The answer is an easy one. The commandment which the Catholic Church received from Christ was, "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel," not "Go, distribute Bibles;" and the commandment which she received she has obeyed. The energies, the money, which Protestants would have expended in printing and circulating translations of the Scriptures, she has expended in founding churches, hospitals, convents, and seminaries, and in providing the whole world with missionaries, by whose labors, nations, to whom the Bible could have no access, have been subjugated to the faith. She recognizes but one means for the conversion of mankind, and that is, the voice of the living teacher; and never can she substitute another in its stead.
Moreover, God gave the sacred books of the Old Testament to his own Israel, not to heathens. Our Lord, through his apostles, bestowed on Christians, not on pagans, the inestimable treasures of the New. The Bible is for those who believe already, for the "man of God," "that he may be thoroughly furnished unto all good works," not for the infidel and heathen, who perhaps read it, but are infidels and heathens still. Such is the will of God, as the Catholic Church has received the same, and the facts of history prove that she is right. For when Protestantism arose, its great aim was to spread the Bible. Its history has been the history of Bible-circulation, and in the Bible Society has culminated the Reformation. These societies have labored bravely,0. We read that previous to the year 1834, a single society in Germany had distributed nearly 3,000,000 copies of the entire Bible, and 2,000,000 more of the New Testament. That by another society in Great Britain, over 35,000,000 copies of the Bible, or New Testament, had been put into circulation before 1859; and that another in New York publishes every year more than 250,000 Bibles, and twice that number of New Testaments, and parts of Scripture. But what are the results? Where are the nations which have been added to the Christian fold? Where are the signs of well-developed and intelligent piety in the great Protestant empires of the age? Have not their own writers told us that the boundaries of Protestantism are the same to-day that they were when Luther left it—that no new nations have been added to its numbers, and, with the exception of the Anglo-Saxon portion of this continent, that no new territory has been subjected to its sway; that for the heathen it has done comparatively nothing, and for the irreligious of its own lands but little more? Look at the United States, for instance, all of whose people come of good Christian stock. The census of 1860 fixes the population at over 30,000,000, while a census of professing Christians, of all Protestant denominations, estimates their number at less than 6,000,000. Is the proportion greater in Germany or in England? And what a comment is this upon the boast of these societies, that they evangelize the world, and that the work they are performing is the work of God!
And has the Catholic Church by preaching done no better? While men yet lived who heard the voice of Luther, the Catholic preachers of Europe had won back to the church more than one half of what she lost by the Reformation. In a few years longer the continent of South America, the Canadas, and thousands of the inhabitants of India, China, and Japan, were sheltered in her bosom. Another century, and again the Catholic faith was blossoming in England, and springing green and vigorous from the soil of our own land. To-day where is the country in which she is not strong and valorous, strong in the blood of her martyrs, valorous in the surety of her victory?
Does history leave a doubt upon the mind as to the true means of Christian labor? Or who can wonder that the Catholic Church refuses to substitute the human means for the divine, or even to waste her energies and money on what experience has shown to be so fruitless? She has the Bible for her children. She places it within the reach of all. Those who are able, can buy it for themselves. To those who are unable to buy, she gives it when they ask. But never has she taken pains to strew the pure pearls of written revelation underneath the feet of infidels and heathen—mindful that, as the Lord warned her, "they will turn again and rend you."
In conclusion, let us ask of every Christian reader a single favor more. It is, that he will candidly examine the best authorities upon this important subject; that he will carefully reflect upon the reasons we have offered, and decide for himself the great questions which we have tried to answer. And when he finds, as he surely will, that the Catholic Church does not condemn the Bible, or forbid her people to circulate and read it—that she has never prohibited or burned a Bible which she did not know to be erroneous and liable to lead her children into error—that she has never cast her lot in with the Bible society, simply because she follows the command of Christ—let him undo the evil he, perhaps, has done, in stating that concerning her which he now knows is false, and manfully assert the truth he now has learned, thus doing justice to the church of God.
[Footnote 207(No reference *): Macaulay's Misc., art. Ranke's History of the Popes.]