"N—no!" answered Amabel, rather puzzled by this view of the case. "It cannot be, of course. Bert the church teaches that it is not fit to put into the hands of every one of the common people."
"The Church must consider our Lord and His apostles greatly in the wrong, then," said Mr. Wesley, smiling.
"How so?" asked Amabel, startled and shocked, but interested in spite of herself.
"Why because it is expressly told us that He preached His discourses to great multitudes, and that the common people heard Him gladly. Also the epistles were all written to the whole of the churches to which they are addressed. And if the common people heard Him gladly then, why should they not do so now? And again, you know that the Latin Bible used by the Romish Church is called the Vulgate, do you not?"
"I know that it is, but not the reason," replied Amabel.
"Because, my daughter, it was translated, by St. Jerome, into the common Latin, which was the vulgar tongue in those days of half the known world—the very tongue in which the ladies talked of household matters and the fashions of the day, and prattled with their little ones, and scolded their maidservants even as they do now. He translated the Scriptures that every one might drink freely of divine knowledge, and though his version is somewhat deficient, Hebrew being not as thoroughly studied as in later days, yet has it been a well-spring of life to thousands of thousands of devout souls now passed to their eternal rest."
"We are not to use our own judgment, but to be guided by the Church," said Amabel.
"That is what I cannot understand—I mean how we are to help using our own judgment," I ventured to remark. "As long as we heard only one side it might be easy enough, but when one is in the hearing all sorts of opinions, how are we to help judging?"
"We are to believe as the Church commands," answered Amabel.
"But why? Is it not because we judge the Church to be the only safe guide? And is not that our own judgment as much as if we came to any other conclusion? It seems to me so."