we are sim ply put t ing it in it s proper place, the place that God m eant it to have; and I would add, the Catholic Church is the only body in

these days which teaches infallibly that the Bible, and the whole of it , is the Word of God, and defends it s inspirat ion, and denounces and excom m unicates anyone who would dare to im pugn its Divine origin and authority.

I said before, and I repeat , that the separate books of the New Testam ent cam e into being to m eet special dem ands, in response to part icular needs, and were not , nor are they now, absolutely necessary either to the preaching or the perpetuat ing of the Gospel of Christ .

I t is easy to see how the Gospels arose. So long as the Apost les were st ill living, the necessity for writ ten records of the words and act ions of Our Lord was not so pressing. But when the t im e cam e for their rem oval from this world, it was highly expedient that som e correct , authoritat ive, reliable account be left of Our Lord’s life by those who had known Him personally, or at least were in a posit ion to have first -hand, uncorrupted inform at ion concerning it . And this was all the m ore necessary because there were being spread abroad incorrect , unfaithful, indeed altogether spurious Gospels, which were calculated to injure and ridicule the character and work of Our Divine Redeem er. St Luke dist inct ly declares that this was what caused him to undertake the writ ing of his Gospel—'For as m uch as m any have taken in hand to set forth in order a narrat ion of the things that have been accom plished am ong us' ( I ., i.) . He goes on to say that he has his inform at ion from eye-witnesses, and has com e to know all part iculars from the very beginning, and therefore considers it right to set them down in writ ing, to secure a correct and t rustworthy account of Christ 's life. So St Mat thew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John, penned their Gospels for the use of the Church, the one supplying often what another om its, but yet none pretending to give an exhaust ive or perfect account of all that Jesus Christ said and did, for if this had been at tem pted, St John tells us, 'the whole world would not have contained the books that would be writ ten' about it . The Gospels, then, are incom plete, and fragm entary, giving us certainly the m ost im portant things to know about Our Saviour's earthly life, but st ill not telling us all we m ight know, or m uch we do know in fact now and understand bet ter , through the teaching of the Catholic Church, which has preserved t radit ions handed down since the t im e of the Apost les, from one generat ion to another. These Gospels were read, as they are now am ong Catholics, at the gatherings of the Christ ians in the earliest days on the Sundays—not to set forth a schem e of doct r ine that they knew already, but to anim ate their courage, to excite their love and devot ion to Jesus Christ , and im pel them to im itate the exam ple of that Beloved Master, Whose sayings and doings were read aloud in their ears.

Well, now, what I said about the Gospels is equally t rue of the Epist les, which m ake up pract ically the whole of the rest of the New Testam ent . They were called into existence at various t im es to m eet pressing needs and circum stances; were addressed to part icular individuals and com m unit ies in various places, and not to the Catholic Church at large. The thought furthest from the m ind of the writers was that they should ever be collected into one volum e, and m ade to do duty as a com plete and all- sufficient statem ent of Christ ian faith and m orals. How did they arise? In this natural and sim ple way. St Peter, St Paul, and the rest went forth to various lands, preaching the Gospel, and m ade thousands of converts, and in each place founded a church, and left priests in charge, and a bishop som et im es (as e.g., St Tim othy in Ephesus) . Now these priests and converts had occasion m any a t im e to consult their spir itual father and founder, like St Paul, or St Peter, or St Jam es, on m any points of doct r ine or discipline, or m orals; for we m ust not im agine at that date, when the Church was in it s infancy, things were so clearly seen or understood or form ulated as

they are now. I t was, of course, the sam e Faith then as always; but st ill there were m any points on which the newly m ade Christ ians were glad to consult the Apost les who had been sent out with the unct ion of Jesus Christ fresh upon them —points of dogm a and ritual and governm ent and conduct which they alone could set t le. And so we find St Paul writ ing to the Ephesians (his convert s at Ephesus) , or to the Corinthians (his convert s at Corinth) , or t o the Philippians (his convert s at Philippi) , and so on to the rest (14 Epist les in all) . And for what reason? Either in answer to com m unicat ions sent to him from them , or because he had heard from other sources that there were som e things that required correct ion in these places. All m anner of topics are dealt with in these let ters, som et im es in the m ost hom ely style. I t m ight be to advise the convert s, or t o reprove them ; to encourage them or inst ruct them ; or t o defend him self from false accusat ions. I t m ight be, like that to Philem on, a let ter about a private person as Onesim us, the slave. But whatever the Epist les deal with, it is clear as the noonday sun that they were writ ten just at part icular t im es to m eet part icular cases that occurred naturally in the course of his m issionary labours, and that neither St Paul, nor any of the other Apost les, intended by these let ters t o set forth the whole theology or schem e of Christ ian salvat ion any m ore than Pope Pius the Tenth intended to do so in his Decree against the Modernists, or in his Let ter on the Sanct ificat ion of the Clergy. The thing seem s plain on the face of it . Leo XI I I writes to the Scotch Bishops on the Holy Scriptures, for exam ple; or Pius the Tenth to the Eucharist ic Congress in London on the Blessed Sacram ent , or publishes a Decree on Frequent Com m union; or, again, one of our Bishops, say, sends forth a let ter condem ning secret societ ies, or issues a Pastoral dealing with the new Marriage Laws—are we to say that these docum ents are intended to teach the whole way of salvat ion to all m en? that they profess to state the whole Catholic creed? The quest ion has only to be asked to expose it s absurdity. Yet precisely the sam e quest ion m ay be put about the posit ion of St Paul's Epist les. True, he was an Apost le, and consequent ly inspired, and his let ters are the writ ten Word of God, and therefore are a final and decisive authority on the various points of which they t reat , if properly understood; but that does not alter t he fact that they nowhere claim to state the whole of Christ ian t ruth, or to be a com plete guide of salvat ion to anyone; they already presuppose the knowledge of the Christ ian faith am ong those to whom they are addressed; they are writ ten to believers, not t o unbelievers; in one word, the Church existed and did it s work before they were writ ten, and it would st ill have done so, even though they had never been writ ten at all. St Paul's let ters ( for we are taking his m erely as a sam ple of all) date from the year 52 A.D. to 68 A.D.; Jesus Christ ascended to Heaven leaving His Church to evangelise the world, 33 A.D.; and we m ay confident ly assert that the very last place we should expect t o find a com plete sum m ary of Christ ian doct r ine is in the Epist les of the New Testam ent .

There is no need to delay further on the m at ter. I think I have m ade it clear enough how the various books of the New Testam ent t ook their origin. And in so explaining the state of the case, we are not undervaluing the writ ten Word of God, or placing it on a level inferior to what it deserves. We are sim ply showing the posit ion it was m eant to occupy in the econom y of the Christ ian Church. I t was writ ten by the Church, by m em bers (Apost les and Evangelists) of the Church; it belongs to the Church, and it is her office, therefore, to declare what it m eans. I t is intended for inst ruct ion, m editat ion, spir itual reading, encouragem ent , devot ion, and also serves as proof and test im ony of the Church's doct r ines and Divine authority; but as a com plete and exclusive guide to Heaven in the hands of every m an—this it never was and never could be. The Bible in the Church; the Church before the Bible—the Church the Maker and I nterpreter of the Bible—that is r ight . The Bible above the Church; the Bible independent of the Church; t he Bible, and the Bible only, the

Religion of Christ ians—that is wrong. The one is the Catholic posit ion; the other the Protestant .

CHAPTER I V. Catholic Church Com piles the New Testam ent

Now we know that the Gospels and Epist les of the New Testam ent were read aloud to the congregat ions of Christ ians that m et on the first day of the week for Holy Mass ( just as they are st ill am ong ourselves) , one Gospel here, another there; one Epist le of St Paul in one place, another in another; all scat tered about in various part s of the world where there were bodies of Christ ians. And the next quest ion that naturally occurs to us is, when were these separate works gathered together so as to form a volum e, and added to t he Old Testam ent t o m ake up what we now call the Bible? Well, they were not collected for the best part of 300 years. So that here again I am afraid is a hard nut for Protestants t o crack, viz.—That though we adm it that the separate works com posing the New Testam ent were now in existence, yet they were for centuries not t o be found altogether in one volum e, were not obtainable by m ult itudes of Christ ians, and even were altogether unknown to m any in different parts of the world. How then, could they possibly form a guide to Heaven and the chart of salvat ion for those who had never seen or read or known about them ? I t is a fact of history that the Council of Carthage, which was held in 397 A.D., m ainly through the influence of St August ine, set t led the Canon or Collect ion of New Testam ent Scriptures as we Catholics have them now, and decreed that it s decision should be sent on to Rom e for confirm at ion. No Council ( that is, no gathering of the Bishops of the Catholic Church for the set t lem ent of som e point of doct r ine) was ever considered to be authoritat ive or binding unless it was approved and confirm ed by the Rom an Pont iff, whilst the decisions of every General Council that has received the approval of Rom e are binding on the consciences of all Catholics. The Council of Carthage, then, is the first known to us in which we find a clear and undisputed catalogue of all the New Testam ent books as we have them in Bibles now.

I t is t rue that m any Fathers and Doctors and writers of the Church in the first three centuries from t im e to t im e m ent ion by nam e m any of the various Gospels and Epist les; and som e, as we com e nearer 397, even refer to a collect ion already exist ing in places. For exam ple, we find Constant ine, the first Christ ian Em peror, after the Council of Nicea, applying to Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, and a great scholar, t o provide fift y copies of the Christ ian Scriptures for public use in the churches of Constant inople, his new capital. This was in 332 A.D. The contents of these copies are known to us, perhaps (according to som e, even probably) one of these very copies of Eusebius' handiwork has com e down to us; but they are not precisely the sam e as our New Testam ent , though very nearly so. Again, we find lists of the books of the New Testam ent drawn up by St Athanasius, St Jerom e, St August ine, and m any other great authorit ies, as witnessing to what was generally acknowledged as inspired Scripture in their day and generat ion and count ry; but I repeat that none of these corresponds perfect ly to the collect ion in the Bible that we possess now; we m ust wait t ill 397 for the Council of Carthage, before we find the com plete collect ion of New Testam ent books set t led as we have it today, and as all Christendom had it t ill the sixteenth century, when the Reform ers changed it .

You m ay ask m e, however, what was the difference between the lists of New Testam ent books found in various count ries and different authors before 397, and the catalogue drawn up at the Council of that date? Well, that int roduces us to a very im portant point which tells us eloquent ly of the office that the Catholic Church perform ed, under God the Holy Ghost , in select ing and sift ing and stam ping with her Divine authority, the Scriptures of the New Law; and I m ake bold to say that a calm considerat ion of the part that Rom e took in the m aking and drawing up and preserving of the Christ ian Scriptures will convince any im part ial m ind that to the Catholic Church alone, so m uch m aligned, we owe it that we know what the New Testam ent should consist of, and why precisely it consists of these books and of no others; and that without her we should, hum anly speaking, have had no New Testam ent at all, or, if a New Testam ent , then one in which works spurious and works genuine would have been m ixed up in ruinous and inext r icable confusion.

I have used the words ’spurious’ and ’genuine’ in regard to the Gospels and Epist les in the Christ ian Church. You are horrified, and hold up your hands and exclaim : ’Lord, save us! here we have a Higher Crit ic and a Modernist . ’ Not at all, dear reader; quite the reverse, I assure you. Observe, I have said in ’the Christ ian Church’—I did not say 'in the Bible' for there is nothing spurious in the Bible. But why? Sim ply because the Rom an See in the fourth century of our era prevented anything spurious being admit ted into it . There were spurious books float ing about ' in the Christ ian Church', without a doubt in the early centuries; this is certain, because we know their very nam es; and it is precisely in her rej ect ion of these, and in her guarding the collect ion of inspired writ ings from being m ixed up with them , that we shall now see the great work that the Catholic Church did, under God's Holy Spir it , for all succeeding generat ions of Christ ians, whether within the fold or outside of it . I t is through the Rom an Catholic Church that Protestants have got their Bible; there is not ( to paraphrase som e words of Newm an) a Protestant that vilifies and condem ns the Catholic Church for her t reatm ent of Holy Scripture, but owes it to t hat Church that he has the Scripture at all. What Alm ighty God m ight have done if Rom e had not handed down the Bible to us is a fruit less speculat ion with which we have nothing whatever t o do. I t is a cont ingent possibilit y belonging to an order of things which has never existed, except in im aginat ion. What we are concerned with is the order of things and the sequence of history in which we are now living, and which we know, and which consequent ly God has divinely disposed; and in this provident ial arrangem ent of history it is a fact , as clear as any other historical fact , that Alm ighty God chose the Catholic Church, and her only, to give us His Holy Scriptures, and to give us them as we have them now, neither greater nor less. This I shall now proceed to prove.

( i) Before the collect ion of New Testam ent books was finally set t led at the Council of Carthage, 397, we find that there were three dist inct classes into which the Christ ian writ ings were divided. This we know (and every scholar adm its it ) from the works of early Christ ian writers like Eusebius, Jerom e, Epiphanius, and a whole host of others that we could nam e. These classes were ( I ) the books 'acknowledged' as Canonical, (2) books 'disputed' or 'cont roverted', (3) books declared 'spurious' or false. Now in class ( I ) i.e., those acknowledged by Christ ians everywhere to be genuine and authent ic, and to have been writ ten by Apostolic m en, we find such books as the Four Gospels, 13 Epist les of St Paul, Acts of the Apost les. These were recognised east and west as 'Canonical', genuinely the works of the Apost les and Evangelists whose nam es they bore, worthy of being in the 'Canon' or sacred collect ion of inspired writ ings of the Church, and read aloud at Holy Mass. But there was (2) a class—and Protestants should part icularly take not ice of the fact , as it ut terly

underm ines their Rule of Faith ‘the Bible and the Bible only'—of books that were disputed, cont roverted, in som e places acknowledged, in others rejected; and am ong these we actually find the Epist le of St Jam es, Epist le of St Jude, 2nd Epist le of St Peter; 2nd and 3rd of St John, Epist le to the Hebrews, and the Apocalypse of St John. There were doubts about these works; perhaps, it was said, they were not really writ ten by Apost les, or Apostolic m en, or by the m en whose nam es they carried; in som e parts of the Christ ian world they were suspected, though in others unhesitat ingly received as genuine. There is no get t ing out of this fact , then: som e of the books of our Bible which we, Catholic and Protestant alike, now recognise as inspired and as the writ ten Word of God, were at one t im e, and indeed for long, viewed with suspicion, doubted, disputed, as not possessing the sam e authority as the others. ( I am speaking only of the New Testam ent books; the sam e could be proved, if there were space, of the Old Testam ent ; but the New Testam ent suffices abundant ly for the argum ent .) But further st ill—what is even m ore st r iking, and is equally fatal to the Protestant theory—in this (2) class of 'cont roverted' and doubt ful books som e were to be found which are not now in our New Testam ent at all, but which were by m any then considered to be inspired and Apostolic, or were actually read at the public worship of the Christ ians, or were used for inst ruct ions to the newly-converted; in short , ranked in som e places as equal to the works of St Jam es or St Peter or St Jude. Am ong these we m ay m ent ion specially the 'Shepherd' of Herm as, Epist le of Barnabas, the Doct r ine of the Twelve Apost les, Apostolic Const itut ions, Gospel according to the Hebrews, St Paul's Epist le to the Laodiceans, Epist le of St Clem ent , and others. Why are these not in our Bible today? We shall see in a m inute. Last ly (3) there was a class of books float ing about before 397 A.D., which were never acknowledged as of any value in the Church, nor t reated as having Apostolic authority, seeing that they were obviously spurious and false, full of absurd fables, superst it ions, puerilit ies, and stories and m iracles of Our Lord and His Apost les which m ade them a laughing-stock to the world. Of these som e have survived, and we have them today, t o let us see what stam p of writ ing they were; m ost have perished. But we know the nam es of about 50 Gospels (such as the Gospel of Jam es, the Gospel of Thom as, and the like) , about 22 Acts ( like the Acts of Pilate, Acts of Paul and Thecla, and others) , and a sm aller num ber of Epist les and Apocalypses. These were condem ned and rejected wholesale as 'Apocrypha'—that is, false, spurious, uncanonical.

( ii) This then being the state of m at ters, you can see at once what perplexity arose for the poor Christ ians in days of persecut ion, when they were required to surrender their sacred books. The Em peror Dioclet ian, for exam ple, who inaugurated a terr ible war against the Christ ians, issued an edict in 303 A.D. that all the churches should be razed to the ground and the Sacred Scriptures should be delivered up to the Pagan authorit ies to be burned. Well, the quest ion was what was Sacred Scripture? I f a Christ ian gave up an inspired writ ing to the Pagans to save his life, he thereby becam e an apostate: he denied his faith, he bet rayed his Lord and God; he saved his life, indeed, but he lost his soul. Som e did this and were called 't raditores', t raitors, bet rayers, 'deliverers up' (of the Scriptures) . Most , however, preferred m artyrdom , and refusing to surrender the inspired writ ings, suffered the death. But it was a m ost perplexing and harrowing quest ion they had to decide—what really was Sacred Scripture? I am not bound to go to the stake for refusing to give up som e 'spurious' Gospel or Epist le. Could I , then, safely give up som e of the 'cont roverted' or disputed books, like the Epist le of St Jam es, or the Hebrews, or the Shepherd of Herm as, or the Epist le of St Barnabas, or of St Clem ent? There is no need to be a m artyr by m istake. And so the st ress of persecut ion had the effect of m aking st ill m ore urgent the necessity of deciding once and for all what was to form the New Testam ent .

What , definitely and precisely, were to be the books for which a Christ ian would be bound to lay down his life on pain of losing his soul?

( iii) Here, as I said before, com es in the Council of Carthage, 397 A.D., confirm ing and approving the decrees of a previous Council (Hippo, 393 A.D.) declaring, for all t im e to com e, what was the exact collect ion of sacred writ ings thenceforth to be reckoned, t o the exclusion of all others, as the inspired Scripture of the New Testam ent . That collect ion is precisely that which Catholics possess at this day in their Douai Bible. That decree of Carthage was never changed. I t was sent to Rom e for confirm at ion. As I have already rem arked, a Council, even though not a general Council of the whole Catholic Church, m ay yet have it s decrees m ade binding on the whole Church by the approval and will of the Pope. A second Council of Carthage over which St August ine presided, in 419 A.D., renewed the decrees of t he form er one, and declared that it s act was to be not ified to Boniface, Bishop of Rom e, for the purpose of confirm ing it . From that date all doubt ceased as to what was, and what was not ’spurious’, or ’genuine’, or ’doubt ful’ am ong the Christ ian writ ings then known. Rom e had spoken. A Council of the Rom an Catholic Church had set t led it . You m ight hear a voice here or there, in East or West , in subsequent t im es, raking up som e old doubt , or raising a quest ion as to whether this or that book of the New Testam ent is really what it claim s to be, or should be where it is. But it is a voice in the wilderness.

Rom e had fixed the ’Canon’ of the New Testam ent . There are henceforward but two classes of books—inspired and not inspired. Within the covers of the New Testam ent all is inspired; all without , known or unknown, is uninspired. Under the guidance of the Holy Ghost the Council declared 'This is genuine, that is false'; 'this is Apostolic, that is not Apostolic'. She sifted, weighed, discussed, selected, rejected, and finally decided what was what . Here she rej ected a writ ing that was once very popular and reckoned by m any as inspired, and was actually read as Scripture at public service; there, again, she accepted another that was very m uch disputed and viewed with suspicion, and said: 'This is to go into the New Testam ent . ' She had the evidence before her; she had t radit ion to help her; and above all she had the assistance of the Holy Spir it , to enable her to com e to a r ight conclusion on so m om entous a m at ter. And in fact , her conclusion was received by all Christendom unt il the sixteenth century, when as we shall see, m en arose rebelling against her decision and altering the Sacred Volum e. But , at all events in regard to the New Testam ent , t he Reform ers left the books as they found them , and today their Testam ent contains exact ly the sam e books as ours; and what I wish to drive hom e, is that they got these books from Rom e, that without the Rom an Catholic Church they would not have got them , and that the decrees of Carthage, 397 and 419 A.D., when all Christ ianity was Rom an Catholic—reaffirm ed by the Council of Florence, 1442, under Pope Eugenius IV, and the Council of Trent , 1546—these decrees of the Rom an Church, and these only are the m eans and the channel and the authority which Alm ighty God has used to hand down to us His writ ten Word. Who can deny it? The Church existed before the Bible; she m ade the Bible; she selected it s books, and she preserved it . She handed it down; through her we know what is the Word of God, and what the word of m an; and hence to t ry at this t im e of day, as m any do, to overthrow the Church by m eans of this very Bible, and to put it above the Church, and to revile her for dest roying it and corrupt ing it—what is this but to st r ike the m other that reared them ; to curse the hand that fed them ; to turn against their best fr iend and benefactor; and to repay with ingrat itude and slander the very guide and protector who has led them to drink of the water out of t he Saviour's fountains?

CHAPTER V. Deficiencies of the Protestant Bible

( I ) THE point that we have arrived at now, if you rem em ber, is this—The Catholic Church, through her Popes and Councils, gathered together the separate books that Christ ians venerated which existed in different parts of the world; sifted the chaff from the wheat , the false from the genuine; decisively and finally form ed a collect ion—i.e. , drew up a list or catalogue of inspired and apostolic writ ings into which no other book should ever be adm it ted, and declared that these and these only, were the Sacred Scriptures of the New Testam ent . The authorit ies that were m ainly responsible for t hus set t ling and closing the 'Canon' of Holy Scripture were the Councils of Hippo and of Carthage in the fourth century, under the influence of St . August ine (at the lat ter of which two Legatees were present from the Pope) , and the Popes Innocent I in 405, and Gelasius, 494, both of whom issued lists of Sacred Scripture ident ical with that fixed by the Councils. From that date all through the centuries this was the Christ ian's Bible. The Church never adm it ted any other; and at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth, and the Council of the Vat ican in the nineteenth, she renewed her anathem as against all who should deny or dispute this collect ion of books as the inspired word of God.

(2) What follows from this is self-evident . The sam e authority which m ade and collected and preserved these books alone has the r ight to claim them as her own, and to say what the m eaning of them is. The Church of St . Paul and St . Peter and St . Jam es in the first century was the sam e Church as that of the Council of Carthage and of St . August ine in the fourth, and of the Council of Florence in the fifteenth, and the Vat ican in the nineteenth—one and the sam e body—growing and developing, certainly, as every living thing m ust do, but st ill preserving it s ident it y and rem aining essent ially the sam e body, as a m an of 80 is the sam e person as he was at 40, and the sam e person at 40 as he was at 2. The Catholic Church of today, t hen, m ay be com pared to a m an who has grown from infancy to youth, and from youth to m iddle-age. Suppose a m an wrote a let ter set t ing forth certain statem ents, whom would you naturally ask to t ell what the m eaning of these statem ents was? Surely the m an that wrote it . The Church wrote the New Testam ent ; she, and she alone, can tell us what the m eaning of it is.

Again, the Catholic Church is like a person who was present at the side of Our Blessed Lord when He walked and talked in Galilee and Judea. Suppose, for a m om ent , that that m an was gifted with perpetual youth ( this by the way is an illust rat ion of W. H. Mallock 's, 'Doct r ine and Doct r inal Disrupt ion', chap. xi.,) and also with perfect m em ory, and heard all the teaching and explanat ions of Our Redeem er and of His Apost les, and retained them ; he would be an invaluable witness and authority to consult , surely, so as to discover exact ly what was the doct r ine of Jesus Christ and of the Twelve. But such undoubtedly is the Catholic Church: not an individual person, but a corporate personalit y who lived with, indeed was called into being by, Our Divine Saviour; in whose hearing He ut tered all His teaching; who listened to the Apost les in their day and generat ion, repeat ing and expounding the Saviour's doct r ine; who, ever young and ever st rong, has persisted and lived all through the centuries, and cont inues even t ill our own day fresh and keen in m em ory

as ever, and able to assure us, without fear of forget t ing, or m ixing things up, or adding things out of his own head, what exact ly Our Blessed Lord said, and taught , and m eant , and did. Suppose, again, the m an we are im agining had writ ten down m uch of what he heard Christ and the Apost les say, but had not fully reported all, and was able to supplem ent what was lacking by personal explanat ions which he gave from his perfect m em ory: that , again, is a figure of the Catholic Church. She wrote down m uch, indeed, and m ost im portant parts of Our Lord’s t eaching, and of the Apostolic explanat ion of it in Scripture; but nevertheless she did not intend it to be a com plete and exhaust ive account , apart from her own explanat ion of it ; and, as a m at ter of fact , she is able from her own perpetual m em ory to give fuller and clearer accounts, and to add som e things that are either om it ted from the writ ten report , or are only hinted at , or part ially recorded, or m ent ioned m erely in passing. Such is the Catholic Church in relat ion to her own book, the New Testam ent . I t is hers because she wrote it by her first Apost les, and preserved it and guarded it all down the ages by her Popes and Bishops; nobody else has any r ight to it whatsoever, any m ore than a st ranger has the r ight to com e into your house and break open your desk, and pilfer your private docum ents. Therefore, I say that for people to step in 1500 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 m eaning 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 is an absurd and groundless claim . Only those who are ignorant of the t rue history of the Sacred Scriptures—their origin and authorship and preservat ion—could pretend that there is any logic or com m onsense in such a m ode of act ing. And the absurdity is m agnified when it is rem em bered that the Protestants did not appropriate the whole of the Catholic books, but actually cast out som e from the collect ion, and took what rem ained, and elevated these into a new 'Canon', or volum e of Sacred Scripture, such as had never been seen or heard of before, from the first t o the sixteenth century, in any Church, either in Heaven above or on earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth! Let us m ake good this charge.

(3) Open a Protestant Bible, and you will find there are seven com plete Books awant ing—that is, seven books fewer than there are in the Catholic Bible, and seven fewer than there were in every collect ion and catalogue of Holy Scripture from the fourth to the sixteenth century. Their nam es are Tobias, Baruch, Judith, Wisdom , Ecclesiast icus, I Machabees, I I Machabees, together with seven chapters of the Book of Esther and 66 verses of the 3rd chapter of Daniel, com m only called 'the Song of the Three Children', (Daniel iii. , 24-90, Douai version) . These were deliberately cut out , and the Bible bound up without them . The crit icism s and rem arks of Luther, Calvin, and the Swiss and Germ an Reform ers about these seven books of the Old Testam ent show to what depths of im piety those unhappy m en had allowed them selves to fall when they broke away from the t rue Church. Even in regard to the New Testam ent it required all the powers of resistance on the part of the m ore con-servat ive Reform ers to prevent Luther from flinging out the Epist le of St . Jam es as unworthy to rem ain within the volum e of Holy Scripture—'an Epist le of st raw' he called it , 'with no character of the Gospel in it '. I n the sam e way, and alm ost t o the sam e degree, he dishonoured the Epist le of St . Jude and the Epist le to the Hebrews, and the beaut iful Apocalypse of St . John, declaring they were not on the sam e foot ing as the rest of the books, and did not contain the sam e am ount of Gospel ( i.e., his Gospel) . The presum ptuous way, indeed, in which Luther, am ong others, poured contem pt , and doubt upon som e of the inspired writ ings which had been acknowledged and cherished and venerated for 1000 or 1000 years would be scarcely credible were it not that we have his very words in cold print , which cannot

lie, and m ay be read in his Biography, or be seen quoted in such books as Dr. Westcot t ’s The Bible in The Church. And why did he im pugn such books as we have m ent ioned? Because they did not suit his new doct r ines and opinions. He had arrived at the principle of private judgm ent—of picking and choosing religious doct r ines; and whenever any book, such as the Book of Machabees, taught a doct r ine that was repugnant to his individual taste—as, for exam ple, that ' it is a holy and wholesom e thought to pray for the dead that they m ay be loosed from sins', 2 Mach. xii. , 46—well, so m uch the worse for the book; 'throw it overboard', was his sentence, and overboard it went . And it was the sam e with passages and texts in those books which Luther allowed to rem ain, and pronounced to be worthy to find a place within the boards of the new Reform ed Bible. I n short , he not only cast out certain books, but he m ut ilated som e that were left . For exam ple, not pleased with St Paul's doct r ine, ‘we are just ified by faith', and fearing lest good works (a Popish superst it ion) m ight creep in, he added the word 'only' aft er St Paul's words, m aking the sentence run: 'We are just ified by Faith only', and so it reads in Lutheran Bibles to this day. An act ion such as that m ust surely be reprobated by all Bible Christ ians. What surprises us is the audacity of the m an that could coolly change by a st roke of the pen a fundam ental doct r ine of the Apost le of God, St . Paul, who wrote, as all adm it ted, under the inspirat ion of the Holy Ghost . But this was the outcom e of the Protestant standpoint , individual j udgm ent : no authority outside of oneself. However ignorant , however stupid, however unlet tered, you m ay, indeed you are bound to cut and carve out a Bible and a Religion for yourself. No Pope, no Council, no Church shall enlighten you or dictate or hand down the doct r ines of Christ . And the result we have seen in the corrupt ion of God's Holy Word.

(4) Yet , in spite of all reviling of the Rom an Church, the Reform ers were forced to accept from her those Sacred Scriptures which they retained in their collect ion. Whatever Bible they have today, disfigured as it is, was taken from us. Blind indeed m ust be the evangelical Christ ian who cannot recognise in the old Catholic Bible the quarry from which he has hewn the Testam ent he loves and studies; but with what loss! at what a sacrifice! in what a m ut ilated and disfigured condit ion! That the Reform ers should appropriate unabridged the Bible of the Catholic Church (which was the only volum e of God's Scripture ever known on earth) , even for the purpose of elevat ing it into a false posit ion—this we could have understood; what staggers us, is their deliberate excision from that Sacred Volum e of som e of the inspired Books which had God for their Author, and their no less deliberate alterat ion of som e of the texts of those books that were suffered to rem ain. I t is on considerat ion of such points as these that pious persons outside the Catholic fold would do well to ask them selves the quest ion—Which Christ ian body really loves and reveres the Scriptures m ost? Which has proved, by it s act ions, it s love and venerat ion? and which seem s m ost likely to incur the anathem a, recorded by St John, that God will send upon those who shall take away from the words of the Book of Life? (Apoc. xxii., 19.)

CHAPTER VI . The Or iginals, and their D isappearance

I . Now, you m ay naturally enough ask m e: 'But how do you know all this? Where has the Bible com e from ? Have you got the original writ ings that cam e from the hand of Moses, or Paul, or John?' No, none of it , not a scrap or a let ter, but we know from history and t radit ion that these were the books they wrote, and they have been

handed down to us in a m ost wonderful way. What we have now is the printed Bible; but before the invent ion of print ing in 1450, the Bible existed only in handwrit ing—what we call m anuscript—and we have in our possession now copies of t he Bible in m anuscript (MS.) , which were m ade as early as the 4th century, and these copies, which you can see with your own eyes at this day, contain the books which the Catholic Bible contains today, and that is how we know we are r ight in receiving these books as Scripture, as genuinely the work of the Apost les and Evangelists. Why is it that we have not the originals writ ten by St . John and St . Paul and the rest? Well, there are several reasons to account for the disappearance of the originals.

( I ) The persecutors of t he Church for the first 300 years of Christ ianity dest royed everything Christ ian that they could lay their hands on. Over and over again, barbarous pagans burst in upon Christ ian cit ies, and villages and churches, and burned all the sacred things they could find. And not only so, but they especially com pelled Christ ians (as we saw before) to deliver up their sacred books, under pain of death, and then consigned them to the flam es. Am ong these, doubt less, som e of the writ ings that cam e from the hand of the Apost le and Evangelist perished.

(2) Again, we m ust rem em ber, the m aterial which the inspired authors used for writ ing their Gospels and Epist les was very easily dest royed; it was perishable to a degree. I t was called papyrus, ( I shall explain what it was m ade of in a m om ent ) , very frail and brit t le, and not m ade to last to any great age; and it s delicate qualit y, no doubt , accounts for t he loss of som e of the choicest t reasures of ancient literature, as well as of the original handwrit ing of the New Testam ent writers. We know of no MS of the New Testam ent exist ing now, which is writ ten on papyrus.

(3) Furtherm ore, when in various churches throughout the first centuries copies were m ade of the inspired writ ings, there was not the sam e necessity for preserving the originals. The first Christ ians had no superst it ious or idolat rous venerat ion for the Sacred Scriptures, such as seem s to prevail am ong som e people today; they did not consider it necessary for salvat ion that the very handwrit ing of St . Paul or St . Mat thew should be preserved, inspired by God though these m en were; they had the living, infallible Church to teach and guide them by the m outh of her Popes and Bishops; and to teach them not only all that could be found in the Sacred Scriptures, but the t rue m eaning of it as well; so that we need not be surprised that they were content with m ere copies of the original works of the inspired writers. So soon as a m ore beaut iful or correct copy was m ade, an earlier and rougher one was sim ply allowed to perish. There is nothing st range or unusual in all this; it is j ust what holds good in the secular world. We do not doubt the term s or provisions of t he Magna Charta because we have not seen the original; a copy, if we are sure it is correct , is good enough for us.

I I . Well, then, the originals, as they cam e from the hand of Apost le and Evangelist , have totally disappeared. This is what infidels and scept ics taunt us with and cast in our t eeth: 'You cannot produce, ' they say, 'the handwrit ing of those from whom you derive your religion, neither the Founder nor His Apost les; your Gospels and Epist les are a fraud; they were not writ ten by these m en at all, but are the invent ion of a later age; and consequent ly we cannot depend upon the contents of them or believe what they tell us about Jesus Christ . ' Now, of course, these at tacks fall harm lessly upon us Catholics, because we do not profess to rest our religion upon the Bible alone, and are independent of it , and would be just as we are and what we are

though there were no Bible at all. I t is those who have staked their very existence upon that Book, and m ust stand or fall with it , that are called upon to defend them selves against the crit ics. But I shall only rem ark here that the argum ent of infidel and scept ic would, if logically applied, discredit not only the Bible, but m any other books which they them selves accept and believe without hesitat ion. There is far m ore evidence for the Bible than there is for certain books of classical ant iquity which no one dream s of disput ing. There are, for exam ple, only 15 m anuscripts of the works of Herodotus, and none earlier than the 10th century A.D.; yet he lived 400 years before Christ . The oldest m anuscript of the works of Thucydides is of the 11th century A.D.; yet he flourished and wrote m ore than 400 years before Christ . Shall we say, then, ’I want to see the handwrit ing of Thucydides and Herodotus, else I shall not believe these are their genuine works. You have no copy of t heir writ ings near the t im e they lived; none, indeed, t ill 1400 years after them ; they m ust be a fraud and a forgery’? Scholars with no religion at all would say we were fit for an asylum if we took up that posit ion; yet it would be a far m ore reasonable at t itude than that which they take up towards the Bible. Why? Because there are known to have been m any thousand copies of the Testam ent in existence by the 3rd century—i.e. , only a century or two after St . John—and we know for certain there are 3000 exist ing at the present day, ranging from the fourth century downwards. The fact is, the wealth of evidence for the genuineness of t he New Testam ent is sim ply stupendous, and in com parison with m any ancient histories which are received without quest ion on the authority of late and few and bad copies, the Sacred Volum e is founded on a rock. But let us pass on; enough for us to know that God has willed that the handiwork of every inspired writer, from Moses down to St . John, should have perished from am ongst m en, and that he has ent rusted our salvat ion to som ething m ore stable and enduring than a dead book or an undecipherable m anuscript—that is, the living and infallible Church of Christ : ubi Ecclesia, ibi Christus.

Now I wish to devote what rem ains of this chapter t o say som ething about the m aterial inst rum ents that were used for the writ ing and t ransm ission of Holy Scriptures in the earliest days; and a brief review of the m aterials em ployed, and the dangers of loss and of corrupt ion which necessarily accom panied the work, will convince us m ore than ever of the absolute need of som e divinely protected authority like the Catholic Church to guard the Gospel from error and dest ruct ion, and preserve 'the Apostolic deposit ' (as it is called) from sharing the fate which is liable to overtake all things that are, as says St Paul, contained in 'earthen vessels'.

I I I . Various m aterials were used in ancient t im es for writ ing, as, e.g., stone, pot tery, bark of t rees, leather, and clay tablets am ong the Babylonians and Egypt ians. ( I ) But before Christ ianity, and for the first few ages of our era, Papyrus was used, which has given it s nam e to our 'paper'. I t was form ed of the bark of the reed or bulrush, which once grew plent ifully on the Nile banks. First split into layers, it was then glued by overlapping the edges, and another layer glued to this at r ight angles to prevent split t ing, and, after sizing and drying, it form ed a suitable writ ing surface. Thousands of rolls of papyrus have been found in Egypt ian and Babylonian tom bs and beneath the buried city of Herculaneum , owing their preservat ion probably to the very fact of being buried, because, as I said, the substance was very brit t le, frail, and perishable, and unsuited for rough usage. Though probably m any copies of the Bible were originally writ ten on this papyrus (and m ost likely the inspired writers used it them selves) , none have survived the wreck of ages. I t is this m aterial St . John is referr ing to when he says to his correspondent in I I Epist le, verse 10; 'Having m ore things to write to you, I would not by paper and ink'. (2) When in the course of t im e,

papyrus fell into com parat ive disuse from its unsuitableness and fragility, the skins of anim als cam e to be used. This m aterial had two nam es; if it was m ade out of the skin of sheep or goats, it was called Parchm ent ; if m ade of the skin of delicate young calves, it was called Vellum . Vellum was used in earlier days, but being very dear and hard to obtain, gave place to a large extent to the coarser parchm ent . St . Paul speaks about this stuff when he tells St Tim othy, ( I I . Tim . iv. 13) to ’br ing the books, but especially the parchm ents’. Most of the New Testam ent m anuscripts which we possess today are writ ten on this m aterial. A curious consequence of the cost liness of this substance was this, that the sam e sheet of vellum was m ade to do duty twice over, and becam e what is term ed a palim psest , which m eans ’rubbed again’. A scribe, say, of the tenth century, unable to purchase a new supply of vellum , would take a sheet containing, perhaps, a writ ing of the second century, which had becom e worn out through age and difficult to decipher; he would wash or scrape out the old ink, and use the surface over again for copying out som e other work in which the living generat ion felt m ore interest . I t goes without saying that in m any cases the writ ing thus blot ted out was of far greater value than that which replaced it ; indeed, som e of the m ost precious m onum ents of sacred learning are of this descript ion, and they were discovered in this way. The process of erasing or sponging out the ancient ink was seldom so perfect ly done as to prevent all t races of it st ill rem aining, and som e st rokes of the older hand m ight often be seen peeping out beneath the m ore m odern writ ing. I n 1834 som e chem ical m ixture was discovered which was applied with m uch success, and had the effect of restoring the faded lines and let ters of those venerable records. Cardinal Mai, a m an of colossal scholarship and unt ir ing indust ry, and a m em ber of the Sacred College in Rom e under Pope Gregory XVI , was a perfect expert in this branch of research, and by his ceaseless labours and ferret -like hunts in the Vat ican library, brought to light som e rem arkable old m anuscripts and som e priceless works of ant iquity. Am ong these, all students have to thank him for restoring a long lost work of Cicero (De Republica) that was known to have existed previously, and which the Cardinal unearthed from beneath St August ine’s Com m entary on the Psalm s! The m ost im portant MS. of the New Testam ent of this descript ion is called the Codex of Ephraem . About 200 years ago it was not iced that this curious looking vellum , all soiled and stained, and hitherto thought to contain only the theological discourses of St . Ephraem , an old Syrian Father, was showing dim t races and faint lines of som e older writ ing beneath. The chem ical m ixture was applied, and lo! what should appear but a m ost ancient and valuable copy of Holy Scriptures of handwrit ing not later than the fifth century! This had been coolly scrubbed out by som e im pecunious scribe of the twelfth century to m ake room for his favourite work, the discourses of St Ephraem ! Let us charitably hope that the good m onk (as he probably was) did not know what he was scrubbing out . At all events, it was brought into France by Queen Catherine de Medici, and is now safely preserved in the Royal Library at Paris, containing on the sam e page two works, one writ ten on top of the other with a period of 700 years between them .

I have told you about the sheets used by the earliest writers of the New Testam ent : what kind of pen and ink had they?

( I ) Well, for the brit t le papyrus, a reed was used, m uch the sam e as that st ill in use in the East ; but of course for writ ing on hard tough parchm ent or vellum a m etal pen, or stylus, was required. I t is to this St . John refers in his third Epist le (verse 13) when he says, ’I had m any things to write unto thee, but I would not by ink and pen write to thee’. The st rokes of these pens m ay st ill be seen quite clearly im pressed on the parchm ent , even though all t race of the ink has ut terly vanished. Besides this, a bodkin or needle was em ployed, by m eans of which, along with a ruler, a blank leaf

or sheet was carefully divided into colum ns and lines; and on nearly all the m anuscripts these lines and m arks m ay st ill be seen, som et im es so firm ly and deeply drawn that those on one side of the leaf have penet rated through to the other side, without , however, cut t ing the vellum .

(2) The ink used was a com posit ion of soot or lam pblack or burnt shavings of ivory, m ixed with gum or winelees or alum ( for all these elem ents entered into it ) . I n m ost ancient m anuscripts, unfortunately, the ink has for the m ost part turned red or brown, or becom e very pale, or peeled off or eaten through the vellum , and in m any cases later hands have ruthlessly ret raced the ancient let ters, m aking the original writ ing look m uch coarser. But we know that m any coloured inks were used, such as red, green, blue, or purple, and they are often quite brilliant to this day.

(3) As to the shape of t he MSS., the oldest form was that of a roll. They were generally fixed on two rollers, so that the part read ( for exam ple in public worship) could be wound out of sight and a new port ion brought to view. This was the kind of thing that was handed to Our Lord when He went into the synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath. ’He unfolded the book’, and read: and then ’when He had folded the book, he restored it to t he m inister’ (St Luke iv., 17-20.) When not in use these rolls were kept in round boxes or cylinders, and som et im es in cases of silver or cloth of great value. The leaves of parchm ent were som et im es of considerable size, such as folio; but generally the shape was what we know as quarto or sm all folio, and som e were octavo. The skin of one anim al, especially if an antelope, could furnish m any sheets of parchm ent ; but if the anim al was a sm all calf, then it s skin could only furnish very few sheets; and an instance of this is the m anuscript called the Sinait ic (now in St Petersburg) whose sheets are so large that the skin of a single anim al (believed to have been the youngest and finest antelope) could only provide two sheets (8 pages) .

(4) The page was divided into two or three or four colum ns ( though the lat ter is very rare) . The writ ing was of two dist inct kinds, one called uncial (m eaning an inch) , consist ing ent irely of capital let ters, with no connect ion between the let ters, and no space between words at all; the other style, which is later, was cursive ( that is, a running hand) like our ordinary handwrit ing, with capitals only at the beginning of sentences; and in this case the let ters are joined together and there is a space between words. The uncial style (consist ing of capitals only) was prevalent for the first three centuries of our era; in the fourth century the cursive began and cont inued t ill the invent ion of print ing.

(5) Originally, I need hardly say, there was no such thing in the MSS. as divisions into chapters and verses, and no points or full stops or com m as, to let you know where one sentence began and the next finished: hence the reading of one of these ancient records is a m at ter of som e difficulty to the unscholarly. The div ision into chapters so fam iliar to us in our m odern Bibles was the invent ion either of Cardinal Hugo, a Dom inican, in 1048, or m ore probably of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, (d. 1027) ; and it is no calum ny upon the reputat ion of either of these great m en to say that the division is not very sat isfactory. He is not happy in his m ethod of split t ing up the page of Scripture; the chapters are of very unequal length, and frequent ly interrupt a narrat ive or argum ent or an incident in an inconvenient way, as any one m ay see for him self by looking up such passages as Acts xxi. 40; or Acts iv. and v.; or I Corinthians xii. and xiii. The division again into verses was the work of one Robert Stephens, and the first English version in which it

appeared was the Geneva Bible, 1560. This gent lem an seem s to have com pleted his perform ance on a journey between Paris and Lyons ( inter equitandum , as the Lat in biographer phrases it ) , probably while stopping overnights in inns and hostels. ’I think,’ an old com m entator quaint ly rem arks, ’it had been bet ter done on his knees in the closet ’. To this I would venture to add that his achievem ent m ust share the sam e crit icism of inappropriateness as the arrangem ent into chapters.

(6) The m anuscripts of the Bible, as I before rem arked, now known to be in existence, num ber about 3000, of which the vast m ajorit y are in running hand, and hence are subsequent to the fourth century. There are none of course later than the sixteenth century, for then the Book began to be printed; and none have yet been found earlier than the fourth. Their age, that is, the precise century in which they were writ ten, it is not always easy to determ ine. About the tenth century the scribes who copied them began to not ify the date in a com er of the page; but before that t im e we can only j udge by various characterist ics that appear in the MSS. For exam ple, the m ore sim ple and upright and regular the let ters are, the less flourish and ornam entat ion they have about them , the nearer equalit y there is between the height and breadth of t he characters—the m ore ancient we m ay be sure is the MS. Then, of course, we can often tell the age of a MS. approxim ately at least by the kind of pictures the scribe had painted in it ; the illust rat ions he had int roduced, and the ornam ent ing of the first let ter of a sentence or on the top of a page; for we know in what century that part icular style of illum inat ion prevailed. I t would be im possible to give anyone who had never seen any specim ens of these wonderful old m anuscripts a proper idea of their appearance or m ake him realise their unique beauty. There they are today, perfect m arvels of hum an skill and workm anship; m anuscripts of every kind; old parchm ents all stained and worn; books of faded purple let tered with silver, and their pages beaut ifully designed and ornam ented; bundles of finest vellum , yellow with age, and bright even yet with the gold and verm ilion laid on by pious hands 1000 years ago—in m any shapes, in m any colours, in m any languages. There they are, scat tered throughout the libraries and m useum s of Europe, challenging the adm irat ion of everyone that beholds them for the astonishing beauty, clearness, and regularity of their let tering, and the incom parable illum inat ion of their capitals and headings; st ill at this day, after so m any centuries of change and chance, charm ing the eye of all with their soft yet brilliant colours, and defying our m odern scribes to produce anything the least approaching them in loveliness. There lie the sacred records, hoary with age, fragile, slender, t im e-worn, bearing upon their front clear proofs of their ancient birth; yet with the bloom of youth st ill clinging about them . We sim ply stand and wonder; and we also despair. We speak glibly of the 'Dark Ages' and despise their m onks and fr iars (and I shall, with your leave, speak a lit t le m ore about them im m ediately) , but one thing at least is certain, and that is, that not in the wide world today could any of their crit ics find a craftsm an to m ake a copy of Holy Scr ipture worthy to be com pared for beauty, clearness, and finish with any one of the hundreds of copies produced in the convents and m onasteries of m ediaeval Europe.

CHAPTER VI I . Var iat ions in Text Fatal to Protestant Theory.

I HAVE m ent ioned m onasteries, and just ly so, for there is no doubt that the vast m ajorit y, indeed pract ically all, of these venerable pages, were t raced by the hand of som e ecclesiast ic. The clergy were the only persons who had learning enough for it . What care, what zeal, what loving labour was spent by these holy m en in their work of t ranscribing the word of Scripture we can judge by viewing their handiwork. Yet the work was necessarily very slow and liable to error; and that errors did creep in we know from the sim ple fact that there are about 200,000 variat ions in the text of the Bible as writ ten in these MSS. that we have today. This is not to be wondered at , if you rem em ber that there are 35,000 verses in the Bible. Consider the various ways in which corrupt ions and variat ions could be int roduced. The variat ions m ight have been (a) intent ionally int roduced or (b) unintent ionally. (a) Under this class we m ust unfortunately reckon those changes which were m ade by heret ics to suit their part icular doct r ine or pract ice, j ust as, for exam ple, the Lutherans added the word ’only’ to St . Paul’s words to fit in with their new fangled not ion about ’j ust ificat ion by faith only’. Or again, a scribe m ight really think that he was im proving the old copy from which he was t ranscribing by put t ing in a word here or leaving out a word there, or put t ing in a different word, so as to m ake the sentence clearer or the sense bet ter . But (b) it is sat isfactory t o be assured (as we are) that the vast m ajorit y of changes and variet ies of readings in these old MSS. is ent irely due to som e unintent ional cause. ( i) The scribe m ight be t ired or sleepy or exhausted with m uch writ ing, and m ight easily skip over a word, or indeed a whole sentence; or m iss a line or repeat a line; or m ake a m istake when he cam e to the end of a line or a sentence; he m ight be interrupted in his work and begin at the wrong word when he recom m enced. Or he m ight ( ii) have bad eyesight (som e lost it altogether through copying so m uch) ; or not know really what was the proper division to m ake of the words he was copying, especially if the copy he was busy with was one of the old Uncials, with no stops and no pauses and no division between words or sentences; or he m ight , if he were writ ing at the dictat ion of another, not hear very well, or pick up a word or phrase wrongly, as, for exam ple, the wom an did when she wrote ’Satan died here’ for a m illiner’s shop, instead of ’Sat in dyed here’. Or ( iii) he m ight actually em body and copy into the sacred text of the Gospels words or notes or phrases which did not really belong to the Gospel at all, but had been writ ten on the m argin of the parchm ent by som e previous scribe m erely to explain things. These ’glosses’, as they are called, undoubtedly have crept in to som e copies and the Protestants are guilt y of repeat ing one every t im e they say their form of the Lord’s Prayer, with it s ending ’For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Am en.’ Such an addit ion was not ut tered by Our Lord; Catholics consequent ly do not use it .

These are som e (and not all) of the ways in which you could easily see that differences could arise in the various copies m ade by old scribes. Put six m en today to report a speech by any orator; there will be considerable variety in their report s, as one can prove by com paring different newspaper accounts of the sam e speech any m orning. I do not say that the differences will always signify m uch or substant ially alter the speaker ’s m eaning; yet there they are, and som et im es they m ay be serious enough; and if these things happen daily, even now with all our advanced and highly developed m ethods of print ing, how m uch m ore would they happen in the old days before print ing, when hand and brain and eyesight and hearing could m ake so m any blunders? One single let ter changed would conceivably reverse the m eaning of the whole sentence. I shall not alarm you by flaunt ing specim ens from the Greek or Hebrew, but shall m ake plain enough what I m ean by recording an instance occurring in our own days in our own tongue. An old Provost of a certain East Lothian town had died and been duly buried, and a headstone had been erected bearing the fit t ing inscript ion from St . Paul’s 1st Epist le to the

Corinthians (xv. 52) . ’And we shall be changed.’ I t was finished on the Saturday; but a deed of darkness was done before the ’Sabbath’ m orning. The m inister had a son who loved a pract ical j oke. He got accom plices for his sham eful deed; t hey hoisted him up, and in cold blood he took put ty and obliterated the let ter ’c’ in ’changed’. On the ’Sabbath’ the godly, passing around, with long faces, Bibles, and white handkerchiefs, to view the old Provost ’s tom bstone, learned for the first t im e that the Apost le taught ’And we shall be hanged’.

You see what I m ean? Well, the Bibles, before print ing, are full of variet ies and differences and blunders. Which of them all is correct? Pious Protestants m ay hold up their hands in horror and cry out , ’there are no m istakes in the Bible! it is all inspired! it is God’s own Book! ’ Quite t rue, if you get God’s own book, t he originals as they cam e from the hand of Apost le, Prophet , and Evangelist . These, and these m en only, were inspired and protected from m aking m istakes: but God never prom ised that every individual scribe (perhaps sleepy-headed, or stupid, or heret ical) who took in hand the copying out of the New Testam ent would be infallibly secure from com m it t ing errors in his work. The original Scripture is free from error, because it has God for it s author; so teaches the Catholic Church; and the Catholic Bible, too, the Vulgate, is a correct version of the Scripture; but that does not alter the fact that there are scores, nay thousands, of differences in the old m anuscripts and copies of the Bible that were writ ten before the days of pr int ing; and I should like any enquiring Protestants to ponder over this fact and see how they can possibly reconcile it with their principle that the Bible alone is the all- sufficient guide to salvat ion. Which Bible? Are you sure you have got the r ight Bible? Are you certain that your Bible contains exact ly the words, and all the words and only the words, that cam e from the hands of Apost le and Evangelist? Are you sure that no other words have crept in or t hat none have been dropped out? Can you study the Hebrew and Greek and Lat in m anuscripts and versions, page by page, and com pare them , and com pile for yourself a copy of Holy Scripture ident ical with that writ ten by the inspired authors from Moses to St . John? I f you cannot—and you see at once that it is im possible—then do not talk about 'the Bible and the Bible only'. You know perfect ly well that you m ust t rust to som e authority outside of yourself to give you the Bible. The Bible you are using today was handed down to you: you have, in fact , allowed som e third part y to com e between you and God, a thing quite repugnant to the Protestant theory. We Catholics, on the other hand, glory in having som e third party to com e between us and God, because God Him self has given it to us, nam ely, the Catholic Church, to teach us and lead us to Him . We believe in the Bible I nterpreted for us by that Church, because God ent rusted to her the Bible as part of His word, and gave her a prom ise that she would never err in telling us what it m eans and explaining to us the 'm any things hard to be understood', which St Peter tells us are to be found within it . Though there were as m any m illion variat ions as there are thousands in the different copies of the Bible, we should be st ill unm oved, for we have a 'Teacher sent from God', above and independent of all Scripture, who, assisted by the Holy Ghost , speaks with Divine authority, and whose voice to us is the Voice of God. I t m at ters not t o us when a Christ ian m ay have lived on earth; whether before any of t he New Testam ent was writ ten at all, or before it was collected, into one volum e, or before it was printed, or after it has been printed; no m at ter t o us whether there are 1,000 or 1,000,000 variat ions in texts and passages and chapters of ancient copies of which our m odern Bibles are com piled; we do not hazard our salvat ion on such a precarious and unreliable support . We rather take that Guide who is 'yesterday and today and the sam e for ever ', and who speaks to us with a living voice, and who can never m ake a m istake; who is never uncertain or doubt ful or wavering in her ut terances, never denying today what she affirm ed

yesterday, but ever clear, definite, dogm at ic; enlightening what is dark and m aking plain what is obscure to the m inds of m en. This is the Catholic Church, established by Alm ighty God as His organ and m outhpiece and interpreter, unaffected by the changes and unshaken by the discoveries of ages. To her we listen; her we obey; to her we subm it our j udgm ent and our intellect , knowing she will never lead us wrong. I n her we find peace and com fort , sat isfact ion and solut ion of all our difficult ies, for she is the one infallible Teacher and Guide appointed by God. This is a logical, consistent , clear, and intelligible m ethod of at taining and preserving the t ruth, a perfect plan and schem e of Christ ianity. I t is the Catholic plan; it is Chr ist ’s plan. What plan have any others to subst itute for it that can stand a m om ent ’s analysis at the bar of reason, history, com m onsense, or even of Holy Scripture it self?

CHAPTER VI I I . Our Debt to the Monks

THUS far we have been speaking of the Bible as found writ ten in the old m anuscripts, m ost ly in the very early centuries of Christ ianity. Now the next quest ion after set t ling how the Bible was m ade and collected and com m it ted to writ ing, is, how was it preserved and m ult iplied and diffused throughout the centuries previous to the invent ion of print ing? For you will bear in m ind that we are as yet a long way off the day when the first print ing press was invented or set up. Did the people at large know anything at all about the Sacred Scriptures before it was printed and put into their hands? Here we are suddenly plunged into the Middle Ages; what was the history of the Holy Book during that t im e which people in these count ries generally call ’Dark’? I f you have pat ience with m e for a lit t le I shall prove to you that , j ust as the Catholic Church at the very beginning wrote and collected together the sacred books of the New Testam ent , so by her m onks and fr iars and clergy generally she preserved them from dest ruct ion during the Middle Ages and m ade the people fam iliar with them ; and, in short , that it is to the Rom an Church again under God that we owe the possession of the Bible in it s integrity at the present day.

Now of course, this will sound st range and start ling in the ears of those who have im bibed the com m on not ions about the Middle Ages. As I said there was a t radit ional Protestant delusion about the Catholic Church and the Bible in general, so there is a t radit ional opinion which every good Protestant m ust adopt about those Ages of Faith, as we Catholics prefer to call them . The general idea is that they were centuries ( from the eighth century to the end of the fourteenth) of profound ignorance, oppression, superst it ion and of universal m isery—that the m onks were debauched, greedy and lazy—that the people in consequence were illiterate and im m oral, only half civilised, and always fight ing—that the whole of Europe was sunk in barbarism and darkness, m en's intellects enslaved and their wills enervated, and all their natural energies paralysed and benum bed by the blight ing yoke of Rom e—that ( in the com prehensive language of the Church of England Hom ilies) ' lait y and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages, sects and degrees of m en, wom en and children, of whole Christendom , had been altogether drowned in dam nable idolat ry, and that by the space of 800 years and m ore'. That is fair ly sweeping. How they can reconcile that alleged state of things with the uncondit ioned prom ises of Our Blessed Lord that 'the gates of hell should never prevail against the Church' and that He

would ’be with her always to the end of the wor ld’, and that the ’Holy Ghost would lead them into all the t ruth’—is to m e a m ystery. But let that pass. We are asked then to believe that during the Middle Ages t rue Christ ianity was overlaid and buried beneath a m ass of Popish fables and t radit ions, and that of course the Bible in consequence was unknown except t o a very few; was neglected and ignored and kept out of sight , because it would have dest royed Popery if it had been known. Only when the light of the Reform at ion shone out did the Holy Book appear openly in the world, and becom e fam iliar to the faithful of Chr ist as that which was to 'm ake them wise unto salvat ion'.

Now, I am not going to enter into a general defence of the condit ion of things in the Catholic world during these Ages of Faith, though, if t im e perm it ted, nothing would be m ore congenial to m e. I would m erely rem ark in passing, however, t hat perhaps m en of the twenty- first or twenty-second century will take the very sam e view of this age of ours as som e people do now of the Middle Ages, and will look back with horror upon it as a t im e when the world was desolated by fam ine, pest ilence, and war—when nat ions of the earth am assed huge arm ies and built im m ense navies to slaughter each other and plunder each other 's terr itories—when the condit ion of the poor was harsher and crueller than ever before in the history of the world since Christ was born—when there were on the one side som e hundreds or t housands of capitalists, with som e m illionaires am ongst them ; and on the other, m any m illions of the labouring classes in deepest want and m isery; m ult itudes on the very verge of starvat ion, wondering how they were to keep a roof over their heads or get a bit of food for them selves and for their children. People in ages to com e will, m ayhap, regard this century with it s boasted progress and civilisat ion, and this land with 350 years of Protestant ism behind it as an age and a count ry where drunkenness and dishonesty and im m oralit y and m at rim onial unfaithfulness and ext ravagance and unbelief and youthful excesses and insubordinat ion and barbarity of m anners were so universally and so deeply rooted that the authorit ies of the kingdom were sim ply helpless to cope with them . I am one of those who hold that the 'Dark Ages' were ages full of light in com parison to these in which we are now living. The ages which built the gorgeous Cathedrals and Abbeys whose ruins st ill stand as silent but eloquent witnesses of their past glory and beauty, and st ill delight the eye and capt ivate the adm irat ion of even the m ost unsym pathet ic beholder—those ages could not at least have been sunk in ignorance of architecture, or been insensible to the beaut iful and the art ist ic, or been niggardly or ungenerous in their est im ate of what was a worthy tem ple for the m ajesty of the God of heaven and earth and a dwelling-place fit t ing for the Lord of Hosts.

Again, the ages which covered the face of Europe with universit ies and schools of learning, which produced philosophers and theologians like St . Thom as Aquinas and St . Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus and Scotus and Bacon, and which built up the scholast ic system —a system which, for logical acuteness and m etaphysical accuracy, for subt ilt y and unity and com plete consistency, has never been equalled, and which st ill stands unshaken by all at tacks and t r ium phing over all it s r ivals that 'have their day and cease to be'—that age, I say, could hardly have been intellectually dark or barren. Once m ore: an age which produced saints like Dom inick and Francis and Bernard, and was fruit ful in bringing forth Orders of m en and wom en for assist ing our poor hum anity in every form and stage of it s existence—teaching the ignorant , caring for the sick and the afflicted, and even redeem ing capt ives from the yoke of slavery—the age, besides, which witnessed the Crusades, those m agnificent outbursts of Christ ian chivalry and of loyalty to Jesus Christ Our Lord—when m en, kings, and princes, and subjects, seizing the Crusader 's cross, went cheerfully to lay

down their lives in m yriads on the burning plains of Syria in their glorious at tem pts to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hand of Turk and infidel—that age, I say, cannot have been altogether devoid of the love of Him who Him self gave His life for m en, and Whose feet had t rod those sacred places in the days of His Flesh. People speak glibly nowadays of the ignorance of these far-back t im es; but it seem s to m e that no m an who is really grounded in the t ruth of Christ ianity, who knows his Pater Noster, Ave, Creed, the Ten Com m andm ents, and the Seven Sacram ents, and puts them into pract ice, can ever be said to be t ruly ignorant . He m ight not have been able to build a m otor car or even to drive one—to turn out a steam ship or a flying m achine or speak the weird language of Esperanto. Neither could St . Peter or St . Joseph, for the m at ter of that . Nevertheless the pract ical teaching the people of those ages received from priest and m onk in church and school was, I subm it , of far m ore real m oral and intellectual value than the hash of scraps of hygiene and science, French and cookery, civics and art which is cram m ed into the unwilling brain of our twent ieth century public school children. Generally speaking, the m ediaevalists, so despised, had the knowledge of God and of the world to com e; and that was really the best knowledge they could have. (See preface to Dr. Mait land's Dark Ages.)

But I am afraid I have been guilt y of a serious digression; what we m ust do now is to confine ourselves to the single point as to how the Scriptures were preserved and m ult iplied and m ade known to the people in the Middle Ages. ( I ) I shall first prove that the Bible was m ult iplied and preserved by the m onks and priests. All m ust now adm it that it was really in m onasteries that m ult itudes of copies of the Holy Scriptures were m ade. Monasteries were cent res of learning in those t im es even m ore than they are today, because educat ion was not so widely spread. An indispensable part of the out fit of every m onastery was a library. 'A m onastery without a library, ' writes a m onk of the twelfth century to another m onk, ' is like a cast le without an arm oury. ' And he goes on to declare that the great defence in the m onast ic arm oury should be the Bible. Som et im es the libraries were very large, and we read of Em perors and other great people borrowing from them . The m onks were the m ost learned m en of those days, and were by profession scholars, m en who had renounced worldly pursuits and pleasures, and dedicated them selves to a ret ired life of prayer and study; and one of the principal parts of their scholast ic act ivit y was the copying and t ranscribing of the Sacred Scriptures. For this purpose there was a large room called the Scriptorium in which a dozen or m ore m onks could be engaged at one t im e but there were also m any m onks em ployed, each in his own cell, which contained all the necessary apparatus for literary work. These cells were so arranged around the cent ral heat ing cham ber that in winter their hands would not get benum bed with so m uch writ ing. Day by day, year after year, the m onks would persevere in their holy labours, copying with loving care every let ter of the sacred text from som e old m anuscript of the Bible, adorning and illum inat ing the pages of vellum with pictures and illust rat ions in purple and gold and silver colouring, and so producing real works of art that excite the envy and adm irat ion of m odern generat ions. Som e Bishops and Abbots wrote out with their own hands the whole of both the Old and the New Testam ents for the use of their churches and m onasteries. Even nuns—and this point I would bring under special not ice—nuns took their share in this pious and highly skilled labour. We read of one who copied with her own hands two whole Bibles, and besides m ade six copies of several large port ions of the Gospels and Epist les. Every m onastery and church possessed at least one, and som e possessed m any copies of the Bible and the Gospels. I n those ages it was a com m on thing to copy out part icular parts of the Bible (as well as the whole Bible) ; for exam ple, the Gospels, or the Psalm s, or Epist les, so that m any who could not afford

to purchase a com plete Bible, were able to possess them selves of at least som e part which was specially interest ing or popular. This custom is t ruly Catholic, as it flourishes am ongst us today. At the end of our prayer books, for instance, we have Gospels and Epist les for the Sundays, and various publishers, t oo, have issued the four Gospels separately, each by it self, and the pract ice seem s to m e to harm onise ent irely with the very idea and st ructure of the Bible, which was originally com posed of separate and independent port ions, in use in different Churches throughout Christendom . And so we find that the m onks and clergy often confined their work to copying out certain special port ions of Sacred Scripture, and naturally the Gospels were the favourite part .

The work, we m ust rem em ber, was very slow, and expensive as well. Dr. Mait land reckons that it would require ten m onths for a scribe of those days to copy out a Bible; and that 60 or 70 [ pounds] would have been required if he had been paid at the rate that lawstat ioners pay their writers. Of course, with the m onks it was a labour of love, and not for m oney; but this calculat ion of Dr Mait land only refers to the work of copying; it leaves out of account the m aterials that had to be used, pen and ink and parchm ent . Another authority (Buckingham ) has m ade a m ore detailed calculat ion, and assum ing that 427 skins of parchm ent would have been needed for the 35,000 verses, running into 107,000 folios, he reckons that a com plete copy of Old and New Testam ents could not have been purchased for less than 218 [ pounds] . Yet Protestants stare in astonishm ent when you tell them that not everybody could sit by his fireside in those days with a Bible on his knees! Som e princes (am ong them , I think, Charlem agne) gave the m onks perm ission to hunt for deer in the Royal forests, so as to get skins to m ake into parchm ent for copying work. I have no space to give elaborate proof of m y assert ion that , as a m at ter of course, all m onasteries and churches possessed copies of t he Scriptures in the Middle Ages. I t stands to reason that those who m ade the copies would keep at least one for their own use in the m onastery, and another for the public services in the church. We read of one convent in I taly which had not m oney enough for the bare necessaries of life, yet m anaged to scrape up 50 [ pounds] to purchase a Bible. Dr Mait land, in his m ost valuable book The Dark Ages—he was a Protestant , librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a great student , and a m ost im part ial scholar—gives page after page of instances, that cam e under his own not ice in his researches, of religious houses that had Bibles and Testam ents in their possession. Of course these are but casual specim ens; the thing was so com m on that there was no need to chronicle the fact any m ore than you would chronicle the fact that A or B had a clock in his parlour in the nineteenth century. Kings and Princes and Popes often presented beaut iful copies of the Bible to Abbots and Priors for use in their m onastery, som et im es gloriously em bellished within with paint ing and illum inat ions, writ ten in let ters of gold and silver, and bound in golden casing set with gem s. We frequent ly read of such gift s. And not only the Bible, but other books used in the service of the Church, such as copies of the Missal or Psalter or Gospels, all containing great port ions of Holy Scripture, were often presented as gift s by great personages in Church or State, bound in gold or ivory or silver of the utm ost purity, and m arvellously adorned and studded with pearls and precious stones. Nothing was considered too cost ly or t oo m agnificent to lavish on the sacred volum e. But I suppose that when we find Popes like Leo I I I , and Leo IV, and Em perors like Henry I I , and Lewis the Debonnaire, and Bishops like Hincm ar of Rheim s, and Dukes like Hugh of Burgundy, and Bishops like Ralph of Rochester, and num berless Abbots and Priors in the eighth and ninth centuries causing copies of the Sacred Scriptures to be m ade and gifted to m onasteries and churches throughout Europe, t his m ust be taken as evidence of Rom e's hat red of the Word of God, and her fear of it s becom ing known or read or

studied! Yet that this was the com m on custom for hundreds of years is a fact of history that is quite beyond the region of doubt . Moreover, the Sacred Scriptures were a favourite subject of study am ong the clergy; and a popular occupat ion was the writ ing of com m entaries upon them , as all priests at least are aware, from having to recite port ions of them every day, ranging from the age of St Leo the Great and St Gregory, down to St Bernard and St Anslem .

(2) Now one could go on at any length accum ulat ing evidence as to the fact of m onks and priests reproducing and t ransmit t ing copies of the Bible from century to century, before the days of Wycliff and Luther; but there is no need, because I am not writ ing a t reat ise on the subject , but m erely adducing a few proofs of m y assert ions, and t rying to show how ut terly absurd is the content ion that Rom e hates the Bible, and did her best t o keep it a locked and sealed book and even to dest roy it throughout the Middle Ages. Surely nothing but the crassest ignorance or the blindest prejudice could support a theory so flat ly cont radicted by the sim plest facts of history. The real t ruth of the m at ter is that it is the Middle Ages which have been a closed and sealed book to Protestants, and that only now, owing to the honest and pat ient researches of im part ial scholars am ongst them , are the t reasures of those grand centuries being unlocked and brought to their view. I t is this ignorance or prejudice which explains to m e a feature that would be otherwise unaccountable in the histories of the Bible writ ten by non-Catholics. I have consulted m any of them , and they all, with hardly an except ion, either skip over this period of the Bible’s existence altogether or dism iss it with a few off-hand references. They jum p right over from the inspired writers them selves, or perhaps from the fourth century, when the Canon was fixed, to John Wycliff, ’The Morning Star of the Reform at ion’, leaving blank the interm ediate centuries, plunged, as they im agine, in worse than Egypt ian darkness. But I ask—I s this fair or honest? I s it consistent with a love of t ruth thus to suppress the fact , which is now happily beginning to dawn on the m ore enlightened m inds, that it was the m onks and clergy of the Catholic Church who, during all these ages, preserved, m ult iplied, and perpetuated the Sacred Scriptures? The Bible on it s hum an side is a perishable art icle. I nspired by God though it be, it was yet , by the Providence of God, writ ten on perishable parchm ent with pen and ink; liable to be lost or dest royed by fire, by natural decay and corrupt ion, or by the enem ies, whether civilised or pagan, that wasted and ravaged Christendom by the sword, and gave it s churches and m onasteries and libraries to the flam es. Who, I ask, but the m en and wom en, consecrated to God by their vows and devoted to a life of prayer and study in m onasteries and convents, rem ote from worldly st r ife and am bit ion—who but they saved the writ ten Word of God from total ext inct ion, and with loving and reverent care reproduced its sacred pages, to be known and read of all, and to be handed down to our own generat ion, which grudges to acknowledge the debt it owes to their pious and unrem it t ing labours?

CHAPTER I X. Bible- reading in the ‘Dark Ages’

BUT perhaps som e objector m ay say: ’Yes, they copied the Scripture, these m onks and priests, but that was all; they did not know anything really about it , did not understand it ; their work was m erely m echanical. ’ Now, I shall show that the very cont rary was the fact ; they had a profound knowledge and understanding of the

Bible, and it was their constant com panion. ( I ) I n the first place, the Bishops and Abbots required all their priests t o know the Scr iptures. We find constant ly in the old Const itut ions and Canons of different dioceses that the clergy were bound to know the Psalm s, the Epist les, and Gospels, besides, of course, the Missal and other Church service books, ( take for exam ple, the Const itut ions of Belfr ic or of Soissons) . And these rules were effect ive; they had to be observed, for we find Councils like that of Toledo, for instance ( in 835) , issuing decrees that Bishops were bound to enquire throughout their dioceses whether the clergy were sufficient ly inst ructed in the Scripture. I n som e cases they were obliged to know by heart not only the whole Psalter, but (as under the rule of St . Pachom ius) the New Testam ent as well. I suppose m ost m inisters of the Kirk could stand this test quite easily.

Then the clergy were cont inually m editat ing on various port ions of the Scriptures, and writ ing about them in homilies and com m entaries, and ever recit ing them in their services, so they could not help but know them well. Som e of the saints of those days, like St . Anslem and St . Hubert , actually knew them off by heart , and could answer every quest ion, however difficult , about the m eaning of them . And not only saints, but m ult itudes of ordinary priests and Bishops constant ly had the Scriptures on their lips. Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, for exam ple, had a custom , which would be decidedly t rying to m ost clergy in our days, of repeat ing the whole Psalter along with his at tendant priests when journeying; and we are told that ’lying, standing, walking, sit t ing, he had always a Psalm on his lips, always Christ in his heart . ’ Again, we know of Abbots ( like him of Cologne) who ’caused the whole of the Old and the New Testam ents to be read through every year.’ Besides, the Scriptures were read daily during m eals in m onasteries. And if further proof were required that the clergy were int im ately fam iliar, not only with the words, but with the m eaning and teaching of Holy Scripture, we have only to dip into the serm ons, happily preserved, which these m en preached to their flocks, and we shall find them sim ply full to overflowing with quotat ions from every part of the Bible, far fuller, indeed, than the serm ons of Protestant clergy in the twent ieth century. I shall give only one exam ple, and we have no reason to think that it is at all except ional.

I t is the serm on of a m onk called Bardo in Germ any, who was about to be appointed Archbishop of Mentz. He preached, however, first before a great m ult itude at Christm as about the year 1000, the Em peror being present . His text was Psalm xvii, 13. —I have not seen the whole of his serm on, but only about eight printed pages of it . I have counted the references and quotat ions from the Old and New Testam ents, and I find there are exact ly 73. The audience enjoyed the serm on, understood the references, and the m onk was m ade Archbishop. I hope I have shown now how really preposterous is the idea that the m onks did not know the Bible. What m an in his senses can have pat ience to listen to the silly legend that Mart in Luther first discovered by accident the Scriptures—a book which, as a fr iar, he was bound to have known and studied and learned and recited for years? The sim ple fact , as is now proved by irrefutable evidence, is that the clergy of those 'dark ages' had a knowledge of and fam iliarit y with the writ ten Word of God which m odern m inisters cannot equal; and what is no less im portant , together with their knowledge they had a deep venerat ion and love for it , guarding it j ealously from corrupt ion and error, believing what they taught , hum bly accept ing its Divine authorship and authority—an at t itude in st r iking cont rast to present day crit ics, who t reat the Bible like a com m on book, and pick holes in it and im pugn its genuineness and it s accuracy, and in general at tem pt to elim inate the supernatural elem ent from it altogether.

(2) But , again, I think I hear the voice of the objector, who will not believe all this if he can possibly help it—'Yes; well, perhaps the clergy did know the Bible, but nobody else did; it was a closed and sealed volum e to the poor lay people, because, of course, it was all in Lat in. ' Now, leaving aside the quest ion of Lat in for a m om ent ( for I shall com e back to that im m ediately) , it is ut terly false to say or suppose that the lay folks were ignorant of the Scriptures. They were thoroughly well-acquainted with them so far as they required to be in their state of life. I t is t rue, of course—and how could it be otherwise?—that ecclesiast ics being the reading m en and wr it ing m en, in short , the only well-educated persons of those days, naturally have left behind them m ore evidence than m ost lay people could do of their fam iliarit y with the Sacred Word; but it is yet the fact that the literature of those ages, outside clerical docum ents altogether, which has com e down to us, is steeped and perm eated through and through with Scripture. Conversat ions, for exam ple, correspondence, law deeds, household books, legal docum ents, historical narrat ives—all are full of it ; full not only of the ideas, but oft en of the very words of Scripture. How m any lawyers and doctors and professors and ordinary lay folks nowadays, I wonder, would be found quot ing from the Bible in their writ ings? The reason, of course, was that books were scarce in those days, and expensive, and the Bible was the m ost com m on and popular and accessible; it was the m ost fam iliar to kings and princes, to soldiers and lawyers, to business m en and t radesm en, labourers and art isans. They all knew it and understood it , and enjoyed the num berless quotat ions and references to it in serm ons and addresses, and could often repeat port ions of it from m em ory. 'The writ ings of the dark ages'—says Dr. Mait land in chapter 27 of his m ost valuable and entertaining book, The Dark Ages—'the writ ings of the dark ages are, if I m ay use the expression, m ade of the Scriptures. I do not m erely m ean that the writers constant ly quoted the Scriptures, and appealed to them as authorit ies on all occasions as other writers have done since their day; but I m ean that they thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words and phrases of the Bible, and that they did this constant ly and habitually as the natural m ode of expressing them selves. They did it , too, not exclusively in theological or ecclesiast ical m at ters, but in histories, biographies, fam iliar let ters, legal inst rum ents, and docum ents of every descript ion. I do not know that I can fully express m y m eaning, but perhaps I m ay render it m ore clear if I repeat that I do not so m uch refer t o direct quotat ions of Scripture as to the fact that their ideas seem to have fallen so naturally into the words of Scripture that they were constant ly referr ing to them in a way of passing allusion which is now very puzzling to those who are unacquainted with the phraseology of the Vulgate.' We can thus see from the test im ony of such a student of that period as Rev. Dr. Mait land how the language and ideas of the Bible had passed into the current language of the people. Som et im es persons carr ied copies of the Gospels about with them , just as Catholics today carry about them a Gospel of St John, out of venerat ion.

(3) But how, it m ay be asked, could the people who were unable to read (and they were adm it tedly a large num ber) becom e acquainted with the Bible? The answer is sim ple. They were taught by m onk and priest , both in church and school, through serm on and inst ruct ion. They were taught by sacred plays or dram as, which represented visibly to them the principal facts of sacred history, like the Passion Play of t oday at Oberam m ergau. They were taught through paint ings and statuary and frescoes in the churches, which port rayed before their eyes the doct r ines of the Faith and the t ruths of Scripture: and hence it is that in Catholic count ries the walls of churches and m onasteries and convents, and even cem eteries, are covered with pictures represent ing Scriptural scenes.

’Paint ing is the book of t he ignorant ’. Stained glass windows m ay be m ent ioned in the sam e category; and so m ay popular hym ns, and poet ry, and sim ple devot ional books for the poor, all of which, along with the cerem onies and funct ions of the Church, served to im print on people’s m em ories and understandings the great events in God’s dealings with His creatures since the beginning of the world. We m ust rem em ber, t oo, that , for those who could not afford to purchase a Bible or a copy of the Gospels, the Sacred Volum e was often chained to a stone in som e public place about the church for everyone to study; and wealthy persons in their wills were known to leave m oney enough to provide for such a thing. The sim ple t ruth is that the Catholic Church adopted every m eans at her disposal in these old days to bring a knowledge of God’s Word to those who could not read, as well as to those who could. Bibles were not printed because there was no print ing press; but whose fault was that? I s the Church to blam e for not invent ing print ing sooner? But why did God not invent print ing Him self if he wished the Bible to be in everybody’s hand? Nero had no m otor car, nor had Julius Caesar a m axim gun, nor William Wallace a flying m achine—were these m en consequent ly ignorant and behind the t im es and worthy of contem pt? There were no railway t rains in Luther's day; nor did John Knox invent chloroform , or Oliver Crom well elect r icit y—are these m en in consequence to be considered as illiterate, stupid, barbarous, sunk in m ental degradat ion? The Catholic Church, then, had to do the best she could in the circum stances; and I subm it she did all that any organisat ion on earth could possibly have done for the spread of Scripture knowledge am ong her children. Vast num bers could not read; I adm it it ; the Church was not to blam e for that . Lat in was the universal tongue, and you had to be rather scholarly to read it . But I protest against the out rageous not ion that a m an cannot know the Bible unless he can read it . Can he not see it represented before his eyes? Can he not hear it read? Do you not know and understand one of Shakespeare's plays m uch bet ter by seeing it acted on the stage than by reading it out of a book? Do the visitors to Oberam m ergau, witnessing the 'Passion Play', not com e to understand and realise the story of the Passion and Death of Our Lord m ore vividly by seeing it enacted before their eyes than if they read the cold print of a New Testam ent? You hear a Board School child rat t ling off the ten plagues of Egypt and the nam es of all the Kings of I srael and Judah, and divers chapters of t he Bible: but does that child necessar ily know what it is recit ing? Does it understand and appreciate and realise? I t m ay or it m ay not ; there is no necessary connect ion between the two things.

There is such a thing as literal idolat ry, worshipping the let ter and neglect ing the spir it ; a superst it ious, grovelling subserviency to the m ere text of the Bible. A boy or girl m ight know whole passages of the Bible by heart , and only use them for their own m oral ruin. I am contending for the genuine, real, pract ical working knowledge of the Bible am ong the generalit y of Catholics in the Middle Ages: and, whether they could read or not , I do not hesitate to assert that , with few except ions, they had a personal and intelligent knowledge and a vivid realisat ion of the m ost necessary facts in the Sacred Scripture and in the life of Our Divine Lord to an extent which is sim ply not to be found am ong the m illions of our nom inal Christ ians in these islands today. Whatever ignorance there was—this at least all im part ial scholars m ust concede—the Church was in no way to blam e for it . Where, I ask, is the proof of the Church's hat red of the Bible, of any at tem pt to hide it , to dest roy it , to dishonour and belit t le it? I cannot do bet ter than give you here two or three sentences from the work of the learned and honest Protestant student , som e of whose words I have quoted before: 'I m ust add that I have not found anything about the arts and engines of host ilit y, the blind hat red of half-barbarian kings, the fanat ical fury of their subjects, or the reckless ant ipathy of the Popes ( in regard to the Bible) . I do not recollect any

instance in which it is recorded that the Scriptures, or any part of them , were t reated with indignity, or with less than profound respect . I know of no case in which they were intent ionally defaced or dest royed (except as I have just stated for their r ich covers) , though I have m et with, and hope to produce several instances, in som e of which they were the only, and in others alm ost the only, books which were preserved through the revolut ions of the m onasteries to which they belonged, and all the ravage of fire, pillage, carelessness, or whatever else had swept away all the others. I know of nothing which should lead m e to suppose that any hum an craft or power was exercised to prevent the reading, the m ult iplicat ion, the diffusion of the Word of God.’ We m ay fit t ingly conclude this part of our papers with the words of the Quarterly Review , October, 1879: ’The not ion that people in the Middle Ages did not read their Bibles is probably exploded except am ong the m ore ignorant of cont roversialists. The not ion is not sim ply a m istake; it is one of the m ost ludicrous and grotesque blunders. ’

CHAPTER X. W here then are all the Medieval Bibles?

BUT let us return for a m om ent t o the popular object ion (hinted at above) ; ’St ill the Bible was in Lat in; you cannot deny that . The Church kept it in Lat in so as the people should not read it . She was afraid of put t ing it into the com m on language of the people.’ There is som e t ruth in these statem ents; but there is m ore unt ruth. That the Scriptures were for the m ost part in Lat in is t rue; that it was because of the Church’s dread of her people get t ing to know the Bible and so abandoning their Catholic faith is, of course, false.

( I ) Bible in Lat in. Admit t ing for the m om ent that the Bible was in Lat in during the Middle Ages, what follows? That nobody but priests could read it? Nonsense. There were just two classes of people then: those who could read, and those who could not read. Now, those who did read could read Lat in, and, therefore, were perfect ly content with the Scriptures in Lat in. Those who could not read Lat in could not read at all. I ask, therefore, what earthly need was there of a t ranslat ion of the Bible from Lat in into the language of the com m on m ult itude? What good would it have done? At this point we m ay expect to hear our fr iend indignant ly giving vent to som e such object ion as this: ’The people, then, were horribly illiterate; they could not write their own nam es; they could not read; they were half barbarian and savage; they were really fearfully ignorant , you know, and degraded. Just com pare them for one m om ent with our present -day School Board children in the m at ter of reading and writ ing and general intelligence.’

Soft ly now, I answer; one thing at a t im e. We are not discussing that at present , and do not m ean to discuss it , because it is beside the quest ion. The Church was not t o blam e for the people’s ignorance of let ters; but let that pass, or even grant , if you like for the sake of argum ent , that the Church was blam eworthy; the point I am insist ing on is only this—granted a m an cannot read, what on earth is the use of put t ing a Bible in his hand in any language under Heaven, whether Greek or Hebrew, or Lat in, or English, or Arabic? That m an, if he is taught the Bible at all, m ust be taught it in other ways and by other m eans, as we have seen he was in the 'Dark Ages'. So that we arrive at this point , that either the Lat in Bible was read, or no Bible

at all. The learned Protestant author, Dr. Cut ts, in his book, Turning Points of English Church History , refers t o this fact when he says: ’Another com m on error is that the clergy were unwilling that the laity should read the Bible for them selves, and carefully kept it in an unknown tongue that the people m ight not be able to read it . The t ruth is that m ost people who could read at all could read Lat in, and would certainly prefer to read the authorised Vulgate to any vernacular version’—i.e. preferred the Lat in Bible to an English one. Dr Peter Bayne also deals with this point when he rem arked in the Literary World (1894, Oct .) , quoted by 'M.C.L. ' in her booklet , 'Lat in was then the language of all m en of culture, and to an extent probably far beyond what we at present realise, the com m on language of Europe; in those days tens of thousands of lads, m any of them poor, studied at the Universit ies, and learned to talk Lat in. ' I m ay add that I cam e across the statem ent lately in the life of St Peter Mart yr, who flourished in the 13th century, that he gave som e ret reat or addresses to nuns in that age in Lat in, and was understood by them . The whole m istake in peoples' m inds arises, of course, from the supposit ion they m ake that Lat in was then a dead language, whereas it was really a living one in every sense of the term , being read and spoken and writ ten universally in Europe, and consequent ly being understood by everyone who could read at all. What m ot ive or purpose, then, could the Church have had in t ranslat ing it into another tongue? In any case, this m uch none can help adm it t ing—that at least the Church turned the Scr iptures from Hebrew and Greek (which were the original languages) into Lat in, which was the living language of the world, for the benefit of her children. She m ight st ill have kept the Bible a dark, unknown, m ysterious docum ent by leaving it in Hebrew and Greek. She did the very opposite. Does this seem as if she was anxious to keep her people in ignorance?

(2) However, we are not done with object ions yet . 'How is it , ' ask our Protestant fr iends, 'that if, as you say, the Sacred Scriptures were m ult iplied and reproduced and copied over and over again hundreds and thousands of t im es, even in Lat in, how is it that we have so few of these copies now? Where have they gone? Surely we should expect to have m any of them preserved.' The quest ion, I am afraid, bet rays an ignorance (not altogether inexcusable) of the condit ion of society and civilisat ion and of internat ional relat ions in these distant centuries. There were m any causes at work which perfect ly account for the disappearance of the m ajorit y of t he old copies of the Bible. (a) To begin with, there was frequent , if not cont inual, war going on, during which books and m anuscripts were ruthlessly dest royed. We need only m ent ion such instances as the invasions of the Danes and Norm ans, and of the Saracens and Northern Barbarians into I taly, burning m onasteries and churches, sacking and laying waste ecclesiast ical buildings. During these oft - repeated incursions and the horrible pillage that generally accom panied warfare, m any m ost valuable libraries and thousands of MSS. and copies of the Scriptures of rare, indeed of priceless worth, m ust have perished. (b) Then there is the com m on occurrence of fire which accounts for t he loss of m uch valuable literature—by which copies of Scripture were burned, either by accident or by design, either singly or in the general conflagrat ion that consum ed the whole m onastery or library as well. ( c) Another very com m on cause of loss was negligence, through which, both in the Middle Ages and since, m any invaluable books and papers have gone to dest ruct ion. Som et im es a book was borrowed from the conventual library and never returned. This becam e so great an evil that proprietors of books adopted the plan of inscribing an excom m unicat ion or a curse against those who should keep or steal what had been m erely lent—m uch in the st yle of the anathem as pronounced in the Decrees of the Church's Councils.

For exam ple, we find one case like this: ’This book belongs to St Mary of Robert ’s Bridge; whosoever shall steal it or sell it , or alienate it from this house, or m ut ilate it , let him be anathem a m aranatha, Am en.’ The librarian was not oft en as careful as he should have been over his t reasures; so his books and MSS. were som et im es allowed to go am issing, or t o be taken away, or to perish through dam p, or corrupt ion, or rats or m ice, or water, or by being stolen, or even by being sold by those who had no r ight to sell, and to those who had no r ight to buy. Last ly, we know that great quant it ies of m ost im portant parchm ents and m anuscripts have been used by bookbinders for such ignoble purposes as to form backs and bands and fly- leaves and covers of other books. (d) But over and above these sim ple and natural causes, there was another which we m ust not forget , and which was perhaps m ore far- reaching and powerful than the rest—I m ean the deliberate dest ruct ion of the books and m anuscripts so as to get the gold and silver and precious stones in which they were set and bound. I have spoken before of the cost liness of the cases and ornam ents that surrounded the copies of t he Scriptures. Som et imes twenty pounds of pure gold were used in their binding, not to speak of the jewels that adorned their covers. Now, that rapacious and unscrupulous m en, whether Catholic or Protestant , should in their lust for m oney seize upon these t reasures, which were in the keeping of harm less and defenceless m onks and priests, we can well understand; and that they did so is unfortunately only too t rue. Thousands of m onasteries and libraries were r ifled, an incalculable am ount of ancient and precious books and parchm ents burned or otherwise dest royed, and their gold and silver set t ings turned into hard cash. For the Word of God they cared nothing; what they wanted was m oney. And if this were t rue, as it is to a lim ited extent , of Catholic days, what shall we say of the robberies and plunders com m it ted by sectaries in England, in their first fury, at the Reform at ion? We can scarcely conceive the extent to which the Reform ers went in their rage and hat red against everything that had the least sem blance of Rom e about it , especially if it seem ed likely to afford them som e 'filthy lucre'. The Protestant historian, Collier, tells how Henry VI I I , determ ined to 'purge his library' of all Popish and superst it ious books, and consequent ly gave orders for the dest ruct ion of such things as 'm issals, legends, and suchlike'; but not ice the next point of com m and—'to deliver the garniture of the books, being either silver or gold, to his officers'. That was the real m ot ive; avarice, cupidity, greed of gold. The books thus plundered and st r ipped of their precious stones were largely Bibles and copies of the Gospels. Fuller says: 'The Holy Scriptures them selves, m uch as the Gospellers pretended to regard them , underwent the fate of the rest . I f a book had a cross on it , it was condem ned for Popery, and those with lines and figures were interpreted the black art , and dest royed for conjuring.' 'Whole libraries,' exclaim s another, 'were dest royed or m ade waste paper of, or consum ed for the vilest uses . .. broken windows were patched with rem nants of the m ost valuable MSS. on vellum , and the bakers consum ed vast quant it ies in heat ing their ovens.'

Collier, who is quoted above (he was an Anglican Bishop) , writes: 'One am ong the m isfortunes consequent upon the suppression of m onasteries was an ignorant dest ruct ion of a great m any books. The books, instead of being rem oved to royal libraries, to those of Cathedrals, or the universit ies, were frequent ly thrown into grantees as things of sm all considerat ion. Now, these m en oftent im es proved a very ill protect ion for learning and for ant iquity; their avarice was oftent im es so m ean and their ignorance so undist inguishing that , when the covers were som ewhat r ich and would yield a lit t le, they pulled them off, and threw away the books or t urned them to waste-paper; and thus m any noble libraries were dest royed, to a great public scandal and an irreparable loss to learning.' That Henry VI I I caused the m onasteries

and convents to be dissolved, and their books and t reasures plundered and pillaged wholesale, in order t o replenish his coffers that were sorely depleted, is m at ter of history, though the ostensible reason was, of course, zeal for the t rue religion and the purifying of the m orals of people and priest s. How far a sixteenth century Nero like Henry VI I I was fit ted to undertake such a work is a m at ter of opinion. But certain it is that , in the diabolical fury which the authorit ies of that day waged against all Catholic inst itut ions and m onum ents, loads of priceless copies of the Sacred Scriptures perished as ut terly as though they had been dest royed by the Pagan persecutors of the first four centuries after Christ . Listen ( if you are not t ired of hearing of such at rocit ies) to the account given by Dom Bede Cam m , O.S.B., in his charm ing Life of Cardinal Allen, of the out rageous vandalism and hideous barbarit ies perpet rated at Oxford in those fearful days. After telling how the Chapel of All Souls was wrecked, it s im ages and altars defaced and desecrated, the organs burnt in the quadrangle, and even the sacred pyx in which the body of the Lord had lain so long cut down and broken into pieces, he goes on, (page 11) : —'Terrible, too, to all who loved learning was the wanton dest ruct ion of priceless m anuscripts. Cart loads of books were carried off t o the fire or sold to m erchants to wrap their wares in. Anything which these m iserable m en did not understand was condem ned as savouring of superst it ion. All MSS. that were guilt y of the superst it ion of displaying red let ters on their fronts or t iles were doom ed. Ribald young m en carried great spoils of books on biers up and down the city, singing as at a m ock funeral, and their priceless burdens were finally burned in the com m on m arket -place. The story of it all as told by contem poraries, is all but incredible. The University library was st r ipped so bare that even the very shelves were sold for firewood, and the quadrangles of New College were for days lit tered with torn m anuscripts. ' I do not think I need say m ore on the point . I t m ust be tolerably clear now where we should look for an answer to the quest ion, 'Where are all the old copies of the Bible that Catholics say the m onks so lovingly and laboriously m ade in the Middle Ages?' The answer m ust be plainly found in the insensate greed and fanat ical dest ruct iveness on the part of the sixteenth century Revolut ionaries. Which side showed the m ore venerat ion and regard for God's writ ten Word m ay be safely left to the judgm ent of all reflect ing m inds.

CHAPTER XI . Abundance of Vernacular Scr iptures before W ycliff

I HAVE said that people who could read at all in the Middle Ages could read Lat in: hence there was lit t le need for the Church to issue the Scriptures in any other language. But as a m at ter of fact she did in m any count ries put the Scr iptures in the hands of her children in their own tongue. ( I ) We know from history that there were popular t ranslat ions of t he Bible and Gospels in Spanish, I talian, Danish, French, Norwegian, Polish, Bohem ian and Hungarian for the Catholics of those lands before the days of print ing, but we shall confine ourselves to England, so as to refute once m ore the com m on fallacy that John Wycliff was the first to place an English t ranslat ion of the Scriptures in the hands of the English people in 1382.

To anyone that has invest igated the real facts of the case, this fondly-cherished not ion m ust seem t ruly r idiculous; it is not only absolutely false, but stupidly so, inasm uch as it admits of such easy disproof; one wonders that nowadays any

lecturer or writer should have the tem erity to advance it . Now, observe I am speaking of the days before the print ingpress was invented; I am speaking of England; and concerning a Church which did not , and does not , adm it the necessity of Bible- reading for salvat ion; and concerning an age when the product ion of the Scriptures was a m ost cost ly business, and far beyond the m eans of nearly everybody. Yet we m ay safely assert , and we can prove, that there were actually in existence am ong the people m any copies of the Scriptures in the English tongue of that day. To begin far back, we have a copy of the work of Caedm on, a m onk of Whitby, in the end of the seventh century, consist ing of great port ions of the Bible in the com m on tongue. I n the next century we have the well- known t ranslat ions of Venerable Bede, a m onk of Jarrow, who died whilst busy with the Gospel of St . John. I n the sam e (eighth) century we have the copies of Eadhelm , Bishop of Sherborne; of Guthlac, a herm it near Peterborough; and of Egbert , Bishop of Holy I sland; these were all in Saxon, the language understood and spoken by the Christ ians of that t im e. Com ing down a lit t le later, we have the free t ranslat ions of King Alfred the Great who was working at the Psalm s when he died, and of Aelfr ic, Archbishop of Canterbury; as well as popular renderings of Holy Scripture like the Book of Durham , and the Rushworth Gloss and others that have survived the wreck of ages. After the Norm an conquest in 1066, Anglo-Norm an or Middle-English becam e the language of England, and consequent ly the next t ranslat ions of the Bible we m eet with are in that tongue. There are several specim ens st ill known, such as the paraphrase of Orm (about 1150) and the Salus Anim ae (1050) , the t ranslat ions of William Shoreham and Richard Rolle, herm it of Ham pole (died 1349) . I say advisedly ’specim ens’ for those that have com e down to us are m erely indicat ions of a m uch greater num ber that once existed, but afterwards perished. We have proof of this in the words of Blessed Thom as More, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VI I I who says: ’The whole Bible long before Wycliff’s day was by virtuous and well- learned m en t ranslated into the English tongue, and by good and godly people with devot ion and soberness well and reverent ly read’ (Dialogues I I I ) . Again, ’The clergy keep no Bibles from the laity but such t ranslat ions as be either not yet approved for good, or such as be already reproved for naught ( i.e. , bad, naughty) as Wycliff’s was. For, as for old ones that were before Wycliff’s days, they rem ain lawful and be in som e folks’ hand. I m yself have seen, and can show you, Bibles, fair and old which have been known and seen by the Bishop of the Diocese, and left in laym en’s hands and wom en’s too, such as he knew for good and Catholic folk, that used them with soberness and devot ion.’ (2) But you will say, that is the witness of a Rom an Catholic. Well, I shall advance Protestant test im ony also.

The t ranslators of the Authorised Version, in their ’Preface’, referr ing to previous t ranslat ions of the Scriptures into the language of the people, m ake the following im portant statem ents. After speaking of the Greek and Lat in Versions, they proceed:

’The godly- learned were not content to have the Scriptures in the language which them selves understood, Greek and Lat in ... but also for the behoof and edifying of the unlearned which hungered and thirsted after r ighteousness, and had souls to be saved as well as they, t hey provided t ranslat ions into the Vulgar for their count rym en, insom uch that m ost nat ions under Heaven did short ly after their conversion hear Christ speaking unto them in their Mother t ongue, not by the voice of their m inister only but also by the writ ten word t ranslated.’

Now, as all these nat ions were certainly converted by the Rom an Catholic Church, for there was then no other to send m issionaries to convert anybody, this is really a

valuable adm ission. The Translators of 1611, then, aft er enum erat ing m any converted nat ions that had the Vernacular Scriptures, com e to the case of England, and include it am ong the others. ’Much about that t im e,’ they say (1360) , even in our King Richard the Second’s days, John Trevisa t ranslated them into English, and m any English Bibles in writ ten hand are yet t o be seen that divers t ranslated, as it is very probable, in that age . ... So that , to have the Scriptures in the m other t ongue is not a quaint conceit lately taken up, either by the Lord Crom well in England [ or others] . .. but hath been thought upon, and put in pract ice of old, even from the first t im es of the conversion of any nat ion.’

This test im ony, from the Preface, ( t oo lit t le known) of their own Author ised Bible, ought surely to carry som e weight with well disposed Protestants.

Moreover, the ’Reform ed’ Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranm er, says, in his preface to the Bible of 1540: ’The Holy Bible was t ranslated and read in the Saxon tongue, which at that t im e was our m other tongue, whereof there rem aineth yet divers copies found in old Abbeys, of such ant ique m anner of writ ing and speaking that few m en now be able to read and understand them . And when this language waxed old and out of com m on use, because folks should not lack the fruit of reading, it was again t ranslated into the newer language, whereof yet also m any copies rem ain and be daily found.’ Again, Foxe, a m an that Protestants t rust , says: ’I f histories be well exam ined, we shall find, both before the Conquest and after, as well before John Wycliff was born as since, the whole body of Scripture by sundry m en t ranslated into our count ry tongue. ’ ’But as of the earlier period, so of this, there are none but fragm entary rem ains, the "m any copies" which rem ained when Cranm er wrote in 1540 having doubt less disappeared in the vast and ruthless dest ruct ion of libraries which took place within a few years after that date.’ These last words are from the pen of Rev. J. H. Blunt , a Protestant author, in his History of the English Bible; and another Anglican dignitary, Dean Hook, t ells us that ’long before Wycliff’s t im e there had been t ranslators of Holy Writ . ’ One m ore authority on the Protestant side, and I have done: it is Mr. Karl Pearson (Academ y , August , 1885) , who says: ’The Catholic Church has quite enough to answer for, but in the 15th century it certainly did not hold back the Bible from the folk: and it gave them in the vernacular ( i.e. their own tongue) a long series of devot ional works which for language and religious sent im ent have never been surpassed. I ndeed, we are inclined to think it m ade a m istake in allowing the m asses such ready access to the Bible. I t ought to have recognised the Bible once for all as a work absolutely unintelligible without a long course of historical study, and, so far as it was supposed to be inspired, very dangerous in the hands of the ignorant .’ We do not know what Mr. Pearson’s religious standpoint m ay have been, but he goes too far in blam ing the Church for throwing the Bible open to the people in the 15th century, or indeed in any previous age. No evil results whatsoever followed the reading of that precious volum e in any century preceding the 16th, because the people had the Catholic Church to lead them and guide them and teach them the m eaning of it . I t was only when the principle of ’Pr ivate judgm ent ’ was proclaim ed that the Book becam e ’dangerous’ and ’unintelligible’, as it is st ill to the m ult itudes who will not receive the t rue interpretat ion of it at the hands of the Catholic Church, and who are about as com petent to understand and explain it by them selves as they are to explain or prophesy the m ovem ents of the heavenly bodies.

(3) There is no need, it seem s to m e, to waste further t im e and space in accum ulat ing proofs that the Bible was known, read and dist r ibuted by the Catholic

Church in the com m on language of the people in all count ries from the 7th down to the 14th century. I have paid m ore at tent ion to the case of England because of the popularit y of the m yth about Wycliff having been the first to t ranslate it , and to enable the poor blinded Papists, for the first t im e in their experience, to behold the Figure of the Christ of t he Gospels in 1382. Such a grotesque not ion can only be due either to ignorance or concealm ent of the now well- known facts of history. One would fain hope that , in this age of enlightenm ent and study, no one valuing his scholarship will so far im peril it as to at tem pt t o revive the silly fable. But supposing it were as t rue as it is false, that John Wycliff was the first to publish the Bible in English, how in the nam e of reason can it be t rue at the sam e t im e that Luther, m ore than 100 years afterwards, discovered it? Really, people m ust decide which story they are going to tell, for the one is the direct cont radictory of the other. Wycliff or Luther, let it be; but Wycliff and Luther t ogether—that is im possible.

(4) Now, it m ay seem som ewhat irrelevant to our present subject , which is sim ply 'where we got the Bible', to wander off t o foreign lands and see how m at ters stood there at the date at which we have now arrived; but I should not like to pass from this part of the enquiry without set t ing down a few facts which are generally unknown to our separated brethren, as to the existence of plenty of Bibles in those very count ries which they think were, and of course st ill are, plunged in the depths of superst it ion, illiteracy and degradat ion. They flat ter them selves with the idea that it was the knowledge of the Scriptures which produced the blessed Reform at ion the world over; and will tell you that it was all because the Holy Book was scaled and locked and hidden away from the benighted Papists in Cont inental countries that the glorious light of the Reform at ion never broke, and has not yet broken, upon them . There are, however, unfortunately for them , facts at hand, facts unquest ioned, which explode this pious not ion. The facts are these: —( i) As was shown long ago in the Dublin Review (October, 1837) , ' it was alm ost solely in those count ries which have rem ained constant to the Catholic Faith that popular versions of the Bible had been published; while it was precisely in those kingdom s, England, Scot land, Sweden, Denm ark and Norway, where Protestant ism acquired an early and has m aintained a perm anent ascendancy, that no printed Bible existed when they em braced Protestant ism . Holland alone and a few cit ies in Germ any were in possession of the Bible when they adopted the Reform ed Creed.' I s it really the case then, you ask with open eyes, that these Lat in count ries allowed the Bible to be read and t ranslated and printed before Luther? Listen and judge for yourself what rubbish is cram m ed into people's heads. ( ii) Luther's first Bible (or what pretended to be the Bible, for he had am putated som e of it s m em bers) cam e out in 1520. Now, will you believe it , there were exact ly 104 edit ions of the Bible in Lat in before that date; there were 9 before the birth of Luther in the Germ an language, and there were 27 in Germ an before ever his own saw the light of day. Many of these were to be seen at the Caxton Exhibit ion in London, 1877: and seeing is believing. I n I taly there were m ore than 40 edit ions of the Bible before the first Protestant version appeared, beginning at Venice in 1471; and 25 of these were in the I talian language before 1500, with the express perm ission of Rom e. I n France there were 18 edit ions before 1547, the first appearing in 1478. Spain began to publish edit ions in the sam e year, and issued Bibles with the full approval of the Spanish Inquisit ion (of course one can hardly expect Protestants to believe this) . I n Hungary by the year 1456, in Bohem ia by the year 1478, in Flanders before 1500, and in other lands groaning under the yoke of Rom e, we know that edit ions of the Sacred Scriptures had been given to the people. ' I n all ( to quote from "M.C.L's" useful pam phlet on the subject ) 626 edit ions of the Bible, in which 198 were in the language of the laity, had issued from the press, with the sanct ion and at the instance of t he Church, in the count ries where

she reigned suprem e, before the first Protestant version of the Scriptures was sent forth into the world.’ England was perhaps worse off than any count ry at the t im e of the Reform at ion in the m at ter of vernacular versions of the Bible: m any Catholic kingdom s abroad had far surpassed her in m aking known the Sacred Word. Yet these lands rem ained Catholic; England turned Protestant ; what , then, becom es of the pathet ic delusion of ’Evangelical’ Christ ians that an acquaintance with the open Bible in our own tongue m ust necessarily prove fatal to Catholicism ? The sim ple t ruth of course is j ust this, that if knowledge of the Scriptures should of it self m ake people Protestants, then the I t alian and French and Spanish and Hungarian and Belgian and Portuguese nat ions should all have em braced Protestant ism , which up to the m om ent of writ ing they have declined to do. I am afraid there is som ething wrong with the theory, for it is in woeful cont radict ion to plain facts, which m ay be learned by all who care to take the t rouble to read and study for them selves.

(5) Now, before passing on to another part of the subject , I should like you to pause for a m om ent with the brief historical review fresh in your m em ory; and I would sim ply ask this: How can anyone living in the light of m odern educat ion and history cling any longer t o the fantast ic idea that Rom e hates the Bible—that she has done her worst t o dest roy it—that she conceals it from her people lest it should enlighten their blindness, and that the Holy Book, after lying for m any long dark ages in the dungeons and lum ber room s of Popery, was at last exhum ed and dragged into the light of day by the great and glorious discoverer, Mart in Luther? O foolish Scotchm en, who hath bewitched you? Do you not see that Rom e could have easily dest royed it if she had been so disposed during all those centuries that elapsed between its form at ion into one volum e in 397 A.D., and the sixteenth century? I t was absolutely, exclusively in her power to do with it as she pleased, for Rom e reigned suprem e. What m ore sim ple than to order her priests and m onks and Inquisitors t o search out every copy and reduce it to ashes? But did she do this? We have seen that she preserved it and m ult iplied it . She saved it from ut ter dest ruct ion at the hands of infidels and barbarians and pagan t r ibes that burned everything Christ ian they could com e across; she saved it and guarded it from total ext inct ion by her care and loving watchfulness; she, and she alone. There was no one else to do it ; she only was sent by God to defend His Blessed Word. I t m ight have perished, and would have perished, were it not that she em ployed her clergy to reproduce it and adorn it and m ult iply it , and to furnish churches and m onasteries with copies of it , which all m ight read and learn and com m it to m em ory, and m editate upon. Nay, she not only m ult iplied it in it s original languages (Greek and Hebrew) , which would have been intelligible and useful only to the learned few, but she put it into the hands of all her people who could read, by t ranslat ing it into Lat in, the universal tongue; and even for those less scholarly she rendered it into the com m on languages spoken in different count ries. Truly she took a curious way of showing her hat red of God's Holy Word and of dest roying it . Many senseless charges are laid at the door of the Catholic Church; but surely the accusat ion that , during the centuries preceding the sixteenth, she was the enem y of the Bible and of Bible reading m ust , to any one who does not wilfully shut his eyes to facts, appear of all accusat ions the m ost ludicrous; and to tell the t ruth, it is r idiculed and laughed out of court by all serious and im part ial students of the quest ion. With far m ore just ice, it hum bly seem s to m e, m ay the charge of degrading and profaning the Sacred Scriptures be brought against those highly- financed Bible Societ ies which, with a recklessness that passes com prehension, scat ter am ong savages and pagans ut terly uninst ructed, tons of Testam ents, only to be used for m aking ball cart r idges or wadding, for wrapping up snuff, bacon, t obacco, fruit and other goods; for papering the walls of houses; for convert ing into tapest ry or pret ty kites for children; and for other and fouler uses

which it m akes one asham ed to think of. True, the versions thus degraded are false and heret ical, which m ay m it igate the horror in the eyes of Catholics; but those who thus expose them to dishonour believe them to be the real Words of Life. On their heads, then, falls the guilt of ’giving that which is holy to the dogs’.

CHAPTER XI I . W hy W ycliff w as Condem ned

BUT here we are likely to be m et with an object ion by those who have not a very profound or accurate knowledge of the history of this quest ion. ’Why, then,’ they will say, ’why, if the Catholic Church approved of the Bible being read in the tongue of the people, why did she condem n Wycliff, one of her own priests, for t ranslat ing it into English, and forbid her people to read his version of the sacred Scriptures?’ I answer, because John Wycliff ’s version of the Bible was not a correct version, and because he was using it as a m eans of corrupt ing the people’s faith and of t eaching them false doct r ine; and it seem s to m e at least that that was a perfect ly good reason for condem ning it . For, please observe, t hat whilst the Church approves of the people reading the Scriptures in their own language, she also claims the r ight to see that they really have a t rue version of the Scriptures to read, and not a m ut ilated or false or im perfect or heret ical version. She claim s that she alone has the r ight to m ake t ranslat ions from the original languages (Hebrew or Greek) in which the Bible was writ ten; the r ight to superintend and supervise the work of t ranslat ing; the r ight of appoint ing certain priests or scholars to undertake the work; the r ight of approving or condem ning versions and t ranslat ions which are subm it ted to her for her j udgm ent . She declares she will not tolerate that her children should be exposed to the danger of reading copies of Scripture which have changed or falsified som ething of the original Apostolic writ ing; which have added som ething or left out som ething; which have notes and explanat ions and prefaces and prologues that convey false doct r ine or false m orals. Her people m ust have the correct Bible, or no Bible at all.

Rom e claim s that the Bible is her book; that she has preserved it and perpetuated it , and that she alone knows what it m eans; that nobody else has any r ight to it whatsoever, or any authority to declare what the t rue m eaning of it is. She therefore has declared that the work of t ranslat ing it from the original languages, and of explaining it , and of print ing it and publishing it , belongs st r ict ly to her alone; and that , if she cannot nowadays prevent those outside her fold from tam pering with it and m isusing it , at least she will take care that none of her own children abuse it or take libert ies with it ; and hence she forbids any private person to at tem pt to t ranslate it into the com m on language without authority from ecclesiast ical superiors, and also forbids the faithful to read any edit ions but such as are approved by the Bishops. All this the Catholic Church does out of reverence for God’s Holy Word. She desires that the pure, uncorrupted Gospel should be put in her people’s hands as it cam e from the pen of the Apost les and Evangelists. She dreads lest the faithful should draw down upon them selves a curse by believing for Gospel the addit ions and changes int roduced by foolish and sinful m en to support som e pet theor ies of their own; j ust as a m other would fear lest her children should, along with water or m ilk, drink down som e poison that was m ixed up with it . There are then, let it be clearly understood, versions and versions of Holy Scriptures: som e that are correct and

guaranteed by the Church; others that sim ply brist le with m istakes and falsit ies. The form er are perm it ted to Catholics to read and study; the lat ter, it need hardly be said, are ut terly forbidden. Now, to the lat ter class belonged the version of John Wycliff, first put into people’s hands in 1382. A very slight knowledge of the m an him self and of his opinions and of his career m ight persuade any reasonable person that a version m ade by him was the very last that would be allowed to Catholics.

(2) What are the sim ple facts about the m an? He was born in 1320, becam e a priest and theologian and lecturer at Oxford; and at first caused notoriety by taking part with the State against the claim s of the Pope in regard to t r ibute m oney and benefices. But in course of a few years he went further and began to oppose the Church not only in m at ters of policy or governm ent (a course which m ight con-ceivably at t im es be pardonable) , but in the things of faith. Being accused of preaching novel and uncom m on doct r ines, he was, at the instance of Pope Gregory XI , sum m oned before his Archbishop in 1378, and inhibited from teaching any further on the m at ters in dispute. No m ore proceedings were taken against him ( though he did not desist from his ant i-Papal teaching) t ill 1381 when again he was m aking him self notorious. He at tacked the fr iars and Religious Orders with great bit terness; im pugned t ransubstant iat ion, and seem ed to advocate the theory that was afterwards peculiarly Luther’s, r idiculed Indulgences and flooded the count ry with pam phlets and t racts reeking with heresy. He was, in short , a kind of Lollard. ’The Lollards’ ( says the Nat ional Cyclopedia) ’were a religious sect which rose in Germ any at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and differed in m any points of doct r ine from the Church of Rom e, m ore especially as regards the Mass, Ext rem e Unct ion, and atonem ent for sin.’

That , of course, is a very bald and crude statem ent of their tenets. The extent of their ’differences from the Church of Rom e’ will appear in a clearer light if we consider the ’Lollards Pet it ion to Parliam ent ’, 1395. I t contained am ong other novelt ies the fam ous ’twelve conclusions’ against the tem poral possessions of the Church, the celibacy of the clergy, and all vows of chast it y; against exorcism s and blessings of inanim ate objects; t ransubstant iat ion and prayers for the dead; pilgrim ages; com pulsory auricular confession; venerat ion of im ages; and the holding of secular offices by priests. Many also obj ected to the taking of oaths, denied the necessity of Bapt ism for salvat ion, held m arriage to be a m ere civil contract , and spoke of sacram entals as ’j ugglery’. (See Cham bers Cyclopedia and The Catholic Cyclopedia, under ’Lollards’.) Now, you m ay sym pathise with these am iable persons if you like, but you would hardly expect the Catholic Church of that century (or of any century) to sym pathise with them , and st ill less to suffer them to issue her Scriptures expurgated according to their ideas. But thus did John Wycliff. ’He held views,’ ( says the devout Anglican, Dore, in his m ost interest ing work Old Bibles) , ’he held views which, if carr ied into pract ice, would have been totally subversive of m oralit y and good order, but he never separated him self from the [ Catholic] Church of England’. Another Anglican says the Lollards were polit ical m artyrs rather than religious; that their act ions tended to a Revolut ion in the state as well as in the Church; and that both civilians and ecclesiast ics regarded their principles as subversive of all order in things tem poral as well as things spiritual. (Dr. Hook; Lives of Archbishops of Canterbury .) Can we be surpr ised, then, at reading that in 1382, in consequence of the m onst rous heresies that he was now spreading, John Wycliff was again put on t r ial by the Ecclesiast ical Courts, and that 22 proposit ions taken from his works were condem ned? Thereupon he ret ired to Lut terworth, of which he had been Rector for m any years. He was gent ly dealt with, and his declining years were not harassed by any of the persecut ion and torture which it pleases som e to depict

him as suffering; and he died, aft er a st roke of paralysis whilst hearing Mass, on 31st Decem ber, 1384. I n later years, two separate Councils, one at London, the other at Constance, selected 45 proposit ions from the teaching of Wycliff, and condem ned them ) declaring som e to be notoriously heret ical; others erroneous; others scandalous and blasphem ous; others sedit ious and rash; and the rest offensive to pious ears.

(3) Now, I ask any unprejudiced person, was this the kind of m an to undertake the t ranslat ion of the Bible into the com m on language of the people? Was he likely to be t rusted by the Church at that t im e to produce a version thoroughly Catholic and free from all error or corrupt ion—a m an, notoriously eccent ric, guilt y of heret ical and suspicious teaching, at tacking the Church in it s authorit ies from the Pope down to the fr iars, and associated with sectaries abroad who were at once revolut ionaries and heret ics? The quest ion answers it self. You m ay cry out that Wycliff was r ight and Rom e was wrong in doct r ine; that he was a glor ious Reform er and ‘m orning star of the Reform at ion', and that he taught the pure word of the Lord as against the abom inable t radit ions of the Scarlet Wom an of Babylon. But I hum bly subm it that that is not the point . The point is this: you ask why did the Catholic Church condem n Wycliff 's version, and at the sam e t im e allow other versions of the Bible in English? and I am showing you why. I am telling you that Wycliff was heret ical in the eyes of Rom e; that he produced a heret ical version for the purpose of at tacking the Catholic Church of that day, and of spreading his heresies; and that to blam e the Church for forbidding him to do so, and for condem ning his version, is about as sensible as to blam e an author for interdict ing som eone else from publishing a copy of his work that was full of errors and absurdit ies, and contained opinions and sent im ents which he detested. The Catholic Church certainly could never allow a version of Holy Scripture, (which is her own book) like that of Wycliff to go forth unchallenged, as if it were correct and authoritat ive, and bore her sanct ion and approval. As well m ight we expect the Brit ish Sovereign to sanct ion som e hideous caricature from a com ic paper as a t rue and faithful picture of his coronat ion.

(4) We do not shrink from giving John Wycliff and Nicholas of Hereford an equal share of praise for their laborious work of t ranslat ing the whole of the Bible into the English tongue, if the work was really theirs, (which som e scholars like Gasquet , however, have doubted) . What we assert is that it was a bad t ranslat ion, and hence useless, and worse than useless, for Catholics. I t was condem ned and forbidden to be used by a Decree of Archbishop Arundel at Oxford in 1408, which also prohibited the t ranslat ion of any part of the Bible into English by any unauthorised person, and the reading of any version before it was form ally approved. This was a natural and wise and necessary decree. I t did not forbid the reading of any of the old approved versions of Scripture in English which existed in great num bers before Wycliff, as we have seen already. Nor did it forbid new versions to be m ade or read, if under proper supervision and approval by ecclesiast ical superiors. I t only banned false and unauthorised t ranslat ions like Wycliff 's; and Protestant writers, like Dr. Hook, have often declared their belief that it was not from host ilit y to a t ranslated Bible as such that the Church condem ned Wycliff; and that she never would have issued her decree, if his sole purpose had been the edificat ion and sanct ificat ion of the readers. I t was only when the design of the Lollards was discovered, and Wycliff 's subt le plot unm asked of dissem inat ing their pest ilent ial errors through his t ranslat ion, that the Church's condem nat ion fell upon him . A greater authority even than Dr. Hook, I m ean the veteran histor ian, Dr. Jam es Gairdner—an English Churchm an who spent m ore than 60 of his four score years in research am ong the State papers of England dealing with the period about the Reform at ion, and who was recognised as easily the

m ost profound and com prehensive student of t hose t im es—Dr. Gairdner, I say, expressed som e very st rong conclusions to which his historical enquir ies had driven him in regard to the Wycliffite revolt and it s results, and about Rom e and the Bible. (See his book Lollardy and the Reform at ion, reviewed in Decem ber Month, 1908.) 'The t ruth is, ' he says, 'the Church of Rom e was not at all opposed to the m aking of t ranslat ions of Scripture or to placing them in the hands of the laity under what were deem ed proper precaut ions. I t was only j udged necessary to see that no unauthorised or corrupt t ranslat ions got abroad; and even in this m at ter it would seem the authorit ies were not roused to special vigilance t ill they took alarm at the diffusion of Wycliffite t ranslat ions in the generat ion after his death.' (Vol. I , p. 105.) Again, 'To the possession by worthy lay m en of licensed t ranslat ions the Church was never opposed; but t o place such a weapon as an English Bible in the hands of m en who had no regard for authority, and who would use it without being inst ructed how to use it properly, was dangerous not only to the souls of those who read, but to the peace and order of the Church,' (p. 117) . From a deep, calm scholar like Dr. Gairdner words like these are m ore valuable than whole volum es of part isan and unenlightened assert ions from ant i-Catholic cont roversialists; and (as Father Thurston suggests) we cannot but feel grateful to this honoured old scholar in the evening of his days for t hus vigorously and boldly ident ifying him self with an unpopular cause. Sim ply honesty of purpose and love of t ruth com pelled him , out of his vast and prolonged studies, to expose the revolut ionary character of the Wycliffite and Lollard rebellions against Rom e, as well as to sym pathise with the glorious m artyrs like More and Fisher, and to defend the Catholic authorit ies like Archbishop Warham and Bishops Bonner and Tunstall, and to vindicate the good reputat ion and piety of t he m onasteries so cruelly suppressed by Henry VI I I . But we are ant icipat ing. I was speaking of the Church's condem nat ion of Wycliff's undesired and undesirable version.

(5) This was the first t im e in England that the Church ever felt herself obliged to lay som e rest r ict ion on Bible reading in the vulgar tongue; and that fact in it self is surely sufficient to prove that t here m ust have been som e very special reason for her act ing so different ly from what she had been accustom ed to do before. Her act ion at this t im e was precisely sim ilar to the act ion of the Church in France nearly 200 years previously. Then ( that is in the 10th and 13th centuries) som e heret ics called Waldenses and Albigenses revolted against all authority, and overran the count ry, spreading their wild and blasphem ous doct r ines. They taught , am ong other enorm it ies, that there were two Gods (creator of the good and creator of the evil) , that there was no Real Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist , t hat there was no forgiveness for sins after bapt ism , and that there was no resurrect ion of the body. They declared oaths unlawful, condem ned m arriage, and called the beget t ing of children a crim e. All these im piet ies they professed to base on Holy Scripture. Consequent ly, to save her people from being ensnared and led away, the Church in council assem bled at Toulouse, 1029, passed an enactm ent forbidding to laym en the possession of the sacred books, especially in the vernacular, though anyone m ight possess a Breviary or a Psalter or Office of our Blessed Lady for devot ion. Will any one blam e the Church for taking these m easures to suppress the poisonous heresy and prevent it s spreading, and to save the Sacred Scriptures from being m ade the m ere tool and war-cry of a certain sect? In like m anner we m ay not blam e the Church at Oxford under Archbishop Arundel for her fam ous const itut ion against Wycliffite and other false versions of the Bible, but rather adm ire and applaud her wisdom and vigilance and zeal for the purity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ . And in the sam e way we m ay exam ine and invest igate the act ion of the Church in various count ries and in various centuries as to her legislat ion in regard to Bible reading

am ong the people; and wherever we find som e apparent ly severe or unaccountable prohibit ion of it , we shall on enquiry find that it was necessitated by the foolish or sinful conduct on the part either of som e of her own people, or of bit ter and aggressive enem ies who literally forced her to forbid what in ordinary circum stances she would not only have allowed but have approved and encouraged. I t is t rue that the approving or condem ning of Bible reading in part icular centuries or count ries is a m at ter of policy and of discipline on the part of the local Catholic authorit ies, and depends largely upon the prudence and wisdom and zeal of the Bishops set over them , and does not necessarily involve any act ion on the part of the Pope as Suprem e Head of the Church; and hence one cannot declare infallibly off-hand that there has never been a case of unwise or indiscreet legislat ion in regard to the m at ter at the hands of individual Bishops. I do not know of any case m yself; and never read of any instance where Bishops have been proved in the course of t im e to have m ade m istakes in issuing decrees about the m at ter. But supposing som e m istake had been m ade, that would not affect t he general principle on which the ecclesiast ical authorit ies always are supposed to act ; and in the light of Rom e’s principle, and her clear and definite at t itude towards the Bible as her own Book, we m ay safely challenge anyone to convict her either of inconsistency or hat red towards God’s writ ten Word. Once grasp her doct r inal posit ion in regard to the Bible and the Rule of Faith, and you will have no difficulty in account ing for her uncom prom ising host ilit y to versions like Wycliff’s, and for her act ion in condem ning the Bible Societ ies which spread abroad a m ut ilated, corrupt , and incom plete copy of the Holy Scriptures, (generally accom panied by t ract s) with the design of underm ining the faith of Catholics.

CHAPTER XI I I . Tyndale’s Condem nat ion Vindicated by Poster ity.

So m uch then for John Wycliff and his unhappy version. The next m an of any consequence we are confronted with is another favourite of the Reform ers, another ’m artyr’ for the Bible, and that is William Tyndale. His t reatm ent is also flung in our teeth by crit ics, as fresh evidence of Rom e’s im placable hat red of the open Bible. Did she not persecute and burn poor Tyndale, and consign his copy of the Scriptures in English to the flam es? So here again, we m ust show how wise and consistent was the act ion of the Catholic Church in England in regard to Tyndale and his t ranslat ions, and clear her absolutely from the slightest shadow or suspicion of host ilit y to God’s writ ten Word.

( i) What we are about t o speak of now, be it rem em bered, is the Printed Bible, for in 1450 the art of print ing was discovered by a m an rej oicing in the m elodious nam e of John Gooseflesh, (a Germ an) , and in 1456 the first book ever printed issued from the press at Mayence, and it was—what? I t was the Bible, and it is known as the Mazarin Bible, after Cardinal Mazarin. This again, dem onst rates anew what hat red Catholics had in those days to the Bible, and their fear and dread lest it should be known even to exist ! The best way to keep it secret , of course, was to print it . Besides, how could the Bible be printed in 1456? Did not Mart in Luther discover it for the first t im e in 1507? However, j oking apart , the fact rem ains that we have now in our historical review arrived at the point where we bid farewell to copies of the Bible writ ten by the hand, and have to consider only those that were turned out by the

print ing press from 1456 onwards. On Protestant principles it m ust seem a pity that the Lord waited so m any centuries before He invented print ing m achines to spread Bibles about am ong the people; and it seem s also very hard on all preceding generat ions that slipped away without this lam p to their feet and light unto their path.

( ii) Well, William Tyndale (and for that m at ter Mart in Luther too) , was born alm ost a 100 years after John Wycliff died, that is, 1484. He studied at Oxford and becam e a priest , and was seized with the am bit ion of get t ing the Bible printed in England. Now, there were three great object ions to this step being approved. ( I ) I n the first place, Tyndale was not the m an to do it ; he was ut terly unfit ted for such a great work. He says him self he was ’evil favoured in this world, and without grace in the sight of m en, speechless and rude, dull and slow wit ted.’ He had no special qualificat ions for the task of t ranslat ion. He was but a m ediocre scholar, and could not boast of anything above the average intellect . I ndeed, non-Catholic authors have adm it ted that the cause of Scripture reading in the vernacular was dist inct ly prejudiced by having been taken in hand by incapable m en like Tyndale. Then (2) in the second place, he was act ing ent irely on his own account , and without authorisat ion from ecclesiast ical superiors, either in England or in Rom e; he was sim ply a private obscure priest , and was act ing without com m ission and without sanct ion from higher quarters. I ndeed, I go further and say that he was act ing in disobedience to the decision of higher authorit ies. At the very beginning of the sixteenth century ( I am now quot ing the Anglican Dore) ’the authorit ies of the English Church took into considerat ion the desirabilit y of int roducing a vernacular Bible [ i.e. Bible in English] into England, and the great m ajorit y of the Council were of opinion that , considering the religious t roubles on the Cont inent and the unset t led state of things at hom e, at this j uncture the t ranslat ion of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, and it s circulat ion am ong the people, would rather tend to confusion and dist ract ion than to edificat ion.’ Now, you m ay lam ent if you like (as Dore does) this decision as an error of j udgm ent , and affirm that the postponem ent of an English version in print authorised by the Bishops was a m ost unfortunate event , as leading to false and corrupt versions being issued by irresponsible individuals. But r ight or wrong in their j udgm ent , this was the conscient ious conclusion at which the Council under Archbishop Wareham arrived: no printed English Bible m eanwhile was to be allowed; and after all is said and done, they were probably bet ter j udges than we are as to what was best for the Church of that t im e in England. The Lutheran Revolut ion was in full swing abroad (1520) , and the Lutheran heresy was spreading everywhere, carrying with it rebellion and im m oralit y, and the English Bishops m ight well have cause to fear lest the infect ion should poison the faithful under their own jurisdict ion. (3) I n the third place, there was no dem and for a printed English Bible to any great extent—certainly not to the extent of m aking it at all an urgent or pressing duty on the part of the authorit ies to issue one. Dore, ( so often quoted already) r idicules the idea that at that t im e England was a 'Bible- thirsty land'. He declares that 'there was no anxiety whatever for an English version except ing am ong a sm all m inority of the people', and 'the universal desire for a Bible in England we read so m uch of in m ost works on the subject existed only in the im aginat ion of the writers'. Dr. Brewer, another Protestant , also scoffs at the idea. 'To im agine,' he says, 'that ploughm en and shepherds in the count ry read the New Testam ent in English by stealth, or that sm iths and carpenters in towns pored over it s pages in the corner of their m aster's workshops, is to m istake the character and acquirem ents of the age. ' There has, in short , been a great deal of wild and groundless talk about the intense desire of the people of that century to devour the Scriptures. And we can prove it by these sim ple

facts, that ( I ) the people had to be com pelled by law to buy Bibles, for Acts were passed again and again threatening the King’s displeasure and a fine of 40s. per m onth if the Book was not purchased; (2) we have docum entary evidence that inhabitants of certain parts of the count ry, such as Cornwall and Devonshire, unanim ously objected too the new t ranslat ion, and that even am ong the clergy Reform ers like Bishop Hugh Lat im er alm ost ent irely ignored the English copy and always took their texts from the Lat in Vulgate; (3) printers had large stocks of printed Bibles left unsold on their hands, and could not get r id of them at any price, except under legal coercion; (4) the sam e edit ion of the Bible was often re- issued with fresh t it les and prelim inary m at ter, and new t it le-pages were com posed for old unsold Bibles, without any regard to t ruth, sim ply to get them sold. I do not see how we can resist the convict ion that there was really no extensive dem and for English Bibles am ong the m ass of Christ ians at that t ime in England, whether clergy or laity, and that the design of spreading them wholesale am ong the m asses was borrowed from the Cont inent which was then in a perfect ferm ent of Religious and Civil Revolut ion. Hence you can understand at once how Tyndale’s proposal was viewed with suspicion and disfavour by the Bishops, and him self refused any assistance or encouragem ent from Tunstall, Bishop of London, and other prelates. And when we further bear in m ind (as the Athenaeum pert inent ly rem arked, 24th August , 1889) that this irresponsible private chaplain had becom e already known as a m an of dangerous views, who was exceedingly insult ing in his m anner, unscrupulous, and of a m ost violent tem per; that in postprandial discussions he repeatedly abused and insulted Church dignitaries who were present ; that with him the Pope was ant i-Christ and the whore of Babylon, whilst the m onks and fr iars were ’caterpillars, horseleeches, drone-bees, and draff, ’ we shall not be vast ly astonished that these dignitaries did not evince m uch enthusiasm in pushing on Mr. Tyndale’s schem e.

( iii) Unable therefore to proceed with the work in his own land because of ecclesiast ical prohibit ion, Tyndale goes abroad, and after m uch wandering about set t les at Worm s, where in 1525 the Bible was printed and thence sm uggled in considerable quant it ies into England. At once, as was to be expected, it was denounced by the Bishop of London, and I do not deny (nor can I see any reason to deplore) the fact that copies of it were burned cerem onially at St Paul’s Cross. But why? Because it was a false and erroneous and ant i-Catholic version of the Holy Scriptures. I t was full of Lutheran heresies. Tyndale had fallen under the influence of the Germ an Reform er, who by this t im e had revolted from Rom e. About 1522 he had been suspected and t r ied for heresy; he had declared: ’I defy the Pope and all his laws’; and now he actually em bodied in his English version Luther’s notes and explanat ions of text s, which were as full of venom and hat red against Rom e as an egg is full of m eat . ’I t has long been a notorious fact , ’ says Mr. Allnat t ( in his Bible and the Reform at ion) , ’that all the early Protestant versions of the Bible literally swarm ed with gross and flagrant corrupt ions—corrupt ions consist ing in the wilful and deliberate m ist ranslat ion of various passages of the sacred text , and all direct ly aim ed against those doct r ines and pract ices of t he Catholic Church which the "Reform ers" were m ost anxious to uproot . They did give the people an "open Bible" , but what a Bible! ' And Canon Dixon, the cultured Anglican historian, referr ing to the fact that copies of Tyndale's Bible were burnt , m akes these st r iking rem arks: ' I f the clergy had acted thus sim ply because they would have the people kept ignorant of the word of God, they would have been without excuse. But it was not so. Every one of the lit t le volum es, containing port ions of the sacred text that was issued by Tyndale, contained also a prologue and notes wr it ten with such hot fury of vituperat ion against the prelates and clergy, the m onks and fr iars, the r ites and cerem onies of the Church, as was hardly likely to com m end it to the favour of those

who were at tacked.’ Tunstall, Bishop of London, declared he could count m ore than 2,000 errors in Tyndale’s Bible ’m ade in Germ any’; whilst the learned Sir Thom as More, Lord Chancellor of England, found it necessary to write a t reat ise against it , and asserted that to ’find errors in Tyndale’s book were like studying to find water in the sea’. I n short there is not an unprejudiced enquirer now but adm its that the Church could not possibly tolerate Tyndale’s Bible as though it were a t rue or correct version of the Holy Scriptures; she had no alternat ive but to prescribe and forbid it ; otherwise she would have been sinfully neglect ful of her guardianship over the word of God, and idly standing by whilst her children were being poisoned. But who will be so obtuse or so m alicious as to twist this act ion of hers into a determ ined hat red of the Scriptures as Scriptures and to represent her as host ile and opposed to all reading of the Bible whatsoever, even of a t rue and correct version? Surely to hate the Bible is one thing, and to prohibit a false version of the Bible is quite another. Has the Catholic Church not as a m at ter of fact put a correct copy of the Bible into the bands of her children in their own language in the Douai version? As for the burning of Tyndale’s version, there is nothing to be wondered at in it ; it was probably the only, or at least the m ost st r iking and effect ive way of stem m ing it s sale and inst illing a horror of it into the heart s of the people. I t was the custom of the age (as Dore rem arks) t o burn the works of opponents, as Luther a few years before burnt the books of Canon Law, and the Bull of Pope Leo, and in 1522 John Calvin burnt all the copies he could collect of Servetus’ Bible at Geneva, because these contained som e notes he did not t hink were orthodox. I ndeed Calvin went a step further than that—he burned Servetus him self. And surely it m ust be plain enough to everyone that , in the case before us, what the ecclesiast ical authorit ies m eant t o dest roy was, not the Word of God, but the errors of Luther and Tyndale which were corrupt ing it .

( iv) But the m ost interest ing point about the whole affair is that t im e has abundant ly j ust ified the act ion of the Catholic Church and proved that she did the proper thing in at tem pt ing to stam p out Tyndale's Bible. For ( I ) the reading of this pernicious book produced m ost disast rous effects upon the m orals of the people, who becam e rebellious, profane, and irreligious, and disaffected to the civil as well as to the spir itual authorit ies. Hence we find that for ten years, Tyndale's version was denounced and opposed even m ore by the Court and secular officials than by the Bishops; and that at least two royal proclam at ions were issued for every one clerical, against all who read or concealed the obnoxious volum e. I n fact in the year 1531 King Henry VI I I , with the advice of his Council and prelates published an edict that 'the t ranslat ion of the Scripture corrupted by William Tyndale should be ut terly expelled, rejected, and put away out of the hands of the people, and not be suffered to go abroad am ong his subjects'. What a com m entary upon the good and godly doct r ines inculcated by Mr. William Tyndale! And further st ill—som e years later ( the King's veto not having secured the desired effect ) , after several other edit ions of the English Bible had been issued and the condit ion of the Scripture- reading m asses was becom ing worse and worse in consequence, the sam e Royal Defender of the Faith caused another Act t o be passed (1543) ent it led 'for the advancem ent of t rue religion and for the abolishm ent of the cont rary '. By force of this it was decreed that , seeing what abuses had followed the indiscrim inate reading of certain versions of Holy Scripture, and what 'tum ults and schism s' had sprung up, and 'divers naughty and erroneous opinions', and 'pest iferous and noisom e teachings and inst ruct ions', including ‘writ ings against the holy and blessed Sacram ent of the Altar, and for the m aintenance of the dam nable opinions of the sect of Anabapt ists'—all to the 'great unquietness of the realm and great displeasure of his Majesty’ as a result of all this, it was enacted that 'all m anner of books of the Old and New Testam ent in English, being of the craft y, false, and unt rue t ranslat ion of Tyndale' , along with any writ ings

containing Doct r ine cont rary to that of the King, ’shall be clearly and ut terly abolished, ext inguished, and forbidden to be kept or used in this realm ’. The Act then goes on to explain what versions of the Bible m ight be used, and by whom , and forbids the general reading of it by wom en, art ificers, j ourneym en and certain other classes; and lays down sundry other rest r ict ions in regard to it , which are to be observed, under pains and penalt ies, ranging from fines of 40s and 5 pounds 40 pounds up to im prisonm ent for life. I shall not dwell on the reflect ions that arise in one’s m ind on reading such legal enactm ents com ing from such a m an as Henry VI I I ; but , t o com plete our rem arks about Tyndale’s version and to pursue to the end the King’s dealing with it , I m ay add that the very year before he went to his account (1546) he st ruck one m ore blow, which no doubt he intended to be and hoped would be fatal, at this hated volum e. He de1iberately com m anded all copies of it (along with Coverdale’s) to be delivered up and burned. Verily the ’whir ligig of t im e brings in his revenges’. After t his, one finds it som ewhat am using to be told that only priests and Popes burn and hate the Word of God. Henceforth Protestant readers of these lines would do well to rem em ber that the great Reform er and Founder of the Church of England, Henry VI I I , set a high exam ple in the m at ter. However, that is by the way. I was saying that the t im e just ified the act ion of the Church which first proscribed and did it s utm ost t o repress Tyndale’s version, and I have shown how the secular power felt itself driven in selfprotect ion to do the sam e. (2) But another, and perhaps to Protestants a m ore telling proof of the statem ent is found in the fact that their subsequent versions of Scripture deliberately om it ted Tyndale’s m ost characterist ic features, such as his notes, prefaces and prologues. They appeared and then they disappeared. They had their day, and they ceased to be. They were considered unfit to find a place in what purported to be a pure copy of the work of the Apost le and Evangelist . Posterit y, then, has just ified Sir Thom as More, and has condem ned Tyndale. What is this but to vindicate the Church in her act ion towards the corrupt volum e? Wisdom is indeed ’j ust ified of her children’.

CHAPTER XI V. A Deluge of Erroneous Versions

FOLLOWI NG Tyndale’s exam ple, others cont inued the work of issuing English-printed Bibles, and so in the reign of Henry VI I I we have to face quite a deluge of them . One by one they cam e forth, authorised and unauthorised, printed and published by irresponsible individuals, full of errors, with no proper supervision, and having no other effect (as we shall present ly see) than that of drawing down contem pt and disgrace upon the Sacred Scriptures.

( I ) The English Church was now separated from Rom e, and the English Bishops were m ere puppets and slaves at the beck and call of the Royal Tyrant , Henry. They exercised no real independent j urisdict ion over either clergy or people; the governor and ruler in Church and State was the King; and consequent ly no ecclesiast ic could undertake responsibilit y in regard to the publicat ion or suppression of Bibles without the will of his Im perial Master. So long as Henry m ade no object ion, any printer or publisher or literary hack, who thought he saw a chance of m aking a lit t le m oney out of the venture, would take in hand the publishing of a new version of the Bible. George Joye, for exam ple, took this course in regard to Tyndale’s Bible, and in consequence (1535) brought down upon him self a volley of bit ter and un-Christ ian

reproaches from that worthy who (as I have said before) was a m an of uncont rollable tem per and scurrilous language when thwarted or resisted. I n reply to this t irade, George Joye published an ’Apology’, in which he showed that the printer had paid him only 4 ½ d. for the correct ion of every 16 leaves, while Tyndale had net ted 10 pounds for his work; and besides, he exposed in fine style the departure from the t ruth of which Tyndale had been guilt y in boast ing of his t ranslat ion and exposit ion as if it were his own, whereas Joye shows it was really Luther's all the t im e; that Tyndale did not know enough Greek to do it , and had only added 'fantasies' and glosses and notes of his own im aginat ion to the work of others. However, we have no t im e to dwell on the quarrels of these am iable Bible t ranslators, else we should never reach the end of our historical review. Let us enum erate briefly the versions that saw the light in rapid succession during the reign of Henry VI I I .

(2) There was Myles Coverdale's in 1535. Coverdale was a priest , who m arried abroad, and kept a school. I n after years King Edward VI granted him and his wife (sic) Elizabeth a dispensat ion ( ! ) to eat flesh and white m eats in Lent and other fast ing days. I t is wonderful what power the Kings of England had in those days! I n 1537 appeared Mat thew's or Rogers' Bible (which was a m ixture of Tyndale's and Coverdale's) , and this has the dist inct ion of being the first that Henry authorised to be used by the people at large. Mat thew or Rogers ( for he assum ed different nam es for Bible-selling purposes) was, like Coverdale, a renegade priest , and had m arried, and we are not surprised to find that som e of his notes on the Gospel were indecent , and others consisted of abuse of the Church, her clergy, and her doct r ines. Two years later (1539) a m an, Taverner, produced another version of the Bible. He was a laym an, but a preacher notwithstanding, who had saved his skin by recant ing his opinions. And the sam e year appeared a version that was to hold the field for popularit y for the next twenty years viz., the Great bible, som et im es called Cranm er's, from the Preface writ ten by that accom m odat ing prelate. I t was Crom well (Thom as, not Oliver, of course) who engineered it , and Coverdale who supervised it s progress. The print ing of it was begun in France, but when the work was half finished, the Inquisitor-General very properly stepped in and confiscated the presses and types. I f England was going to the dogs through ant i-Papal Bibles, he saw no reason why France should do the sam e. However, it was com pleted and published in London in 1539, and, like previous versions, contained fulsom e flat tery of Henry VI I I , concerning whom Our Lord is represented as saying, 'I have found a m an after My Own heart , who shall fulfil all My will! ' This volum e was by Royal Proclam at ion ordered to be put up in every church in England; and Bonner, Bishop of London ( 'Bloody Bonner ',) who is held up as the m ost determ ined enem y of Bible reading, set up at his own expense six beaut iful copies of this Book at various convenient places in St Paul's Cathedral. Unfortunately, so m uch ill- feeling, disturbance, content ion, and irreverence was the result of this unrest rained Scripture reading that he was com pelled to threaten their rem oval. The license to read and judge, each one for him self, of the sense and m eaning of the Word of God produced, as we said before, m ost lam entable effect s, and led to the ut ter degradat ion of the Sacred Volum e. Not that there was any eager desire or thirst for it , or any great or general use m ade of it : for the printers often com plained of the large stock left , unbought , on their hands, and begged that persons should be com pelled to purchase them , and besought that no fresh edit ions m ight be published; and we have seen that Acts had to be m ade to force people to buy them , under threat of fine and im prisonm ent . But yet those who did read the Bible m ade it only a m at ter of altercat ion and content ion and argum ent , and brought it down to the depths of disrepute and contem pt . The extent t o which this evil had spread m ay best be judged from the pathet ic lam ent of

Henry VI I I him self in his last speech to Parliament : ’I am ext rem ely sorry to find how m uch the Word of God is abused: with how lit t le reverence it is m ent ioned; how people squabble about t he sense; how it is turned into wretched rhym es, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern; and all this in a false const ruct ion and counter-m eaning to the inspired writers. I am sorry t o perceive the readers of the Bible discover so lit t le of it in their pract ice; for I am sure charity was never in a m ore languishing condit ion, virtue never at a lower ebb, nor God Him self less honoured or worse served in Christendom .’ There is no am biguity about these words, and when we rem em ber that the sam e sent im ents are expressed in the writ ings and speeches of m any of the Reform ers them selves, who com plain of the licent iousness of the m asses since the abolit ion Popery, and rem em ber too, how Henry VI I I was const rained to seize and burn Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s and other versions of the Bible, and to forbid the reading of any version at all to large classes of his subjects—in the face of all this, who will fail to see the sinful folly of the policy of the English schism at ics of that day? And who will deny that the Catholic Church showed consum m ate wisdom , holy prudence, and the t ruest reverence for God's Word in withholding her version t ill a m ore convenient season?

(3) But are we finished with the erroneous versions yet? Far from it . Henry VI I I certainly authorised no m ore, for the sim ple reason that he went t o j udgm ent in 1547. No new edit ion cam e out in Edward the Sixth's reign (1547-1553) but in 1557 one was published that owed its origin to William Whit t ingham , a laym an, who had m arried a sister of John Calvin's wife, and who was m ade Dean of Durham . Whit t ingham 's Bible, issued at Geneva, perpetuated the corrupt ions of Tyndale's with an Epist le of Calvin added to the Epist les of St Paul and the other Apost les. During the reign of 'Bloody' Mary (1553-1558) , who, of course, ought to have hated the Scriptures like poison (being a bigoted Papist and the wife of a Spaniard) , there were, st range to say, no proclam at ions against Scripture reading, nor is there to be found any t race of opposit ion on the part either of the Queen or of her Bishops to the Bible being read or printed in the vulgar tongue; so says Mr. Blunt , the Anglican historian. With the accession of the 'Virgin Queen Bess', however, a new Bible saw the light in 1560 at Geneva, which was the work of the Nonconform ists resident there, and is known as the Genevan Bible, though Bible collectors know it m ore fam iliarly by the t it le 'Breeches Bible', from its rendering of Genesis iii, 7: 'They sewed fig leaves together and m ade them selves breeches'. I t was certainly the m ost popular that had yet appeared am ong the sectaries, part ly because of it s undeniable scholarship and accuracy, and part ly because of it s notes on the m argin, which were fiercely Calvinist ic. Take an exam ple: Rev. ix., 3. Here the note runs: 'Locusts are false teachers, heret ics and wordly subt il prelates, with m onks, fr iars, cardinals, pat r iarchs, archbishops, bishops, doctors, bachelors, m asters, which forsake Christ to m aintain false doct r ine.' Nobody worth speaking about is m issed out here.

The Puritan soldiers used to carry about with them a lit t le book m ade up of quotat ions from the notes of this Calvinist ic version. I t seem s also to have suited the Scot t ish taste of the per iod, for it was the first edit ion printed in Scot land. So lit t le, however, did the great m ass of the people in this count ry care for any Bible in English at all that the Pr ivy Council passed a law com pelling every householder possessed of a certain sum to purchase a copy under a penalty of 10 pounds. The Magist rates and Town Council of Edinburgh also did their best t o force the sale of the volum e; and searchers went from house to house throughout this unhappy land to see if it had been bought . But , in spite of all the pressure, we find from the Privy Council Records that m any householders preferred to incur the pains and penalt ies to purchasing the Bible. The old dodge was then adopted in regard to the Genevan

version that had done service with previous copies—the dodge, nam ely, of issuing the very sam e book, with the sam e errors and ident ical notes, but under a new t it le page, so as to deceive the unwary into believing it was a fresh edit ion. This t r ick had to be played, of course, by the unfortunate and im pecunious printers and booksellers, who had large stocks of Bibles unsold on their shelves; and the perpet rat ion of this fraud helped the Genevan edit ions considerably. But the Elizabethan Bishops soon found that this Bible, with it s violent Calvinist ic notes and teaching, was underm ining the popularit y of the Church of England; so Mat thew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, set him self the task of providing another version that would be less offensive to the High Church party and m ore favourable to Anglicanism . The result was the Bishops' Bible, which appeared in 1568, and took the chief place in the public services of the Church, though it never displaced the Genevan in the favour of the people.

We are close now to the m om ent at which the first Catholic version (and up t ill today the only one ever sanct ioned in English) appeared. But there was st ill one m ore Protestant version which, as it is yet the principal recognised Bible of the Protestants of the Brit ish Em pire, m ust not be om it ted. I m ean, of course, King Jam es's version of 1611. I t is the 300th anniversary of this, com m only called the Author ised Version, that English-speaking Protestants are everywhere celebrat ing this year ( 1911) .

(4) Neither the Royal Pedant him self, nor anybody else, seem s to have been sat isfied with any of the Bibles then float ing about . Dr. Reynolds, the Puritan leader, 'm oved his Majesty there m ight be a new t ranslat ion of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of Henry VI I I and Edward VI were corrupt , and not answerable to the t ruths of the original'. Jam es, great scholar as he thought him self to be professed 'that he could never yet see a Bible well t ranslated into English, but the worst of all his Majesty thought , the Geneva'—a judgm ent we cannot be surprised at , considering that that version openly allowed disobedience to a king, and blam ed Asa for only deposing his m other and not killing her. (2 Chron. xv. 16) . Moreover, he declared that 'som e of its notes were very part ial, unt rue, sedit ious, and savoured too m uch of dangerous and t raitorous conceits'. Hence a large band of t ranslators was appointed and in 1611 there was finished and published what has proved to be the best Protestant version that ever appeared—one which has exercised an enorm ous influence not only on the m inds of it s readers, but also on English literature throughout the world. I n 1881-1885 this version of King Jam es was revised, but whilst acceptable to students, the Revision has gained no hold upon the people at large.

(5) How long it will be before another Protestant version appears he would be a bold m an who would venture to prophecy; but that others will spring up and add to the num ber of the wrecks that already st rew the path we m ay confident ly predict . I have given a goodly list of corrupt and erroneous versions; but please do not im agine for a m om ent that m y catalogue is anything like com plete. I have m erely m ent ioned those that were m ore com m only used and secured a certain am ount of popularit y and authorisat ion from Protestant headquarters. But there are, I am safe in saying, hundreds of other edit ions that flooded this unhappy realm from the t im e of Tyndale, som e from foreign count ries, like Holland, and Germ any, and Switzerland, and som e produced at hom e, but all of them swarm ing with blunders and perversions. On glancing over a bookseller 's catalogue the other day m y eye happened to light on som e of those that have at tained notoriety for their absurd m istakes. There is, for exam ple, the 'He' Bible and the 'She' Bible, so called from the hopeless m ixing up of

these pronouns in the Book of Ruth; the 'He' Bible has one set of errors and the ‘She' Bible another. There is the 'Wicked' Bible from the word 'not ' being om it ted from the 7th Com m andm ent . There is the 'Vinegar' Bible, from print ing 'vinegar' instead of 'v ineyard', and so producing ‘The Parable of the Vinegar'. This Bible was printed by a m an called Basket t , and is now vainly sought for by collectors on account of it s num berless errors; indeed, it was wit t ily called the 'Basket - ful of Errors'. There is the 'Murderer 's Bible', from the words of Our Lord being thus printed: 'But Jesus said unto her, let the children first be killed' ( instead of 'fed') . Then we have the 'Whig' Bible and the 'Unrighteous' Bible and the 'Bug' Bible, and the 'Treacle’ Bible, and no end of other kinds of Bibles, all cram m ed full of m istakes and corrupt ions. The Pearl Bible, for instance, published by Field, the Parliam entary printer, has 6,000 errors in it . A fam ous book was writ ten by a m an nam ed Ward in the seventeenth century, ent it led Errata of the Protestant Bible, containing a form idable list of, I should not like to say how m any thousand errors in the var ious versions. No one has yet succeeded in refut ing Ward's Errata. I t stands as a gruesom e com m entary on the history of heret ical t reatm ent of the inspired text . I cam e across a curious and rare book one day in Glasgow University Library, wr it ten in 1659, by a Protestant , one William Kilburn, ent it led Dangerous Errors in Several Late Printed Bibles to the Great Scandal and Corrupt ion of Sound and True Religion. He enum erates the errors, om issions, and specim ens of nonsense that he discovered in these edit ions, m any of them im ported from Holland, and m ent ions that a gent lem an had unearthed 6,000 m istakes in one copy alone.

(6) But t im e would fail to tell of all the corrupt ions and perversions of the original texts which are to be found in pract ically all the Protestant Bibles, down to the present t im e, and whose existence is proved by the fact that one after t he other has been withdrawn, and it s place taken by a fresh version, which in it s turn was found to be no bet ter than the rest . I s this reverence for the Word of God? Which of all these corrupt part isan versions was 'the Rule of Faith?' The Bible, and the Bible only, we are told; but which Bible? I ask. Or had Protestants a different Rule of Faith according to the century in which they lived? according to the copy of the Bible they chanced to possess? What a m ockery of Religion! What a degradat ion of God's Holy Word, that it should have been knocked about like a shut t lecock, and m ade to serve the interests now of this sect , now of that , and loaded with notes that shrieked aloud party war-cries and bit ter accusat ions and filthy insinuat ions! I s this zeal for the pure and incorrupt Gospel? I s this the grand and unspeakable blessing of the 'open Bible'? I t only rem ains now to show by cont rast the calm , dignified, and reverent act ion taken by the Catholic Church, towards her own Book.

CHAPTER XV. The Catholic’s Bible

WHAT was the Catholic Church doing all this t im e? Well, she was in a state of persecut ion in England, and could not do very m uch except suffer .

( I ) Many of her best sons went abroad to m ore favourable lands. The circum stances had assuredly been m ost unsuitable for bringing out a Catholic version of the Scriptures. She was rather content , indeed com pelled, to sit st ill and from her m ajest ic height look down and watch the r ise and fall, the publicat ion and

withdrawal, the appearance and disappearance of dozens of different versions, heret ical and corrupt , grotesque in their blunders and bit ter in their sectarianism , that had been issued by the various bodies. By the end of the sixteenth century no less than 270 new sects had been enum erated, and som e that had been ext inct for centuries, like Arianism , revived under the genial influence of Luther. Dr. Walton, Bishop of Chester, and author of the fam ous Polyglot t Bible that bears his nam e, lam ents this fact in his Preface about the end of the seventeenth century. ’There is no fanat ic or clown’ ’ says he, ’from the lowest dregs of the people who does not give you his own dream s as the Word of God. For the bot tom less pit seem s to have been set open from whence a sm oke has r isen which has obscured the heavens and the stars, and locusts are com e out with wings—a num erous race of sectar ies and heret ics, who have renewed all the old heresies, and invented m onst rous opinions of their own. These have filled our cit ies, villages, cam ps, houses—nay, our churches and pulpits, too, and lead the poor deluded people with them to the pit of perdit ion.' Doubt less the poor Bishop, being a self- com placent Anglican, failed to perceive that he him self was as m uch of a deluded sectary and heret ic as any of them . I t was not t ill 1582 that a Catholic New Testam ent appeared, and that was not in England, but in France, at Rheim s, whence a colony of persecuted Catholics had fled, including Cardinal Allen, Gregory Mart in, and Robert Bristow, who were m ainly responsible for this new t ranslat ion. William Allen, form erly Canon of York, later Archbishop of Mechlin, and last ly Cardinal, had founded a college at Douai for the t raining of priests for the English m ission in 1568. He was com pelled to rem ove it to Rheim s in 1578 owing to Huguenot r iots, and there, as I said, in 1582 they issued the New Testam ent in English for Catholics. I t was a t ranslat ion, of course, from the Lat in Vulgate, which had been declared by the Council of Trent to be the authorised text of Scripture for the Church. Mart in was the principal t ranslator, whilst Bristow m ainly cont r ibuted the notes, which are powerful and illum inat ive. The whole was intended to be of service both to priests and people, t o give them a t rue and sound rendering of the original writ ings, to save them from the num berless false and incorrect versions in circulat ion, and to provide them with som ething wherewith to refute the heret ics who then, as ever, approached with a text in their m outh.

(2) Needless to say, the appearance of this New Testam ent , with it s annotat ions, at once aroused the fiercest opposit ion. Queen Elizabeth ordered the searchers to seek out and confiscate every copy they could find. I f a priest was found in possession of it , he was forthwith im prisoned. Torture by rack was applied to those who circulated it , and a scholar, Dr. Fulke, was appointed to refute it . All these m easures, be it noted, kind reader, were taken by part ies who advocated loudly the unlim ited r ight of private judgm ent . I n 1593 the College returned to Douai, and there in 1609 the Old Testam ent was added, and the Catholic Bible in English was com plete, and is called the Douai Bible. Com plete we m ay well call it ; it is the only really com plete Bible in English, for it contains those seven books of the Old Testam ent which I pointed out before were, and are, om it ted by the Protestants in their edit ions. So that we can claim to have not only the pure, unadulterated Bible but the whole of it , without addit ion or subt ract ion: a t ranslat ion of the Vulgate, which is it self the work of St . Jerom e in the fourth century, which, again, is the m ost authoritat ive and correct of all the early copies of Holy Scripture. At a single leap we thus arr ive at that great work, com pleted by the greatest scholar of his day, who had access to m anuscripts and authorit ies that have now perished, and who, living so near the days of the Apost les, and, as it were, close to the very fountainhead, was able to produce a copy of the inspired writ ings which, for correctness, can never be equalled.

We m ay feel j ust ly proud of our Douai Bible. We need not declare it to be perfect in all respects, either in regard to it s English style or it s em ploym ent of words from foreign languages; we need not feel the less affect ion or adm irat ion for it though we should suggest the possibilit y of revision and improvem ent in som e part iculars—it has, indeed, been re-edited and revised ere now especially by Bishop Challoner. But when all is said and done, it is a noble version with a noble history; t rue, honest , scholarly, faithful to the original. The Catholic Church has nothing to regret in her policy or her act ion towards English versions of the Scriptures. She has not issued one version one year and cancelled it the next because of it s corrupt ions and errors, it s part isan notes, or polit ical doct r ines. Nobly she has stood for reverence and caut ion in respect of t ranslat ing God's Holy Word into the vulgar tongue. She was slow in act ing, I adm it , if by slowness we m ean deliberat ion and prudence, for she saw with unerring vision the evils that were certain to result from a hasty cast ing of pearls before swine. But when she did act , she acted decisively and once for all. Who is there that has followed the sad story of the non-Catholic t reatm ent of the Sacred Scriptures but will be forced by cont rast t o adm ire the wisdom , the calm dignity, the consistent and deliberate policy of the Ecclesiast ical authorit ies of the Catholic Church in England, which stands as a reproof t o the violent , blundering, m alicious m ethods of the sectaries and which, if it had been acquiesced in by others, would have saved the Word of God from infinite degradat ion and contem pt?

(3) Hat red against her version of the Bible when it first appeared was so deep that an oath sworn on it was not deem ed to be valid. I t was on this sacred volum e that Mary, Queen of Scots, laid her hand and swore her innocence the night before her execut ion. The Earl of Kent at once interposed with the rem ark that the Book was a Popish and false t ranslat ion, and in consequence the oath was of no value. 'Does your Lordship suppose, ' was the quiet answer of the noble Queen, 'that m y oath would be the bet ter if I swore on your t ranslat ion, which I do not believe?' Thanks be to God, the Douai version has now so established it s posit ion, and hat red to it and to it s authors has so dim inished, that a Catholic m ay, even in these lands, swear upon it in conscience, and his word is believed as any other m an's in a Court of Law. Found in thousands of pious Catholic hom es at t he present hour, we m ay com fort ourselves with the reflect ion that , in this kingdom , there has now for long existed the t rue version of the Gospel of our Blessed Lord and the inspired words of His holy Apost les and Evangelists, as they have been handed down and preserved by the Catholic Church from the beginning, unchangeable and unchanged; and we m ay feel the m ost absolute certainty that , as it is the t rue version, so, at a date not incalculably distant , it will prove to be the only one, for the others will have gone to j oin their predecessors, and been consigned to a happy oblivion, and only survive in the m em ory of him who glances at their m usty covers and faded pages beneath the glass cases of library or m useum .

CHAPTER XVI . Envoi

AND now m y task is finished, and you, dear reader, if you have followed it up, will ut ter, I am sure, a hearty Deo grat ias! As sincerely and as clearly as possible, I have t r ied to show that it is to the Catholic Church under God that we owe the preservat ion and integrity of the Sacred Scriptures. The Old Testam ent she took over

from the Jewish Church; to it she added the New Testam ent , the work of her own Apost les and Bishops, and com prising them in one great whole, declared that they had the Holy Ghost for t heir author, and were neither to be increased nor dim inished. Throughout the ages when there was no other Church she has preserved them from error, saved them from dest ruct ion, m ult iplied them in every language under Heaven, and put them with the necessary prudence in her people’s hands. Again and again heret ics and apostates have t r ied to m ut ilate and corrupt them —indeed, have actually done so; but the Rom an Church has ever preserved a version pure and ent ire. She claim s that she alone knows the m eaning of their teaching, and alone possesses the r ight to interpret them to m en. She will tolerate no tam pering with the sacred text , and in these days especially, when scient ists and crit ics who have lost belief in the supernatural at tack them and labour to overthrow their Divine authority and authorship, Rom e alone stands as their protector; to her alone pious lovers of the Sacred Volum e, be they Catholic or Protestant , m ust look to save it and defend it . The Pope has appointed a standing Biblical Com m ission to guard the integrity and authent icity of Holy Scripture. This is but natural; for he stands as it were in loco parent is; t he Bible is the Church's offspring. But it is surely the keenest irony of history that , whilst Protestants them selves are st r iving with m ight and m ain to pull to pieces the ancient object of their venerat ion, the Catholic Church, ever reputed it s deadliest enem y, alone is left of all Christ ian bodies to save it from dest ruct ion. And this she will do, as she has ever done in the past ; it is part of her office in this world; there is no other that has either the r ight or the power to do it . I f the Bible loses it s sovereign place in the heart and m ind of non-Catholics, as it is rapidly doing, it is the work of those who, whether in Germ any, or Britain or Am erica, have loudly professed them selves it s greatest cham pions.

The Catholic Church on the other hand, in her long history has nothing to be asham ed of in her t reatm ent of it , but deserves the praise and thanks of all Christ ians for so zealously and fearlessly protect ing it from corrupt ion and contem pt . I ndeed, I will say that a sim ple study of her at t itude towards the inspired Scriptures, in com parison with that of all heret ical bodies, will furnish one of the st rongest argum ents that she is t he True Church of Christ .

Venerable and inspired as Catholics regard the Bible, great as is their devot ion to it for spir itual reading and support of doct r ine, we yet do not pretend to lean upon it alone, as the Rule of faith and m orals. Along with it we take that great Word that was never writ ten, Tradit ion, and hold by both the one and the other interpreted by the living voice of the Catholic Church speaking through her Suprem e Head, the infallible Vicar of Christ . Here we have a Guide that has never failed, and never can, in teaching us our duty both to God and m an. Not on the quicksands of hum an and varying judgm ent , but on the Rock of Divine Authority, we place our feet ; and, am idst the warring of opinions and the conflict of num berless edit ions and versions of Sacred Scripture, and the confused and cont radictory interpretat ions of t exts, we find an unassailable refuge in the decision of Rom e, and in subm it t ing to the judgm ent of that Church to which Christ gave Divine authority to teach when He said, 'Go ye and teach all nat ions', we find a sure consolat ion and an abiding peace.

I ndividual interpretat ion of the Bible—the m ost sublim e but also the m ost difficult Book ever penned—can never bring sat isfact ion, can never give infallible certainty, can never place a m an in possession of that great object ive body of t ruth which Our Blessed Lord taught , and which it is necessary to salvat ion that all should believe. The experience of m any centuries proves it . I t can not do so because it was never

m eant to do so. I t produces not unity, but division; not peace, but st r ife. Only listening to those to whom Jesus Christ said, ’He that heareth you heareth Me,’ only sinking his own fads and fancies and subm it t ing with childlike confidence to those whom the Redeem er sent out to t each in His Nam e and with His authority—only this, I say, will sat isfy a m an, and give to his intellect repose, and to his soul a 'peace that surpasseth all understanding'. Then no longer will he be torm ented with content ious disput ings about this passage of the Bible and that , no longer racked and rent and 'tossed to and fro with every wind of doct r ine', changing with the changing years. He will, on the cont rary, experience a joy and com fort and certainty that nothing can shake in being able to say, 'O m y God, I believe whatever Thy Holy Catholic Church believes and teaches, because Thou hast revealed it Who canst neither deceive nor be deceived.' God grant that m any Bible- readers and Bible- lovers m ay obtain the grace to m ake this act of faith, and pass from an unreasoning subservience to a Book to reasonable obedience and subm ission to it s m aker and defender—the Catholic and Rom an Church.

BI OGRAPHI CAL NOTE

CATHOLI C

The Bible and the Rule of Faith. Abbe Begin. The Bible: I t s Use and Abuse. Paul McLachlan. Concerning the Holy Bible. J. S. Vaughan. Text -Books of Catholic Theology. — Tanquerey, Hunter, etc. Catholic Dict ionary, Catholic Cyclopedia. C.T.S. Publicat ions.—Clarke, Anderson, Donnelly, M. C. L., Allnat t , etc. The Quest ion Box, Faith of our Fathers, etc. I nt roduct ion to Old Testam ent and New Testam ent . Cornely. The Old English Bible. Gasquet . Catholic Students "Aids" to the Study of the Bible. H. Pope, O. P.

PROTESTANT

English Church Histories.—Dixon, Hook, Blunt . The Bible and the Church. . Westcot t . The Dark Ages. Mait land. History of the English Bible. Burnet t Thom pson. The English Bible. Milligan. How the Bible cam e to us. Herne. English Bibles. Dore'. Our Bible. Talbot . How we got our Bible. Sm yth. I nt roduct ion to New Testam ent Crit icism . Scrivener. Helps to Study of the Bible. (Oxford.) The Bibles of England. Edgar. Our English Bible. Hoare.

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