your friends, to pronounce upon it, after I shall have stated the following facts: 1st, that St. Paul himself wrote an epistle, which forms part of the liturgy of all Christian churches, to these very Romanists, in the Greek language, though they themselves made use of the Latin:* 2dly, that the Jews, after they had exchanged their original Hebrew for the Chaldaic tongue, during the Babylonish captivity, continued to perform their liturgy in the former language, though the vulgar did not understand itt and that our Saviour Christ, as well as his apostles, and other devout friends, attended this service in the temple, and the Synagogue, without ever censuring it: 3dly, that the Greek churches, in general, no less than the Latin Church, retain their original pure Greek tongue in their liturgy, though the common people have forgotten it, and adopted different barbarous dialects instead of it: 4thly, that Patriarch Luther maintained, against Carlostad, that the language of public worship was a matter of indifference. Hence, his disciples professed, in their Augsburg Confession, to retain the Latin language in certain parts of their service. Lastly, that when the Establishment endeavored, under Elizabeth, and afterwards under Charles I. to force their liturgy upon the Irish Catholics, it was not thought necessary to translate it into Irish, but it was constantly read in English, of which the natives did not understand a word: thus "furnishing the papists with an excellent argument against themselves," as Dr. Heylin observes.§ The bishop has next a long letter on what he calls the prohibition of the Scriptures, by the Romanists; in which he confuses and disguises the subjects he treats of, to beguile and inflame ignorant readers. I have treated this matter, at some length, in a former letter, and therefore shall be brief in what I write upon it in this but what I do write shall be explicit and clear. It is a wicked calumny then, that the Catholic Church undervalues the Holy Scriptures, or prohibits the use of them. On the contrary, it is she that has religiously preserved them, as the inspired word of God, and his invaluable gift to man, during these eighteen centuries: it is she alone that can and does vouch for their authenticity, their purity, and their inspiration. But then, she knows that there is an unwritten word of God, called tradition, as well as a written word, the Scriptures; that the former is the evidence for the authority of the latter, and that when nations had been converted, and churches formed by the unwritten word, the authority of this was nowise abrogated + Walton's Polyglot Proleg. Hey, &c. p. 575. *St. Jerom, Epist. 123. Mosheim, by Maclaine, vol. ii. § Ward has successfully ridiculed this attempt in his England's Reformation, Canto II. by the inspired epistles and gospels, which the apostles and evangelists occasionally sent to such nations or churches. In short, both these words together form the Catholic rule of faith. On the other hand, the church, consisting, according to its more general division, of two distinct classes, the pastors and their flocks, the preachers and their hearers; each has his particular duties in the point under consideration, as well as in other respects. The pastors are bound to study the rule of faith in both its parts, with unwearied application, to be enabled to acquit themselves of the first of all their duties, that of preaching the gospel to their people.* Hence St. Ambrose calls the sacred Scripture the Sacerdotal Book, and the Council of Cologne orders that it should "never be out of the hands of ecclesiastics." In fact, the Catholic clergy must, and do employ no small portion of their time, every day, in reading different portions of Holy Writ. But no such obligation is generally incumbent on the flock, that is, on the laity; it is sufficient for them to hear the word of God from those whom God has appointed to announce and to explain it to them, whether by sermons, or catechisms, or other good books, or in the tribunal of penance. Thus, it is not the bounden duty of all good subjects to read and study the laws of their country: it is sufficient for them to hear and to submit to the decisions of the judges, and other legal officers, pronouncing upon them; and, by the same rule, the latter would be inexcusable if they did not make the law and constitution their constant study, in order to decide right. Still, however, the Catholic Church never did prohibit the reading of the Scriptures to the laity: she only required, by way of preparation for this most difficult and important study, that they should have received so much education as would enable them to read the sacred books in their original languages, or in that ancient and venerable Latin version, the fidelity of which she guarantees to them; or in case they were desirous of reading it in a modern tongue, that they should be furnished with some attestation of their piety and docility, in order to prevent their turning this salutary food of souls into a deadly poison, as, it is universally confessed, so many thousands constantly have done. At present, however, the chief pastors have everywhere relaxed these disciplinary rules; and vulgar translations of the whole Seripture are upon sale, and open to every one, in Italy itself, with the express approbation of the Roman pontiff. In these islands, we have an English version of the Bible in folio, in quarto, and in octavo forms, against which our opponents have no other objection to make, except that it is too literal,† that is, * Trid. Sess. v. cap. 2. Gess. xxv. cap. 4. + See the Bishop of Lincoln's Elements of Theol. vol. ii. p. 10. too faithful. But Dr. Porteus professes not to admit of any restriction whatever, "on the reading of what heaven hath revealed, with respect to any part of mankind." No doubt, the revealed truths themselves are to be made known as much as possible to all mankind; but it does not follow from hence, that all mankind are to read the Scriptures: there are passages in them, which, I am confident, his lordship would not wish his daughters to peruse; and which, in fact, were prohibited to the Jews till they had attained the age of thirty.* Again, as Lord Clarendon, Mr. Grey, Dr. Hey, &c., agree, that the misapplication of Scripture was the cause of the destruction of church and state, and of the murder of the king in the grand rebellion; and as he must be sensible, from his own observation, that the same cause exposed the nation to the same calamities in the Protestant riots of 1780, I am confident the bishop, as a Christian, no less than as a British subject, would have taken the Bible out of the hands of Hugh Peters, Oliver Cromwell, Lord George Gordon, and their respective crews, if this had been in his power. I will affirm the same, with respect to Count Emanuel Swedenborg, the founder of the modern sect of New Jerusalemites, who taught that no one had understood the Scriptures, till the sense of them was revealed to him; as also with respect to Joanna Southcote, foundress of a still more modern sect, and who, I believe, tormented the bishop himself with her rhapsodies, in order to persuade him that she was the woman of Genesis, destined to crush the serpent's head, and the woman of the Revelations, clothed with the sun, and crowned with twelve stars. Nay, I greatly deceive myself if the prelate would not be glad to take away every hot-brained dissenter's Bible, who employs it in persuading the people that the Church of England is a rag of Popery, and a spawn of the whore of Babylon. In short, whatever Dr. Porteus may choose to say of an unrestricted perusal and interpretation of the Scriptures, with respect to all sorts of persons, it is certain, that many of the wisest and most learned divines of his church have lamented this as one of her greatest misfortunes. I will quote the words of one of them. "Aristarchus of old, could hardly find seven wise men in all Greece; but amongst us, it is difficult to find the same number of ignorant persons. They are all doctors and divinely inspired. There is not a fanatic or a mountebank, from the lowest class of the people, who does not vent his dreams, for the word of God. The bottomless pit seems to be opened, and there come out of it locusts with stings; a swarm of sectaries and * St. Jerom in Proem. to Ezech. St. Greg. Naz. de Moderand. Disp. heretics, who have renewed all the heresies of former ages, and added to them numerous and monstrous errors of their own.* Since the above was written, the Bibliomania, or rage for the letter of the Bible, has been carried, in this country, to the utmost possible length, by persons of almost every description, Christians and infidels; Trinitarians, who worship God in three persons, and Unitarians, who hold such worship to be idolatrous; Pædobaptists, who believe they become Christians by baptism; Anabaptists, who plunge such Christians into the water, as mere pagans; and Quakers, who ridicule all baptism, except that of their own imagination; Arminian Methodists, who believe themselves to have been justified without repentance, and Antinomian Methodists, who maintain that they shall be saved without keeping the laws either of God or man; Churchmen, who glory in having preserved the whole orders, and part of the missal and ritual of the Catholics; and the countless sects of dissenters, who join in condemning these things as antichristian Popery. All these have forgotten, for a long time, their characteristical tenets, and united in enforcing the reading of the Bible as the only thing necessary! The Bible societies are content that all these contending religionists should affix whatever meaning they please to the Bible, provided only they read the text of the Bible! Nay, they are satisfied if they can but get the Hindoo worshippers of Juggernaut, the Thibet adorers of the Grand Lama, and the Taboo cannibals of the Pacific Ocean, to do the same thing; vainly fancying that this lecture will reform the vicious, reclaim the erroneous, and convert the pagans. In the mean time, the experience of fourteen years proves, that theft, forgery, robbery, murder, suicide, and other crimes go on increasing with the most alarming rapidity; that every sect clings to its original errors, that not one pagan is converted to Christianity, nor one Irish Catholic persuaded to exchange his faith for a Bible book. When will these Bible enthusiasts comprehend what learned and wise Christians of every age have known and taught, that the word of God consists not in the letter of Scripture, but in the meaning of it! Hence it follows, that a Catholic child, who is grounded in his short but comprehensive First Catechism, so called, knows more of the revealed word of God, than a Methodist preacher does, who has read the whole Bible ten times over. The sentiment expressed above is not only that of St. Jerom† and other Catholic writers, but also of the learned Protestant bishop whom I have already quoted. He says, "The word of God does not consist in mere + Cap. I. ad Galat. * Walton's Polyglot Prolegom. letters, but in the sense of it, which no one can better interpret than the true church, to which Christ committed this sacred deposit.' ”*—I am, &c. JOHN MILNER. LETTER XLVIII.-TO JAMES BROWN, JUN., ESQ. ON VARIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS. DEAR SIR THE learned prelate, who is celebrated for having concentrated the five sermons of his patron, Archbishop Secker, and the more diffusive declamation of Primate Tillotson against Popery, having gone through his regular charges on this topic, tries, in the end, to overwhelm the Catholic cause, with an accumulation of petty, or, at least, secondary objections, in a chapter which he entitles, Various Corruptions and Superstitions of the Church of Rome. The first of these is, that Catholics "equal the apochryphal with the canonical books" of Scripture; to which I answer, that the same authority, namely, the authority of the Catholic Church, in the fifth century, which decided on the canonical character of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Revelations, and five other books of the New Testament, on the character of which, till that time, the fathers and ecclesiastical writers were not agreed, decided also on the canonicity of the books of Tobias, Judith, and five other books of the Old Testament, being those which the prelate alludes to as apochryphal. If the church of the fifth century deserves to be heard in one part of her testimony, she evidently deserves to be heard in the other part. His second objection is, that "the Romish Church," as he calls the Catholic Church, has made "a modern addition of five new sacraments to the two appointed by Christ; making also the priest's intention necessary to the benefit of them." I have, in the course of these letters, vindicated the divine institution of these five sacraments, and have shown that they are acknowledged to be sacraments, no less than the other two, by the Nestorian and Eutychian heretics, &c., who separated from the church almost fourteen hundred years ago, and, in short, by all the Christian congregations of the world, except a comparatively few modern ones, called Protestants, in the north of Europe. Is it from ignorance, or wilful misrepresentation, that the Bishop of London charges "the Romish Church with the modern addition of five new sacraments?" With respect to the intention of * Walton's Proleg. |