The bishop, assuming an air of supreme contempt, replied:
“Your answer shows your complete ignorance on the subject on which you speak so boldly. If you were a little better informed on that grave subject, you would know that the translation by Martini, which the Pope advised the Italian people to read, formed a work of twenty-three big volumes in folio, which, of course, nobody except very rich and idle people could read. Not one in ten thousand Italians have the means of purchasing such a voluminous work; and not one in fifty thousand have the time or the will to peruse such a mass of endless commentaries. The Pope would never have given such an advice to read a Bible, as the one you distribute so imprudently.”
“Then, my lord, do you positively tell me that the Pope gave permission to read Martini’s translation because he knew that the people could never get it on account of its enormous size and price, and do you assure me that he would never have given such an advice had the same people been able to purchase and read that holy work?”
“Yes, sir! It is what I mean,” answered the bishop, with an air of triumph, “for I know, positively, that this is the fact.”
I replied, calmly: “I hope your lordship is unwillingly mistaken; for if you were correct, the stern and unflinching principles of logic would force me to think and say that that Pope, and all his followers were deceivers, and that encyclical, a public fraud in his own hands; for we, Catholic priests, make use of it, all over the world, and reprint it at the head of our own Bibles, to make the people, both Protestants and Catholics, believe that we approve of their reading our own versions of that Holy Book.”
Had I thrown a spark of fire in a keg of powder, the explosion would not have been more prompt and terrible than the rage of that prelate. Pointing his finger to my face, he said:
“Now, I see the truth of what I have been told, that you are a disguised Protestant, since the very day you were ordained a priest.
“The Bible! the Bible! is your motto! For you, the Bible is everything, and the holy church, with her Popes and bishops, nothing! what an insolent, I dare say, what a blasphemous word I have just heard from you! You dare call an encyclical letter of one of our most holy Popes, a fraud!”
In vain, I tried to explain; he would not listen, and he silenced me by saying:
“If our holy church has, in an unfortunate day, appointed you one of her priests in my diocese, it was to preach her doctrines, and not to distribute the Bible! If you forget that, I will make you remember it!”