faith,"-that "excommunication being a spiritual punishment, it doth not prejudice the excommunicate in, nor deprive him of his civil rights,"—and that " God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His word, or not contained in it," are doctrines officially set forth by the Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches, and accepted by Protestant churches generally, both in Europe and America. There is this difficulty in the way of removing from the Roman Catholic church of the 19th century the responsibility for the theory and practice of persecution: the Church, whose authorities have so explicitly taught it and whose history is so full of it, must be different from what it was-that is, must be neither infallible nor unchangeable-or else the Church now must sanction and defend what the Church has openly and undeniably taught and practiced for centuries; in other words, the Roman Catholic Church is distinctly and preeminently a persecuting church. Said the London Times of January 14, 1853, in perfect correspondence with some Roman Catholic utterances : "The vengeance of Rome against heretics is measured only by her power to punish them." CHAPTER XIII. THE BIBLE. "THE BIBLE," said Chillingworth more than two centuries ago, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants." The confessions of all Protestant churches echo this sentiment. "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation," say the Church of England, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, the Methodist Episcopal Church (in substance), &c. The Westminster Catechism declares, “The holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the word of God," the only rule of faith and obedience." "The supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried"; "the only rule of faith and practice"; and other varying forms, to the same effect, are used to characterize the Bible in the creed and covenants of different Protestant churches. They all agree in taking the Bible as the one sufficient guide to heaven. But Roman Catholics express themselves differently from Protestants in this matter. They receive the Bible indeed; but they want something more than the Bible for their guide. Thus the creed of pope Pius IV. declares, after repeating the Nicene creed as held by the church: "I most steadfastly admit and embrace apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions, and all other observances and constitutions of the same church. "I do also admit the holy scriptures, according to that sense which our holy mo her the church has held and does hold, to which it belongs to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the scriptures: neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the fathers." The council of Trent passed a decree "respecting the canonical scriptures," and another "respecting the edition and use of the sacred books." These two decrees, occupying about 3 pages, are in substance as follows: The first places "the unwritten traditions, which, received from the mouth of Christ himself by the apostles, or from the apostles themselves, the Holy Spirit dictating, have come down to us, as if delivered from hand to hand," on an equality, as to pious affection and veneration, with the books of the Old and New Testament; gives a list of these canonical books, including in the Old Testament' all the " Apocrypha," except I. and II. Esdras and the prayer of Manasses; and anathematizes any one who may not "receive as sacred and canonical all those books and every part of them, as they are commonly read in the Catholic church, or are contained in the old Vulgate Latin edition, or who may knowingly and deliberately despise the aforesaid traditions." The 2d of these decrees "ordains and declares that this same old and Vu'gate edition, which has been approved in the church by the long use of so many ages, shall be held as authentic in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions; and that no one, on any pretext whatever, may dare or presume to reject it:" it likewise forbids 1 The books which this decree includes in the Old Testament are here given, with their names as printed in the Douay Bible, and the corresponding book or part [in brackets] of the Old Testament or Apocrypha in the English Bible, wherever the two versions differ: "Genesis; Exodus; Leviticus; Numbers; Deuteronomy; Josue [= Joshua]; Judges; Ruth; I. Kings, alias I. Samuel; II. Kings, alias II. Samuel; III. Kings [= I. Kings]; IV. Kings [= II. Kings]; I. Paralipomenon, alias I. Chronicles; II. Paralipomenon, alias II. Chronicles; I. Esdras [= Ezra]; II. Esdras, alias Nehemias [= Nehemiah]; Tobias [= Tobit, in Apoc.]; Judith [in Apoc.]; Esther [10 chapters in O. T., and nearly 7 chapters in Apoc.]; Job; Psalms; Proverbs; Ecclesiastes; Canticle of Canticles [= Song of Solomon]; Wisdom [in Apoc.]; Ecclesiasticus [in Apoc.]; Isaias [= Isaiah]; Jeremias [ Jeremiah]; Lamentations; Baruch [in Apoc.]; Ezechiel [= Ezekiel]; Daniel [Daniel in O. T.; and in Apoc., the Song of the 3 Children, the Story of Susanna, and the Idol Bel and the Dragon]; Osee [= Hosea]; Joel; Amos; Abdias [ Obadiah]; Jonas [Jonah]; Micheas [= Micah]; Nahum; Habacuc [= Habakkuk]; Sophonias [= Zephaniah]; Aggeus [= Haggai]; Zacharias [=Zechariah]; Malachias [= Malachi]; I. Machabees [=I. Maccabees, in Apoc.]; II Machabees [= II. Maccabees, in Apoc.]. The New Testament of the two versions is substantially the same, "the Apocalypse" of the Douay being "the Revelation of St. John the Divine" in the English version. = any interpretation of the scriptures "contrary to that sense which holy mother church has held and holds, or contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers," the offenders to be "denounced by the ordinaries [= bishops], and punished with the penalties determined by law" ["a jure" by legal right or justice]; it provides for a censorship of Bibles and religious books, under penalty of excommunication and fine for those who print, publish, circulate, or have them without the examination and approval of the ordinary; and it provides punishment by the bishops for those who pervert the language of holy scripture to profane uses. The 2d Plenary Council of Baltimore, held in 1866, after repeating some of the leading parts of the Tridentine decrees, adds another decree, which is thus translated: "Since the faithful keeping of the deposit of the Holy Scriptures, committed by the Lord to the Church, requires of the bishops to strive with all their strength, lest the word of God, adulterated through the fraud or carelessness of men, be furnished to the faithful, we vehemently urge all the pastors of souls of this region, to keep continually before their eyes all those things which have been decreed in the matter of so great moment by the holy council of Trent, commended by the supreme pontiffs, especially by Leo XII. and by Pius VIII. of happy memory, in their encyclical letters, and determined by the most Illustrious and Reverend, John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore, in conjunction with the other bishops of this region, at the meeting held in the year 1810: that they keep away from their own flocks the bibles corrupted by non-Catholics, and permit them to pick out the uncorrupted food of the word of God only from approved versions and editions. We therefore determine that the Douay version, which has been received in all the churches whose faithful [i. e., whose members] speak English, and deservedly set forth by our predecessors for the use of the faithful, be retained entirely. But the bishops will take care that for the future all editions, both of the New and of the Old Testament of the Douay version, be most faultlessly made [i. e., printed], according to the most approved copy to be designated by them, with annotations which may be selected only from the holy fa thers of the church, or from learned and Catholic men." By the "old Vulgate Latin edition" the council of Trent meant the Latin version of the Bible which has long passed as Jerome's. He was one of the most learned and celebrated of the Latin fathers, a monk and priest, born in Dalmatia about A. D. 330, and dying at Bethlehem about A. D. 420. About A. D. 383 he began, at the request of pope Damasus, to revise the old Latin version of the Bible; and about A. D. 390-404 he made a new translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. The Latin Bible, which is called by his name, is in some parts a very valuable translation, but is of very unequal merit, and is thus described by an able English critic and scholar, Rev. B. F. Westcott, in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible: .... .... "The books of the Old Testament, with one exception, were certainly taken from his [Jerome's] version from the Hebrew; but this had not only been variously corrupted, but was itself in many particulars (especially in the Pentateuch) at variance with his later judg ment. . . . . The Psalter [= Palms]. . was retained from the Old Version, as Jerome had corrected it from the Septuagint [= the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament]. Of the Apocryphal books Jerome hastily revised or translated two only, Judith and Tobit. The remainder were retained from the Old Version against his judgment; and the Apocryphal additions to Daniel and Esther, which he had carefully marked as apocryphal in his own version, were treated as integral parts of the books...... In the New Testament, . . . . . the text of the Gospels was in the main Jerome's revised edition; that of the remaining books his very incomplete revision of the old Latin." In regard to the editions of the Vulgate published by popes Sixtus V. and Clement VII., see the account of the bull Æternus ille, in Chapter IV. The Roman Catholic church, as appears above, accepts and defends the Latin Vulgate Bible as its standard, and anathematizes all who appeal from it to any other version, or even to the Hebrew and Greek originals. Moreover, every translation of the Bible into English or any other language must be made |