The Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Volume 1, March 1865

MARCH, 1865.
There are few so foolish as to close their eyes against the brilliant rays of the mid-day sun, and, at the same time, to assert deliberately that the sun is not yet risen, and that the world is still enveloped in darkness.
1. The first question that naturally suggests itself is, did the Church seek to remove the sacred volume from the hands of her own ministers, that is, of those whom she destined to teach her faithful children, and to gather all nations into her hallowed fold? The whole daily life of these sacred ministers of itself responds to such a question. Ask their diurnal hours, or any page of the daily Liturgy of the Church; ask those beautiful homilies which were delivered day by day in the abbeys of Bangor, Westminster, or Certosa, all of which breathe the sweet language of the inspired text; ask the myriad children of St. Columban, who in uninterrupted succession, hour by hour, chanted the praises of God in the accents of holy writ; ask the countless sanctuaries which decked the hills and valleys not only of our own island, but of every land on which the light of Christian faith had shone—the peaceful abodes of those who renounced the world's smiles and vanities to devote themselves to the service of God, and whose every orison recalled the teaching and the words of inspired truth. Ask even the medieval hymns published by the present Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, which, though shorn by the editor of much of their Catholic beauty, yet bear in each remaining strophe a deep impress of the language and imagery of the Bible, and prove to conviction that, so devoted was the Church of the ante-Reformation period to the study of the inspired text, that the very thoughts of her clergy, their language, their daily life, seemed to be cast in its sacred mould.
3. Italy, however, was not only remarkable for the number of its editions; it deserves still greater praise for the solicitude with which it compared the existing text with that of the ancient manuscripts, and endeavoured to present to the public editions as accurate as the then known critical apparatus would allow. One or two editions deserve particular notice, and in our remarks we will take the learned Vercellone for our guide, in his Dissertazioni Accademiche (Roma, 1864, pag. 102, seq. 9).