Again, the Pope, who, as the head and mouth-piece of the Catholic Church, administers its discipline and issues orders to which every Catholic, under pain of sin, must yield obedience, has positively declared, "that the faithful should be excited to the reading of the Holy Scriptures: for these are the most abundant sources which ought to be left open to every one, to draw from them purity of morals and of doctrine;" which declaration may be found in the preface to the English Catholic Bibles now in use.
Second, her unvarying practice.
The Catholic Church, from the beginning, has provided effectual means, not only for the distribution of the Bible among her people, but also for their knowledge of the truths which it contains. One of her holy orders is that of Reader, "whose duty," as her catechism says, "is to read the Sacred Scriptures to the people in a clear and distinct voice, and to instruct them in the rudiments of faith." [Footnote 195]
[Footnote 195: Catechism. Cone. Trid. pars. ii. De Ordin.]
Again, from the beginning, it has been made the daily duty of her priests and religious persons to recite "the divine office," which consists of psalms, of readings from the Bible, and of prayers. The new revision of this office made by Gregory VII., in which its different parts were first collected into one volume, became known as the "Breviary," and is still so called. From this was translated and compiled, in great part, the "Daily Morning and Evening Prayer" of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the epistles, gospels, lessons, and psalms of which, thus borrowed, present, as is well known, so large a portion of the Holy Scriptures. Indeed, the Breviary is but the Bible, in a form adapted to devotional uses, and illustrated with pious meditations and devout prayers. Before us lies a copy, published in the year 1632, during the Huguenotic wars and persecutions. It bears the official order of the great Richelieu; and, as we turn over its leaves, we find that a large part of the whole Bible is embraced within its pages, and we perceive that as long as this book can be found in the hands of all her clergy, and is accessible to every one who seeks it, so long, within the borders of the Catholic Church at least, the Holy Scriptures will be widely circulated and intimately known.
Again, in every age, the most eminent and pious of the pastors and scholars of the Catholic Church have devoted their lives to the study and explanation of the Bible. The sermons of the first eight centuries were principally oral commentaries on the sacred text. The great libraries of valuable Christian works, which have come down to us from the primitive church, are made up of volumes directly based on Holy Scripture. Their writers are well known as men of great intellect, of unwearied zeal, of deep and humble piety. Look at this list of some of them: In the second century, Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen; in the third century, Pierius, Pamphilus, Hesychius, and Eusebius; in the fourth century, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustin, Chrysostom, and Ephrem; in the fifth century, Cyril, Theodoret, and Isidore of Pelusium; in the sixth century, Gregory the Great, Cassiodorus, Procopius, and Primasius; in the seventh century, Maximus, Isidore of Seville, Julian of Toledo, and John Damascene; in the eighth century, Venerable Bede, Alcuin, and Rabanus Maurus; in the ninth century, Christian Druthmar, Walafridus Strabo, Remigius of Auxerre, and Sedulius; in the tenth century, OEcumenius and Olympiodorus; in the eleventh century, Nicetas, Lanfranc, and Theophylact; in the twelfth century, Euthymius, Anselm, and Rupert; in the thirteenth century, the great Thomas Aquinas and Hugo de Sancto Caro; in the fourteenth century, Nicholas de Lyra, Paul of Burgos, and Gerson; in the fifteenth century, Laurentius Valla, Tostatus, Denis the Carthusian, Marsilius, and Le Fèvre: in the sixteenth century, Cornelius à Lapide, Maldonatus, and Jansen of Ghent; in the seventeenth century, Natalis Alexander and John Baptist du Hamel; in the eighteenth century, the learned Calmet, of whose work the famous Dr. Adam Clarke has written: "This is, without exception, the best comment on the sacred writings ever published, either by Catholics or Protestants." [Footnote 196]
[Footnote 196: Horne's Introduction. Vol. ii. part. iii. chap. V. sec. iii. § 3, Am. ed. 1836.]
Certainly, no age, illuminated with such lights as these, deserves to be called "dark;" no people, taught by such teachers, could ever have been ignorant. And when we remember that, as an eminent Protestant clergyman has said, "the writings of the dark ages are made of the Scriptures;" not merely, "that the writers constantly quoted the Scriptures, and appealed to them as authority on all occasions, but that they thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words and phrases of the Bible, and that they did this constantly as the natural mode of expressing themselves," (The Dark Ages. By Rev, S. R. Maidand, D.D. London, 1853;) and remember, further, that this could not be so, unless the people who wrote and those who read alike had free access to Holy Scripture both possessing the books and being permitted to circulate and use them, we shall be far enough from believing that in the Catholic Church the Bible has ever been "a hidden book," or that the doors of its rich treasure-house were ever closed to men.
Again, the efforts of the Catholic Church to preserve and perpetuate the Bible have been unceasing. As early as the fourth century, by the direction of Pope Damasus, St. Jerome entered on the work of preparing a full and perfect copy of the Scriptures. He devoted twelve years to the study of the Hebrew, Syriac, and other oriental languages. He collected at Jerusalem and in the East all the most accurate versions, both of the Old and New Testaments. From these, revised, compared, and corrected with each other, he prepared that Latin version which is commonly called the "Vulgate," and which, as all biblical critics allow, is the most perfect and complete copy of the Bible which now exists. During the period between the fourth and sixteenth centuries, every great monastery (and Europe was full of them) had its "scriptorium," or writing-chamber, in which copies of the Scriptures were constantly produced. Of the 1400 manuscripts of the New Testament which are now extant, not one was written earlier than the fourth century, or by other than Catholic hands; and Protestants themselves have no higher origin for their Scriptures than these Catholic copies, and no surer ground of reliance on their accuracy than the fidelity and learning of Catholic scholars. How easy, if the Catholic Church condemned the Bible, would it have been to neglect this multiplication of the sacred books, and to silently destroy existing copies! Yet those who depend altogether on her labors for their boasted Scripture, have said, and still will say, that she fears the Bible and would gladly banish it from men. But when the age of printing came, her efforts were redoubled. According to the popular idea, translations of the Scripture into the vulgar tongues were never made before the Reformation, or even till long after it, by Catholics. Nothing could be more false. The Bible, either wholly or in part, had been translated and published in no less than seven of the common languages of Europe, before Luther and his Reform were ever dreamed of. In the year 1466 a translation into German was printed, copies of which still exist. This translation passed through sixteen different editions at Strasburg, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, in the course of a few years, and was followed by another translation, of which three editions were published at Wittemberg in 1470, 1483, and 1490; two at Cologne in 1470 and 1480; one at Lubeck in 1494; one at Haberstadt in 1522; and one each at Mayence, at Strasburg, and at Basle, in 1517. Luther first published his translation in 1530, nine years after the Diet at Worms and twelve years after he had turned Reformer. Before his time, therefore, there were no less than twenty-seven different editions of the Bible in the German language in circulation among the people, besides almost innumerable editions in Latin, a tongue with which the clergy and the learned of that age were well acquainted. In the year 1471 a translation of the Bible into Italian was printed both at Rome and Venice, and passed through thirteen different editions before the year 1525. Two different translations into French were also published; one in 1478, which was printed in seventeen successive editions before 1546; and the other in 1512, which also passed through many editions. In 1478 a translation into Spanish was published, which was reprinted in 1515 with the express sanction of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1475, a translation into Flemish was published at Cologne, of which seven new editions were printed before 1530. In 1488, the Bible, in the Bohemian language, was printed at Prague, and again produced at Cutna in 1498, and at Venice in 1506 and 1511. An edition in Sclavonian was also published at Cracow in the first part of the same century. Add to these the different versions made in the "dark ages," and you have no less than twenty-two translations and seventy printed editions of the Holy Scriptures in the vulgar tongues of England, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Sweden, prepared by the Catholic pastors and scholars of Europe, and distributed among their people, before Luther and his Bible were ever heard of. When Protestant historians relate that this renowned Reformer never saw a Bible till he was twenty years of age, and had been a student at the university upward of two years, and depict his wonder and delight at its discovery, (Hist. Ref. D'Aubigné, vol. i. p. 131,) we hardly know whether to condemn the ignorance of the Reformer or the dishonesty of the historian, one of which must be true. Circumstances certainly seem to cast the odium of falsehood on the latter, rather than that of unparalleled stupidity upon the former.