Even when we have to speak of religion with practical infidels, who read the Bible, or have some knowledge of its contents, that book will serve us as a powerful weapon of defence and persuasion. Few intelligent men or women of to-day, especially if they are earnest, and have a real regard for virtue and truth, though they may consider them as mere gifts of the natural order, fail to recognize that Christianity is a power for good, and that Christ, its Author, is and ever will be the great teacher of mankind, in whose true following man becomes better, nobler, and happier. To illustrate this fact, we may be permitted to quote at some length from an article by Baron Von Hügel in a recent number of the Dublin Review (April, 1895). Speaking of Christ, he cites from various writers, as follows:
Thus "Ernest Rénan, sceptical even to his own scepticism, addresses him and says: 'A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved, since thy death than during thy passage upon earth, thou wilt become the corner-stone of humanity, to such a point, that to blot out thy name out of the world would be in very truth to shake its very foundations.'[[2]] John Stuart Mill, who tells us of himself: 'I never lost faith, for I never had it,' proclaims at the end of his long life's labors: 'Whatever else may be taken from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left; a unique figure, not more unlike all his predecessors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his personal teaching. It is no use to say that Christ in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of his followers. For who among his disciples or their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee, as certainly not St. Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasy were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.'[[3]] Even so purely Deistic a critic as Abraham Kuenen declares: 'The international religion which we call Christianity was founded, not by the Apostle Paul, but by Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus whose person and whose teaching are sketched in the Synoptic Gospels with the closest approximation of truth.' 'The need of Christianity is as keen as ever. It is not for less but for more Christianity that the age cries out. Even those many who do not identify Christianity with the ecclesiastical form in which they themselves profess it, and who have no confidence that the world will necessarily conform to them—even these may be at peace. The universalism of Christianity is the sheet-anchor of their hope. A history of eighteen centuries bears mighty witness to it; and the contents of its evidence and the high significance they possess are brought into the clearest light by the comparison with other religions. We have good courage then.'[[4]] So advanced a critic and sensitively loyal a Jew as Mr. Claud Montefiore tells us: 'Some of the sayings ascribed to Jesus have sunk too deep into the human heart, or shall I say into the spiritual consciousness of civilized mankind, to make it probable that any religion which ignores or omits them will exercise a considerable influence outside its own borders. It may be that those who dream of a prophetic Judaism, which shall be as spiritual as the religion of Jesus, and even more universal than the religion of Paul, are the victims of a delusion.'[[5]] So largely naturalistic a critic as Julius Wellhausen writes of our Lord's teaching and person: 'The miraculous is impossible with man, but with God it is possible. Jesus has not only assured us of this, but he has proved it in his own person. He had indeed lost his life and saved it, he could do as he would. He had escaped the bonds of human kind and the sufferings of self-seeking nature. There is in him no trace of that eagerness for action which seeks for peace in the restlessness of its own activity. The completely super-worldly standpoint in which Jesus finds strength and love to devote himself to the world has nothing extravagant about it. He is the first to know himself, not simply in moments of emotion, but in completest restfulness, the child of God; before him no one so felt or so described himself.' 'Jesus not only prophesies the kingdom of God, but brings it out of its transcendence on to earth; he plants at least its germ. The new times already begin with him: the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead arise. Everywhere he found spaciousness for his soul, nowhere was he cramped by the little, much as he put forward the value of the great; this we should do, and not leave that undone. He was more than a prophet; in him the word had become flesh. The historic overweightedness, to which the Jews were succumbing, does not even touch him. A unit arises in the dreary mass, a man from among the rubbish which the dwarfs, the rabbis, had heaped up. He upsets the accidental, the caricature, the dead, and collects the eternally valid, the human divine, in the focus of His individuality. "Ecce homo," a divine wonder in this time and this environment.'"
Such being the view of religiously disposed persons outside of the Catholic Church regarding the New Testament teaching of Christ, it would seem easy at first sight to convince them of the Catholic doctrine by reference to the words of Christ and the Gospels, which contain explicit, if not complete testimony in behalf of the Catholic teaching. There is one difficulty in the way of this, and that is that Protestants themselves distrust the meaning of the New Testament words except in so far as it expresses their own feelings. The principle of private interpretation necessarily leads to this one-sided view. A hundred persons appeal to the one Book as an infallible expression of God's will and truth. Now, some of these infallible expressions manifestly contradict one another as Protestants interpret them. Yet the consequences of such contradictions are vital, and involve eternal life or death. Take the doctrine of baptism by water as essential to salvation, according to the reading of some Protestants; yet the Quaker, no less sincere than his Baptist neighbor, and claiming a special inward light, consciously neglects baptism, holding that the teaching of the New Testament is only meant in a spiritual sense. Equally awful in their consequences are the two contrary doctrines regarding the Eucharistic presence of Christ as declared in the New Testament, one believer drawing the conclusion that he must adore God under the veil of bread, the other equally convinced from the same Scriptures that such a view is sheer idolatry, and that there is nothing divine under the appearance of bread. This appeal to private judgment makes most Protestants sceptical if you attempt to prove to them Catholic doctrine from the New Testament; and unless you can first convince them that the Church has a greater claim to declare the sense of the Bible than any private individual, they will consider their opinion of its meaning and purpose just as good as yours.
But it is different if you appeal to the Old Testament for a confirmation of Catholic doctrine. And I would strongly urge this method for various reasons. Every Protestant will admit that the Old Testament is not only inspired and divine in its origin, but that in its historic expression, even the deutero-canonical portion, contains the application of its meaning and purpose. In other words, that God not merely gave the Israelites a law, but also shows us how He meant them to interpret that law in their lives—domestic, social, and religious. Here, therefore, we have little need, or even opportunity, for private interpretation as to God's meaning. That meaning becomes clear from the action of His people.
At the same time it is also clear and generally admitted that the Old Testament is a foreshadowing of the New Law, hence that the doctrines and practices of the Christian Church have their counterpart in the Old Law. Protestants readily agree to this, in proof of which fact I may be allowed to quote Prof. Robertson Smith:
"Christianity can never separate itself from its historical basis, or the religion of Israel; the revelation of God in Christ cannot be divorced from the earlier revelation on which our Lord built. Indeed, the history of Israel, when rightly studied, is the most real and vivid of all histories; and the proofs of God's working among His people of old may still be made, what they were in time past, one of the strongest evidences of Christianity."[[6]]
Dr. A. B. Bruce in his Apologetics, 1892, p. 325, says: "The Bible, instead of being a dead rule, to be used mechanically, with equal value set on all its parts, is rather a living organism, which, like the butterfly, passes through various transformations before arriving at its highest and final form. We should find Christ in the Old Testament as we find the butterfly in the caterpillar."[[7]]
Hence if you can show to the average intelligent Protestant that a doctrine or practice distinctively of the Catholic Church prevailed in the Jewish Church, you have established an a priori argument for its reasonableness. This applies particularly to such doctrines and practices as Protestants condemn or censure in the Catholic Church from a mere habit of not finding them in their own churches, or from some prejudice nourished by bigotry of early teachers, or by the popular literature of the anti-Catholic type. I only mention such topics as Indulgences, Confession, the Infallibility of the Pope, Celibacy of the clergy and religious, and such like. Now all these things existed in the Old Law, not so completely developed as in the Christian Church, but sufficiently pronounced to establish a motive of credibility for their existence in the Church of Christ. Thus we have the reasonableness of the practice of Confession plainly indicated in the Mosaic times: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Say to the children of Israel, when a man or woman shall have committed any of all the sins that men are wont to commit, and by negligence shall have transgressed the commandment of the Lord, and offended, they shall confess their sin, and shall restore the principal itself, and the fifth part over and above, to him against whom they have sinned" (Num. v. 6-7; also 13-14). The Infallibility of the Pope finds its perfect counterpart in the oracular responses given by the Jewish high-priest when he wore the Urim and Thummim in his breastplate, which covers the precise ground of Papal decisions regarding faith and morals, the breastplate being called "the rational of judgment, doctrine, and truth" (See Exod. xxviii. 30; Levit. viii. 8; Num. xxvii. 21; Deut. xxxiii. 8, etc.).
As to the practice of virginity, we know that it existed among the Jews, as an exceptional condition; but as such it had the sanction of God. Thus the Prophet Jeremias receives the command of virginity from Jehovah directly: "And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Thou shalt not take thee a wife; neither shalt thou have sons and daughters in this place" (Jer. xvi. 2).
Thus practical arguments, of which I can here only indicate a few, may be found for each and all of the usages of the Catholic Church. And any censure of the latter will cast its reflection upon the Jewish dispensation, of which God was Himself the Author and Guardian. For if God sanctioned ceremonies in worship, and infallibility in the high-priest, and virginity in the Prophet whom He selects for a special mission, and confession, with penance and the obligation of restitution, why should Protestants think it so strange to find us practise the same things which have the seal of divine approbation!