OCR Text |
Show u CHURCH AND BIBLE. The old and untrue claim that the Catholic church has kept the Bible from the people is still heard from Protestants despite the fact that history his-tory as it is beginning to be written in the twentieth century is giving us some of the truth so long withheld, catholic scholarship has been underrated under-rated in the past, and some of the arguments ar-guments that have been used against the church's relation to the Bible now appear to be so ridiculous that Catho-. lies are content to ignore them and permit Protestants to do all the refutation. refu-tation. - Atheists and agnostics of the present day are doing some good in the world. The history they are writing is free from Protestant prejudices, preju-dices, and the Catholic church is beginning be-ginning to come into its own. To begin with the church's relation to the Bible, it is necessary to go back to the fifteenth century. Printing was not invented until 1438, and prior to that time the number of Bibles in the world , was necessarily small. The church is doing its utmost, however, to increase the number. The ceaseless work in the scriptorium of the early monasteries testifies to this fact. Men and women were kept copying Bibles from morning till night, the beautiful story being told of a German nun whose feat of writing out two whole Bibles was regarded with such veneration ven-eration that it was inscribed on her tombstone. If the church in the beginning be-ginning was opposed to the' Bible, why did it take such pains to have it preserved? The Bible, however, has never been regarded by the church as the only source of truth, and it is on this point that it differs with the teachings of Martin Luther. When Christ came to earth, he came to teach a message from , the Father, and the early Christians Chris-tians received the faith long before the New Testament was written. If Christ wanted the Bible to be made the foundation of the faith, he would have been forced to invent printing several centuries earlier than it was. This was clearly not his desire, yet Luther ordained to his followers that if they wanted to know what Christ taught they would have to have recourse re-course to tho Bible. A stagy and melodramatic story is told by a French historian of Luther's discovery of the Bible how he came upon it hid away among dusty tomes in the library of his monastery, how he exclaimed fervently, "This is the word of God, and it is being kept from the people," and how finally he launched his reformation with the principal object in view of disseminating dissemi-nating the word of God among the people. That this story is pure fiction fic-tion I will attempt to prove to you by the following prospectus sent out by the firm which published Jacob's "Life of Luther," a firm which has always al-ways been regarded as eminently a partisan in a Protestant way. The prospectus said that the work would have none of the eulogistic narrative on Luther which figured in D'Aubigne's history, the one referred to, but would be a critical biography. Statutes enacted during the reign of Henry VIII. forbid "any woman, excepting ex-cepting gentlewomen, journeymen artificers ar-tificers or apprentices," from reading the Bible. Buckingham's "The People in the Middle Ages" tells how St. Dun-stan, Dun-stan, as penance for an offense committed com-mitted by King Edgar, made him distribute dis-tribute 108 copies of the Bible in the vernacular among his . people. History, as I said before, i3 beginning begin-ning to tell the truth, and facts like these are becoming known. The most interesting affair in some time was the recent sermon of a Protestant clergyman of Brooklyn, who quoted the Pope's opinion in support of the Bible. Imagine a Protestant clergyman clergy-man holding up the Pope of Rome as an authority on the Bible, the book that the church had hitherto always been accused of suppressing! It is enough to make Martin Luther turn in his grave. As a matter of fact, it is the Protestant church that is daily becoming be-coming more hostile to the Bible. Indifferent In-different sects . are tearing it apart page by page, and if they keep on little will be left between the covers. The Rev. Dr. de Costa made "this his principal reason for 'renouncing Protestantism. Prot-estantism. The Catholic church, on the other hand, while It has never accepted ac-cepted the Bible as the foundation of faith, has ever been ready to defend it. Christ told his diciples to go forth and preach, and there was no St. Peter's Pe-ter's printing company organized when they began the propagation of the faith. The clergy of the Catholic church, as tbfe lawful successors of these disciples, are carrying on the same propagation. Rev. Father Par-dow, Par-dow, in Catholic Home Companion. |