BIBLE STUDY.
And with this view, I now say specially, cultivate such intercourse laying His holy Word open before you. I spoke in the previous Chapter of the Bible spread open by the evening lamp, the Bible marked with signs of diligent search. With all my heart I mean to press that thought. It will be best to reserve for another Chapter certain suggestions on methods of Bible study. But I may, and I will at once, offer a few words on the subject in general. It is a subject which lies near my heart, and of the urgent importance of which I am very sure.
THE ORDINATION CHARGE.
Above all then I would entreat you to be a Bible student at whatever cost of other religious reading. It is a very common thing to substitute, practically, for the Bible a little library of livres de piété, as the French would call them, small "good books." Not very long ago, in the course of an ordination examination, I came across an instructive instance. In answer to a question in a "Pastoral Paper" for candidates for Priest's Orders, a thoughtful young Clergyman stated incidentally that he used every day with great profit certain devotional books, and that about twice a week he took for definite meditation and prayer a passage from the Gospels. It struck me that here was a strange and sad inversion of the right order of proportion; devotional books daily, and the New Testament (in any sense of earnest meditative study) about twice a week! Very different, I thought, is the view and teaching of the Church of England in this matter of the spiritual reading of her Ministers. What does the Church say, through the Bishop, when the Deacon is ordained Presbyter? "Seeing that you cannot by any other means compass the doing of so weighty a work, pertaining to the salvation of man, but with doctrine and exhortation taken out of the Holy Scriptures, and with a life agreeable to the same; consider how studious ye ought to be in reading and learning the Scriptures.... We have good hope that you will continually pray to God the Father, by the mediation of our only Saviour Jesus Christ, for the heavenly assistance of the Holy Ghost; that, by daily reading and weighing of the Scriptures, ye may wax riper and stronger in your Ministry."
And I need not go about to prove that the Church does not mean such daily "reading and weighing" to wait till the young man is actually ordained Priest. We should scarcely have had the First Homily of the First Book written, if such had been her mind. Have you ever read over that "Voice of the Church"?
M. HENRI LASSERRE ON DEVOTIONAL READING.
A remarkable confirmation of my present contention comes to us from an unexpected quarter. I refer to the Preface prefixed by that ardent Roman Catholic, M. Henri Lasserre, to his remarkable French translation of the Four Gospels, the book which, December 4, 1886, received the cordial benediction of Leo XIII., but within a twelvemonth, such is "the power behind the Pope," was placed on the Index Expurgatorius. Probably such passages as the following had much to do with this strange and sudden self-reversal of the judgment of the Vatican.
"A timid school," after the crisis of the Reformation, which finds, of course, little favour with M. Lasserre, and on which, very unjustly, he lays much of the blame of the practical prohibition of the Bible within "the Catholic Church," "a timid school tended thenceforth to strike from the hands of believers the divine Book which makes the foundation of our faith, and laboured to substitute for it by degrees a pious literature, intended to furnish hearts and minds with a nourishment suited to their weakness, a diet without danger. Some of these books, we own without hesitation, are excellent in themselves, and have contributed to the sanctification of many souls. However, this is the exception. In the majority of these works, where, alas, the sugar of devotion takes the place of the salt of wisdom, the eternal truths and the genuine teachings of the Gospel were soon diluted, and, as it were, lost in strange waters.... One and all, the better specimens and the deplorable (les lamentables) alike, they are another thing altogether, yes, absolutely another thing, than the Gospel, whose apostolic mission they have noiselessly usurped by an invasion insensible, I had almost called it clandestine.... The general ignorance of the Gospels has been the one cause in France, these twenty years, of the success of the scandalous romance which appeared under the title of La Vie de Jésus. Among a people moderately familiar with the narratives of St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John ... there would have been no need to refute it. Every one would have seen, without assistance, its flagrant falsifications, its gross sophisms, its absolute emptiness. This deep-seated and complex evil, this enervation of the Christian spirit, this anæmia (cette anémie) of so many among us, are an object of sorrowful anxiety (préoccupation) for the Catholic thinker" (pp. x, xxv).
CURRENT NEGLECT OF SCRIPTURE.
For the Protestant thinker too, within a Church which has now for centuries, in every possible official way, pressed home the reading of the Bible upon her every member, and of course upon her every Minister, there is material for similar anxieties, mutatis mutandis. Bible study, such as our Lord and the Apostles enjoined and encouraged, is not on the increase amongst us, to say the least of it; certainly the ignorance of the blessed Book even among candidates for holy Orders is sometimes, is not seldom, very great indeed. Nay more, there is sometimes, however rarely as yet, an ominous disposition even in clerical circles to shelve the Bible. Quite lately I heard, on excellent authority, that a certain large Clerical Society, revising its rules, deliberately decided that the meetings shall not in future be begun with the reading of Scripture. My friend and Brother, do not swim even on the edges of such a current. Swim with all your might, in your Master's might, against it.