The air of satisfaction with which he uttered these words, the calmness and unaffected gravity he manifested, all announced he had indeed become a new man.
“In a year he will be an eminent Christian!” said Victor, as Louis disappeared.
He was not mistaken.
TO BE CONTINUED.
CONCILIAR DECREES ON THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.
FROM THE ETUDES RELIGIEUSES.
The church has been commissioned to teach all mankind. It is by preaching she fulfils this great work. But to aid her in this divine mission, her Founder has furnished her with books written under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, which contain the very word of God graven in ineffaceable characters. So precious a treasure has always been preserved by the church with the respect it merits. Her doctors have carefully weighed every word of these holy books; they have taken pleasure in developing the different significations; and their commentaries form the finest monuments of Christian literature. There, as in a well-furnished arsenal, they have sought spiritual arms in their warfare against the enemies of the faith, and they have defended the Bible with unequalled zeal against all attacks and alterations by heretics. The Scriptures have been the object of the fury of persecutors, and more than one hero has shed his blood to defend them from the insults of the unbeliever, and thereby had his name inscribed on the glorious roll of the martyrology.
Protestantism, at its very birth, was desirous of profiting by this respect of the Christian world. It affected an ardent zeal for the sacred books, and, carrying its veneration beyond reasonable limits, maintained that the Bible is the only rule of faith. But its very exaggerations, by a law of Providence, have led it to the opposite extreme. Three centuries have hardly elapsed, and the followers of those who acknowledged no other rule of faith than the Bible, gradually led to the verge of rationalism, accord a merely human authority to the sacred volume.