PREFACE
This little book about the Bible grew out of lectures which the writer delivered
on the subject to mixed audiences. The lectures were afterwards expanded, and
appeared in a series of articles in the Catholic press 1908-1909, and are now
with slight alterations reprinted. Their origin will sufficiently account for
the colloquial style employed throughout.
There is, therefore, no pretense either of profound scholarship or of eloquent
language; all that is attempted is a popular and, as far as possible, accurate
exposition along familiar lines of the Catholic claim historically in regard to
the Bible. It is candidly controversial without, however, let us hope, being
uncharitable or unfair.
Friends had more than once suggested the re-issue of the articles; and it
appeared to the writer that at last the proper moment for it had come when the
Protestant world is jubilating over the Tercentenary of the Authorized Version.
Amidst the flood of literature on the subject of the Bible, it seemed but right
that some statement, however plain and simple, should be set forth from the
Catholic side, with the object of bringing home to the average mind the debt
that Britain, in common with the rest of Christendom, owes to the Catholic
Church in this connection. Probably the motive of the present publication will
be best understood by a perusal of the following letter from the writer which
appeared in the Glasgow Herald, 18th March, 1911: –
The Bible Centenary and the Catholic Church
Amid the general jubilation over the three hundredth anniversary of the
appearance of King James’s version of the Bible, I think it would be a pity if
we did not make mention of that great Church to which, under God, we owe our
possession of the sacred Scriptures – I mean of course, the Roman Catholic
Church. Without striking one single jarring 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 celebrations, and, as it were, saying,
‘Rejoice over it, but remember it was from me you got it.’ As a Scotsman,
who cannot forget that it is the Bible that has made Scotland largely what she
is today, I yield to no one in veneration of the inspired Scriptures and in
admiration of the incomparably beautiful Authorized Version. Still, honor to
whom honor. We shall only be awarding a just meed of praise and gratitude if we
frankly and thankfully recognize that it is to a council (or councils) of the
R.C. Church that we owe the collections of the separate books into our present
Canon of the New Testament, and that to the loving care and devoted labor o the
monks and scholars of that Church all through the ages we are indebted, not only
for the multiplication and distribution of the sacred volume among the faithful
when as yet no printing press existed, but even for the preservation of the Book
from corruption an destruction. It is, then, undoubtedly true to say that, in
the present order of Providence, it is owing to the Roman Catholic Church that
we have a Bible at all. And no one will be a bit the worse Christian and
Bible-lover if he remembers this notable year that it is to the Mother Church of
Christendom he must look if he would behold the real preserver, defender, and
transmitter of the ‘Word that endureth forever.’ – Henry Grey Graham.
INTRODUCTION
If all were true that is alleged against the
Catholic Church in her treatment of the Holy Scripture, then the proper title of
these papers should not be ‘How we got’, but ‘How we have not got the
Bible’. The common and received opinion about the matter among non-Catholics
in Britain, for the most part, has been that Rome hates the Bible – that she
has done all that she could to destroy it – that in all countries where she
has held power and 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 its publication or its perusal, at least she renders
it as nearly useless as possible by sealing it up in a dead language which the
majority of people can neither read nor understand. And all this she does, (so
we are told), because she knows that her doctrines are absolutely opposed to and
contradicted by the letter of God’s written Word – she holds and propagates
dogmas and traditions which could not stand one moment’s examination if
exposed to the searching light of Holy Scripture. As a matter of fact, is it not
known to everybody that, when the Bible was for the first time brought to the
light and printed and put into the people’s hands in the sixteenth century,
suddenly there was a great revolt against the Roman Church – there was a
glorious Reformation? The people eagerly gazing upon the open Bible, saw they
had been befooled and hoodwinked, and been taught to hold ‘for doctrines the
commandments of men’, and forthwith throwing off the fetters, and emancipating
themselves from the pure truth of the Word of God as set forth in Protestantism
and Protestant Bibles. Is not this the tale that history tells about Rome? Has
she not always waged a cruel and relentless war against the Holy Book – issued
prohibitions and framed decrees against reading it, or having it in the house
– sometimes even in her deadly hatred going the length of making bonfires of
heaps of Old and New Testaments, as Tunstall, Bishop of London, did to William
Tyndale’s? Has she not burned at the stake, or at least banished from their
home and country, servants of the Lord like John Wycliff and William Tyndale for
no other crime than that of translating and printing and putting into lay folk’s
hands the sacred text of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Who does not know
instances, even in our own days, of pious old women (especially in Ireland)
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 into the fire? This is not at all
uncommon (it is said) in Catholic lands, where the poor people sometimes chance
to get a copy of God’s Word through the devoted labors of Bible-women and
tract-distributors. A Scotch lady in Rome, now happily a Catholic but then am
ember of a Protestant congregation there which supports a Bible-distributor,
once informed me of the account that this gentleman gravely related to a meeting
of the congregation, as to how an old woman in a small Italian town, accepting
one of his Testaments and being illuminated by the Gospel of St. John (which she
never saw before, of course, though part of it is read every day at Holy Mass),
straightway went and confuted her priest and silenced him, so that he had no
word to say in reply. This I repeat, is the commonly accepted idea about Rome
and her attitude towards Holy Scripture among the masses of non-Catholic people.
I have said advisedly ‘among the masses’, for happily there are now a goodly
number of enlightened and impartial persons, and of scholars who have studied
the matter fairly for themselves, men, for example, of the stamp of the late Dr.
S. R. Maitland, among whom the ideal is quite exploded. And one may not blame
the masses too severely for entertaining the notion above alluded to: how
indeed, we may ask, could they possibly think otherwise in face of the tradition
handed down to them from their forefathers since the ‘Reformation’, by
minister, teacher, and parents, through sermon, catechism, newspaper, books of
travel, fiction, and history? They have believed the tradition as naturally as
they believed that the sun rose in the east and set in the west; or that
monasteries and convents were sinks of iniquity and dens of corruption; or that
there was once a female Pope called Joan; or that Catholics pay money to get
their sins forgiven. You cannot blame them altogether, for they had, humanly
speaking, no opportunity of knowing anything else.
The Protestant account of pre-reformation Catholicism has been largely a
falsification of history. All the faults and sins that could possibly be raked
up or invented against Rome, or against particular bishops or priests, were
presented to the people of this unhappy land, and all their best acts
misconstrued, misjudged, misrepresented, and nothing of good told in her favor.
She has been painted as all black and hideous, and no beauty could be seen in
her. Consequently people came to believe the tradition as a matter of course,
and accepted it as history, and no more dreamed of enquiring whether it was true
or not than they dreamed of questioning whether Mary wrote the Casket Letters or
blew up Darnley at Kirk o’ Field. Add to this the further fact that,
Catholicism being almost totally wiped out in Scotland, the people had no means
of making themselves personally acquainted with either its doctrines or its
practices, and being very imperfectly educated till the beginning of the
nineteenth century, were as incapable of arriving at a true knowledge of the
interior life of the Catholic Church as of the internal organism of an
antidiluvian tadpole. Hence one can easily understand how it came about that,
among the mass of the people in Bible-loving Scotland, the Pope was recognized
as the Anti-Christ foretold by St. John, and Rome herself, that sitteth upon the
seven hills, identified as ‘Babylon, the Great, the mother of harlots, and
abominations of the earth’, and the ‘woman drunken with the blood of the
saints’. The story goes that one day the Merry Monarch, Charles the Second,
propounded to the learned and scientific men about the Court the following
profound problem: How is it that a dead fish weighs less than a living one? The
learned and scientific men discussed the grave difficulty and wrote elaborate
treatises on it to please the Royal enquirer, but came to no satisfactory
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 exactly the same dead or living, and all the time the Merry Monarch
had been ‘having them on’. People have been acting much in the same way in
regard to the assertion so glibly made that Rome hates the Bible, and persecutes
it, and tries to blot it out of existence. But nowadays many are enquiring –
Is it really so? Are we sure of our facts? Are we not building up mountains of
abuse and calumny on a false supposition? Just as all have come to know that the
sun, as a matter of fact, does not rise or set but stands still, that there
never was a Pope Joan but his name was John, that monasteries and convents are
homes of learning and sanctity and charity, and that no Catholic every pays or
ever could pay a single farthing to get his sins remitted – and all this
through the spread of knowledge and education and enlightenment and study – so
also I venture to think that people will now be rightly considered ignorant and
blameworthy, and at the least behind the times, if they do not learn that the
notion I have alluded to above about the Catholic Church and the Bible is false
and nonsensical – historically false and inherently nonsensical. By a calm
consideration of the facts of history and a mind open to conviction on genuine
evidence, they will be driven by sheer force of honesty to the conclusion that
the Catholic Church, so far from being the monster of iniquity that she is
painted, has in very truth been the parent, the author and maker under God, of
the Bible; that she has guarded it and defended it all through the ages, and
preserved it from error or destruction; that she has ever held it in highest
veneration and esteem, and has grounded her doctrines upon it; that she alone
has the right to call it her book; that she alone possesses the true Bible and
the whole Bible, and that copies of the Scriptures existing outside of her pale,
are partly incorrect and partly defective, and that whatever in them is true, is
true because derived from her who alone posses the Book in its fullness and its
truth. If they were Catholics, they would love God’s Holy Word more and more;
they would understand it better; they would adore the Divine Providence that
took such a wise and sure means of preserving and perpetuating it; and they
would profoundly admire the Catholic Church for her ceaseless vigilance,
untiring zeal, and unswerving fidelity to the commission entrusted to her by
Almighty God.
Copyright (c) 1997-1999 Ecclesia Militans
All Rights Reserved
Updated: November 26, 2000
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