THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE BIBLE.

BY MGR. SETON.

Bible is the name now given to the sacred books of the Jews and Christians. Independently of all considerations of its moral and religious advantages, we believe that no book has conduced more than the Bible to the intellectual advancement of the human race; we believe that no book has been to so many and so abundantly wealth in poverty, liberty in bondage, health in sickness, society in solitude; and as a divinely inspired work, such as the testimony of the Jewish nation for the greater part of it, and the tradition of the Christian Church for the whole of it, declares it to be, it claims our sincerest homage. The relations of the church to these Scriptures of the Old and New Testament form an important part of dogmatic theology and an interesting portion of ecclesiastical history. They have, also, been the occasion of religious differences in the Christian body; for as that wise Englishman, John Selden, said in his Table Talk two centuries and a half ago, "'Tis a great question how we know Scripture to be Scripture, whether by the church, or by man's private judgment." We shall not discuss purely controversial matters, but limit ourselves to an introductory statement of facts and to a brief consideration of the Canon, the Inspiration, and the Vulgate edition of Scripture.

The church is a living society commissioned by Jesus Christ to preserve the Word of God pure and unchanged. This revealed Word of God is contained partly in the Holy Scriptures and partly in Tradition. The former is called the Written Word of God. Writing - not necessarily indeed on paper, but, as often found, on more durable materials, such as clay or brick tablets, stone slabs and cylinders and metal plates - being the art of fixing thoughts in an intelligible and lasting shape, so as to hand them down to other generations and thus perpetuate historical records, there is a special congruity that the Almighty, from whose instructions not only original spoken, but probably also written, language was derived, should have put his Divine Revelations in writing through the instrumentality of chosen men; and as the human race is originally one, we think that the fact that Scriptures of some sort claiming to be inspired are found in all the civilized nations of the past, shows that such conceptions, although outside of the orthodox line of tradition, are derived from the primitive unity and religion of the human family.

This large volume of writings, possessed by the church, may be described as a collection of Holy Writ composed under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and acknowledged by the faithful to be the Word of God.

Our Lord and his personal followers received the Jewish sacred books with the same reverence as the Jews themselves did, and gave them the title, then in general use, of "The Scriptures." After an interval of time there came a change; for some of the apostles and disciples of the Redeemer wrote books possessing sacred authority. Their writings were quoted within the church with the same formulas which had been used before to introduce citations from the Law and the Prophets which constituted collectively the hieratic Hebrew books. The writings of Christian origin were at first styled "Scriptures of the New Covenant." In the fourth century Saint John Chrysostom and succeeding writers used the word Bible for the entire collection contained in the Old and New Testament. The authority of the sacred Scriptures, although, of course, very great in the church, is not of itself supreme and paramount, being only a part of the revealed Word of God and subject in its interpretation and understanding to the controlling influence of the spoken Word of God commonly called Tradition. The church teaches that the sacred Scriptures are the written Word of God and that he is their Author, and consequently she receives them with piety and reverence. This gives a distinct character to the Bible which no other book possesses, for of no mere human composition, however excellent, can it ever be said that it comes directly from God. The church also maintains that it belongs to her and to her alone-to determine the true sense of the Scriptures and that they cannot be rightly interpreted contrary to her decision : because she claims to be, and is, the living, unerring authority to whom--and not to those who expound the Scriptures by the light of private judgmentinfallibility was promised and given. Her teaching is the Rule of Faith, since she is a visible, perpetual and universal organization, possessed of legislative, executive and judicial functions. She is historically independ ent of the Holy Scriptures, some parts thereof being anterior and other parts subsequent to her own existence, but receives, safeguards and preserves them as her most sacred deposit: somewhat as, to use a comparison taken from our civil polity, the government of the United States, in its three coördinate branches, venerates, interprets and executes the American Constitu

tion.

The Scriptures, then, being one of the sources of Christian doctrine, were eagerly studied and explained from the first age of the church. There were libraries under clerical patronage in many parts of the Roman Empire even during the era of persecutions, and the place of honor therein was always attributed to the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament and to the Commentaries thereon, which was one of the principal departments of Christian literature. Unfortunately most of these more ancient exegetical treatises have perished through accident or design, the destruction of sacred books of whatever description belonging to the Christians being one of the distinctive aims of the general persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. Christian schools were also established in the very first age of the church

that of Alexandria, which some believe to have been founded by Saint Mark, being the most famous of them--in which the science of hermeneutics, or the art of interpreting the Scriptures, was taught and cultivated long before the rules of biblical interpretation were determined and committed to writing. One of the duties incumbent upon the pastors of the church, in the conduct of public worship, has ever been the reading of the Scriptures with an explanation of what was read or an exhortation derived from it. During the Middle Ages, owing to the lack of those aids and appliances— such, especially, as archæology and comparative philology-learned and scientific, as contrasted with scholastic and devotional interpretation of the Holy Scripture, although never quite neglected, occupied relatively only a small share in the studies of those times. Nevertheless, the one course of learning which exceeded in importance all other courses, was the study of the Scriptures; so that it is impossible to read the works of mediæval scholars without perceiving how thoroughly they were acquainted with the letter and imbued with the spirit of Holy Writ. We may truly say that the Scriptures were the classics of the monks and their pupils; but the students of magic and of the natural sciences disdained them, hence Chaucer, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, describing the Doctour of Phisike, tells us that "his studie was but litel on the Bible." The celebrated Englishman, friar Roger Bacon, earnestly recommended to his contemporaries the critical study of the Scriptures in their original language, and a strong impulse was given to these studies when, in the year 1311, the Council of Vienne ordered that teachers of Hebrew, Chaldaic and Arabic should be appointed in the universities. The same studies were still further promoted when a knowledge of Greek was spread in the West after the fall of Constantinople, A. D. 1453, and the invention of printing-"the primogenial fruit of the press," as it has been called, being a Bible--rendered books cheaper and more numerous. At a later period the Council of Trent ordained that lectureships of sacred Scriptures, where not already founded, were to be established in cathedral and collegiate churches and in the monasteries of monks, and asked the public authorities to endow such lectureships--"so honorable and the most necessary of all"-in colleges in which they had not yet been instituted. "That the heavenly treasure of the sacred books, which the Holy Ghost has with the greatest liberality delivered unto men, may not lie neglected." (Session V. on Reformation, Ch. 1.)

The church ardently supports all efforts for a deeper study and a profounder knowledge of the Scriptures, nor does she interfere with the interpretation of the sacred text when it is undertaken with, at least an implied, subordination to the higher law. Catholic commentators of the Bible have been almost numberless; nor have they ever been restricted to a servile repetition of such interpretations as may already have been given; they may differ even from the greatest and most orthodox of their predecessors, only they are not at liberty to attach to Scripture a meaning in conflict with the

unanimous consent of the Fathers or a doctrinal decision of the church, according to the emphatic declaration of the Council of Trent held in the year 1546: "No one, relying on his own knowledge, shall presume to interpret Scripture, in matters of faith and morals relating to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the sacred Scripture to his own senses contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church -who is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures-hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers." The Catholic principles as to the general use of the Bible may be deduced from this Tridentine decree which was particularly directed against those irreverent and sometimes blasphemous expounders of Holy Writ whom the Council qualifies as "petulant spirits." According to our view the Bible does not contain the whole of revealed truth, nor is it necessary for every Christian to read and understand it. The church existed as an organized society, having powers from her divine Founder to teach all nations, before the Scriptures as a whole existed, and before there was question or dispute about any part of the Scriptures.

Only seven of the apostles and disciples of our Lord left anything written, and when Saint Luke composed the Acts there were already many local churches governed by their own pastors; and Saint Paul had commended the Romans, saying, “Your faith is spoken of in the whole world" (Rom. i. 8), forty years before the last book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse or Revelations of Saint John, were committed to writing. Some ten generations of Christians lived and died before that collection of sacred books called the Bible was universally known and received. Parts of this collection are unsuited for popular reading; hence the practice and discipline of the church with respect to the indiscriminate reading of the Scriptures have varied with the circumstances of person, time and place. In the early ages they were read by all, clergy and laity, and the Fathers encouraged such reading, although they also insisted on the obscurity of part of the sacred text and on the humility and purity of mind with which it should be approached, some things therein being hard to understand and liable to be wrested by the unstable and the unlearned to their own destruction (comp. 2 Peter, iii. 16), so that the divine assistance was usually invoked before reading the inspired writings, and a short prayer to this effect will be found in almost every copy of the Bible used by Catholics. We cannot, however, too strongly insist that the private reading of the Scriptures was never held to be obligatory on the faithful, although provision was early made for the public reading of the Scriptures by instituting the minor order of lector or reader and embodying so much of the Scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, in the liturgy. Special dangers appearing during the Middle Ages from corrupt translations and from the error of those who called upon the laity to judge the ministers of religion and the dogmas of the church by their own interpretation of Scripture, the evil was