Occasional sermons and lectures

Contents

PAGE

I. — The Christian family i

II. — Cornelius Heeney 13

I. Delivered in the CJiureh of the Trans figtiration

I TROPOSE speaking to you this evening, my friends, on the Bible; or, rather, I would explain to you the position of the Catholic Church with regard to that sacred volume. And, first of all, I must disclaim all intention of being, or of seeming to be, controversial. I shall simply lay before you some plain facts, and from these you can draw your own conclusions.

The Bible is a book which contains truths revealed by God. It is divided into two parts, the Old Testament and the New. The former treats of the laws, religion, and morals of the pre-Christian period of this world's history. The latter regards the teachings of Christ, and the code of morals to be observed under his dispensation. We shall confine ourselves chiefly to the New Testament and its relations to the Catholic Church. We shall therefore have to keep before our minds two great things — viz., the Church and the Bible : the living voice of Christ and the Written Word of the sacred page.

The Lord Christ established a Church on earth. He established it by his living voice, his personal teaching. He preached and taught by word of mouth. He told his poor disciples to go and do likewise — to preach to all nations. When he ascended into heaven the disciples went forth to do as he bade them; and multitudes of people in distant lands were converted to Christianity before one

THE BIBLE.

word was written of the book which we call the Bible, the New Testament.

Our divine Lord is not recorded to have written a line of Scripture. Nor did he ever command his apostles to write. When he sent them on their apostolic mission he said to them : Go, teach all nations. Preach the gospel to every creature. He that heareth you, heareth me." He did not say, " Go, write my history, my teachings, and the book will be the only rule of faith for all mankind.'* No. Of the twelve apostles only five, and of the seventy-two disciples and all the early followers of our Lord only three, have left us any of their sacred writings. Only two of the twelve apostles thought it advisable to write a gospel — Mark and Luke not being apostles, not even counted among the disciples of our Saviour. Matthew and Mark were five years preaching before they wrote a line of their gospels. Luke wrote his gospel twenty-four years after our Lord's ascension ; John, sixty years after the ascension. The Epistles were not written until many years after the ascension; some of them thirty years after that event. The entire New Testament did not exist until one hundred years after the ascension, and then its parts were scattered here and there, and were not collectively known to any of the churches. How could it be otherwise, when we know that the gospels and epistles were addressed not to the entire Christian people, but to particular persons or particular churches ? They were written on the occasion of some emergency, when some abuse was to be corrected in some particular church, or when special rules of conduct were to be laid down, just as bishops write pastorals to-day. We have no record anywhere that the disciples were commanded by God to write these epistles. Jesus certainly did not so command them; and hence we read only the words, But they, going iQi\Jti^ preached every-

THE BIBLE.

where, the Lord co-operating with them." From all this it must not be supposed that the Catholic Church wishes to take away from the Bible its importance and its merits. God forbid ! We shall soon show you how the Church loved and revered the Bible, preserved it, and copied and adorned it in the days of storm and blood and sacrilege; and that, without the fostering care of that same Church, it is doubtful whether the sacred volume would be in existence to-day.

If, then, the Bible is the rule of faith, and the only rule of faith, as the followers of the Reformation doctrine would have us believe; if from the Bible, and from the Bible only, we take that faith without which we can not be saved — what, I ask, became of those thousands of early Christians who had no Bible to guide them ? It is a historical fact, beyond the shadow of doubt or controversy, that a large portion of human society had become Christian before the book was heard of. Are we to suppose that, as they lived without the Bible, without the indispensable book, they were all deprived of eternal bliss beyond the grave? Forbid it. Almighty God! The darkest tenets of Calvin are bright compared to such a doctrine. Tertullian, who lived in the second century, tells us that in his time the cities, castles, towns, and assemblies — yea, the very camps, the palaces, and the senate — were filled with Christians. And yet in his time the Scriptures were only beginning to be gathered together. Justin Martyr, who lived at the same time, writes, "There is not one race of men, barbarian or Greek — nay, of those who live in wagons, or who are nomads, or shepherds in tents — among whom prayers and eucharists are not offered to the Father and Maker of the universe, through the name of the crucified Jesus." And this though the whole New Testament had not yet been gathered together. Thus,

THE BIBLE.

my dear friends, I candidly tell you — and I have the uncontroverted history of the early ages on my side — that not only did the Church exist before the Bible, but that the Church had grown to goodly proportions, had her virgins, her confessors, and her glorious army of martyrs before the great book had been put between its covers.

Now, some one may not yet see — may yet ask — What has all this to do with the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Scriptures ? I reply, It has everything to do with it. It indicates the relation between the Church and the book. That living voice, which founded a Church before the book had been put together, not only taught with the same authority after the book had been put together as it had taught before^ but became its interpreter and its guarantee. It was that very Church that told the world what was true Scripture and what was not, what was inspired and what was not. The existence of the Church, therefore, was altogether independent of the book ; and if the sacred Scriptures were lost to-morrow, the Church would be no worse off than were those Christians who lived and died before the Scriptures were written at all.

What assurance have we that the book we possess is the mspj^ed^Nord of God ? May it not contain more than the word of God ? or does it contain all the word of God ? We are forced in honesty to go back to the time when these Scriptures were pronounced authentic and inspired. We must go av/ay back to the same authority that Luther had to fall back on for the inspiration and authenticity of that same volume. We must say the Catholic Church in the fourth century taught us, when in the third Council of Carthage it solemnly declared what books were canonical and what apocryphal. Thus it is the Catholic Church, and it alone, can stand up and tell to all the sects on earth

THE BIBLE.

what is Scripture and what is not. But Luther, poor, proud, weak son of humanity, threw overboard a part of this sacred volume — the Epistle of St. James, which he called *'a letter of straw." He rejected this epistle because it taught that good works as well as faith were necessary for salvation. He thought, or tried to think, or pretended to think, that, no matter what one's deeds were, good or bad, faith of itself could secure salvation. Therefore it was that with an easier conscience he broke his vows of chastity and committed the double sacrilege of taking a nun for his wife. Exemplary apostle of Reformation !

If the Catholic Church in the fourth century declared, as the Protestant Church of the last three centuries has declared, that the Bible, and the Bible only, was the true depository of faith, and that nobody could be saved without it, the entire Christian world would have laughed outright. For the Bible was unknown to the great mass of the people. Not one in a thousand could read. The art of printing was not dreamed of. Men, Christian men, who feared God and kept his law, and partook of the eucharistic Supper, never saw and perhaps never heard of such a thing as a Bible. They lived and died and went to heaven innocent of the written law, even as many an old, illiterate, but pious and dutiful man or woman of our own day. Are our own Celtic grandfathers and grandmothers all lost to God eternally because, forsooth, they closed their eyes forever without having seen a Bible ?

Here, then, we can put our finger on the very spot where the Catholic Church and the various forms of Protestantism split and part company. While the latter read the book to gather religion from it, we read it to illustrate, to strengthen, and to make deeper the religion

THE BIBLE.

which we already hold from the teaching Church of God. We employ it to confirm and witness to that distinct faith which has been handed down by the living voice which spoke and taught with the selfsame authority before the book existed, as it has done since the book has become the property of all Christians.

As the second, third, and fourth centuries were rolling by, the Church was securing all her talent to collate and translate the Scriptures — to study the Hebrew, Greek, and Syro-Chaldaic versions — and to present the whole New Testament in the one great Latin tongue to the entire Christian world. And this she did in the face of fierce persecution, at a time when Eastern Mohammedanism and ruthless vandalism had sworn to destroy the sacred book and the religion which fostered it. The Church all the while guarded the sacred volume as the apple of her eye ; watched, protected, and cherished it ; saved it from the rage of an Attila, from the fury of an Alaric — " bearing it, like a stout swimmer, aloft in her hand over the troublous waters of persecution, until she reached in safety the shores of civilization, where in due time she handed it over to the disciples of Guttenberg the printer, to be multiplied and diffused beyond the possibility of extinction."

Oh, what shall we say of the monks who spent their lives in copying and adorning the Scriptures ? Indeed, without this resource it is hard to see how the sacred volume could have been spared to us. For learning, extinguished all over the world, lived only within the sacred precincts of the convent — in the ark of the monastic institution. Some monks spent their whole lives in the transcription of the Bible. And, not content with a bare transcript, they loved to embellish the sacred page with cunning devices, with illumination and miniature which at

THE BIBLE.

the present day excite the wonder and challenge the rivalry of artists. So transcendent was their work, that Gerbert says, It seemed to be the product not of hu7?ian but of angelic hands."

And so affairs progressed with the Bible until the glorious art of printing was invented. Here I am reminded of an incident which occurred to myself only a short time ago; and it was this very incident, by the way, which suggested my selecting thi^ subject for to-night: A gentleman, apparently intelligent, accosted me on the street one evening as we were walking in the same direction from the ferry. In the course of a conversation on the Bible, he said he was startled to hear from me that Luther's version was not the first ever printed, as he thought the Catholic Church was afraid to diffuse the Bible after the invention of printing. He added that such was the accepted belief of his co-religionists. I told him that no fewer than fifty-six distinct editions of the Scriptures had appeared on the continent of Europe before Luther's. Of these editions, twenty-one were published in German; one in Spanish; four in French; twenty-one in Italian; five in Flemish; and four in Bohemian. Printing was no sooner invented than Catholic Bibles rolled out from the various presses with a rapidity that is truly amazing.

The Catholic Church afraid of the Bible! Why, what was to hinder the Church from crushing the Bible out of existence in the early ages ? On the contrary, as early as the fourth century Pope Damasus commanded a new and complete translation of the Scriptures to be made into the Latin language ; not into the language of a circumscribed region, but into the language which was then the living tongue of the civilized world. St. Jerome, the most learned Hebrew scholar of his age, was set to the work of prepar-

THE BIBLE.

ing the great Vulgate — i. e., the popular edition of the Bible, the edition best known to the ages that followed. And as new languages sprang up with the formation of new peoples new translations were made into them. The Venerable Bede, who lived in the eighth century, translated the Bible into Saxon, which was then the language of England. There was an English version of the Scriptures bygood and godly people with devotion and soberness well and reverently red." Open any Catholic Bible, and you will find on one of the first pages a letter from some Pope recommending the pious reading of the volume. Open the great Haydock Bible, printed in this country, and you will find a letter from every bishop in the United States indorsing it, and expressing a hope that it will be diffused among their flocks. It is only the other day that an eminent Protestant layman expressed surprise on- seeing, in the Catholic publication shops of Barclay Street, whole shelves upon shelves laden with Bibles in every size and print and style of binding. Does the Church fear the diffusion of the Bible ?

Some there are, nevertheless, who object, and say the Church withholds the Bible from the people. Now, there is in this assertion an infinitesimal quantity of truth w^ith a very large quantity of error. The objection itself, however, we shall answer in a future discourse, simply adding to-night, in the words of St. Peter (II Epistle, iii, i6), that there are in the Scriptures ''certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest to their own destruction." The Jewish people were not allowed to read the Scriptures until after their thirtieth year. The Protestant Bishop Tillotson forbade his children the promiscuous reading of the Bible.

Of other particulars in this matter — too numerous and too important to be treated of in a hurried manner — we

THE BIBLE.

shall speak in a future address. For to-night let us be satisfied with a few facts: (i) That the old, thoughtful Catholic Church of Christ is the interpreter of the Word of God; (2) that she loves that Word, and has preserved it from ruin and decay ; but that (3) outside that Word she has a living tradition to guide the children of God, for many things also Jesus did and said ''that are not written in this book."

In conclusion, we say we love the Bible because it is God's book. It tells us of the great men of old. Then let us read with love the sacred Word of God. It is the choicest food of the soul, the bread of life, the tree of true knowledge, of which all who taste shall be wise unto salvation.

THE BIBLE.