THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 150, 17 March 1876, Page 15

THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH.

Any Catholic able to read the Bible is free to read it in any country or tongue under heaven. But if you use the word in the sense that people are not allowed to read every book that pretends to be the Bible, or to take from what they read any meaning they please, then you are right, because the Catholic Church would not be discharging her duty to mankind if she did not prohibit such a reading. You are* aware that from the very first ages there have been corrupt Bibles. You must have heard of the Bible of Ebion and Cerinthus, and of Jquila, and Symmachus, and Theodotian. There have been otl ers besides, just as corrupt. Should all, then, be permitted to read them? Certainly not. Moreover, how many meanings have been taken from the Bible, contradictory, impious, and immoral I Should all these be allowed ? Or is God worshipped and served by them ? Or is mankind benefitted by them ? You will say with me, by no means. This manner of speech, then, needs correction. Further on, you tell ÜBj that prohibition of general reading was not " the case in the early - centuries of the Christian era," and you quote Justin Martyr that the Scriptures " were regularly read in the churches." Are you unaware that the same is the ease to-day in every church of the Christian world which holds communion with Rome ? and, more than this, on all Sundays and festivals of precept, they are read in the vulgar tongue. But the usage then or now, is no proof that there ever was a general reading, in your sense allowed by the Christian Church. What you take from Chrysostom has no bearing on the question at all. Now for St. Gregory in 1080. You state that "he ordained that Latin should be the universal language of Catholic worship, and consequently excluded all vernacular reading of Scriptures in public assemblies." Your conclusion, here, does not follow from the premises, and the proof is in the fact that the vernacular is used in the chief public assemblies of the Church. It seems to me you ought to be grateful to Gregory for this act rather than to condemn him. It ought to show you how careful he was of preserving the Scriptures in an age of the corruption of languages, when he ordered the ScripUnes to be everywhere (in the Latin Church) read in Latin, which was a fixed language, and could not suffer from the change. Leo the Twelfth's condemnation of " all societies for the distribution of the Bible" you ought not to find fault with, unless you believe that anybody, for any purpose, can make a Bible and distribute it without let and hindrance. Suppose the Jews, who naturally hate Christianity, should publish a Bible with the New Testament all garbled, mutilated and perverted, do you think they should not be condemned for the act, and prevented from distributing it, if possible? — Dean Byrne.