Bible quizzes : to a street preacher


Booklet No. 1

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TO A STREET
PREACHER

By FATHERS RUMBLE AND CARTY
Radio Replies Press, St. Paul 1, Minn., U. S. A.



Vol. I

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Booklet Quizzes to a Street Preacher

No. 1. Bible No. 6. Hell

No. 2. Purgatory No. 7. Birth Prevention

No. 3. Indulgence No. 8. Eucharist

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BIBLE QUIZZES TO A STREET
PREACHER

1. In a pamphlet I just read the Catholic Church is
charged with destroying the Bible.

Yes. The Church is accused of hating the Bible, de-
stroying the Bible, keeping the Bible from the hands
of the people, of burning it wherever and whenever
she found it and of sealing it up in the dead language
of Latin which the majority of people can neither
read nor understand. And all this she does (so they
say), because she knows that her doctrines are abso-
lutely opposed to and contradicted by the letter of
God’s written Word, and that she holds to dogmas
and creeds which could not stand one gleam of the
searching light of Holy Scripture. But in reality the
Bible was always available to the people and many
editions appeared before the Reformation.

2. Bid not the great revolt against the Roman
Church let the people see how they had been befooled
and hoodwinked?

Many believe that putting the Bible into the hands
of the people brought about the Reformation. The
multiplicity of Christian religions was brought about
by putting the Bible into the hands of the people with-
out a proper interpreter of what the Scriptures were
saying. The Bible was in the hands of the people
long before the Reformation as you can observe
through statements elsewhere in this pamphlet.

3. Do real honest scholars believe the present-day
Protestant statements against the Church for her at-
titude on the Bible?

Dr. S. R. Maitland, Protestant secretary to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, explodes the common opin-
ion of the masses who believe such charges because
of tradition handed down to them from their fore-
fathers since the “Reformation,” by minister, teacher,
and parents; through sermon, catechism, newspaper,
radio, fiction, and history. They believe the tradition
that monasteries and convents were sinks of iniquity
and corruption; or that Catholics pay money to have
their sins cancelled, etc. The Protestant account of
pre-Reformation Catholicism has been largely a falsi-
fication of history and all the good the Church did
has been misconstrued, misjudged, misrepresented
as Dr. Maitland and other students of history admit
after their study of the documentary sources. It would
be well for readers of this pamphlet to investigate
and if they do they will come to the conclusion of
the story, told about Charles the Second, the Merry
Monarch of England. Charles the Second propounded



2 BIBLE WITHOUT A CHURCH

to his learned and scientific men the following pro-
found problem: “How is it that a dead fish weighs
less than a living one?” The scholars discussed the
grave difficulty and wrote long articles to win the
favor of their Royal inquisitor, but they came to no
satisfactory solution of the problem. Finally, it oc-
curred to one of the scientists to test whether a dead
fish does weigh less than a living one; and, of course,
he discovered the lie or the joke; for the fish weighed
exactly the same, dead or living. People act in the
same gullible manner when treating statements con-
cerning the oldest Christian Church in the world. It
would be well to investigate and you will soon re-
move the mountains of abuse, calumny, and false sup-
position.

4. The books in our public libraries give testimony
that your Church is the enemy of the Bible.
By a calm consideration of the facts of history and

a mind open to conviction on genuine Catholic and
non-Catholic evidence, you will admit by sheer force
of honesty that the Catholic Church is not the enemy
of the Bible for she has been the parent, the author
and maker of the Bible; she has guarded it and de-
fended it all through the ages against those who would
destroy the Bible; she has ever held it in esteem
and has refused to allow the fallible brain of man to
tamper with the Bible; she has grounded her doc-
trines upon the Bible; she, of all the Christian Church-
es in the world has the right to call the Bible HER
OWN BOOK; she can boast to the world that she
alone possesses the true Bible and the whole Bible of
not 66 books but 73 books, and that copies of the
Scriptures outside the Church are partly incomplete
and partly defective and that whatever in them is
true, is true because it comes from the Bible which
the Church preserved from the days of the Apostles
who were the authors of the New Testament.

5. We can have a Bible without a Church.
You cannot, for common sense would tell you that

what comes first is the Church and then her writings.
We must not get the cart before the horse. The Jew-
ish Church or Synagogue existed before Moses wrote
a single line of the Old Testament and in the like
manner the Catholic Church existed before a single
line of the New Testament was written Pentecost
Day, the Birthday of Christianity, was not the coming
down of the Holy Ghost in the form of a book, for
there was no book as Johannes Jorgensen, the famous
convert writer of Stockholm, Sweden, declares. The
Holy Ghost came down in the form of tongues of
fire symbolizing that Christianity was to be spread
not through the written but the spoken word. It is



WHO WROTE THE BIBLE? 3
reasonable that Divine Providence had the Jewish
Synagogue to protect the Old Testament from mutila-
tion and it is logical and reasonable that the Church
that gave the Bible to the world should be set up by
God to preserve and perpetuate the inspired writings
of the New Testament.

6. Was the Bible given to the world by God?
The Bible was not served to the world all complete

upon a golden platter as the Book of Mormons is sup-
posed to have been served to the fifteen-year-old boy,
Joseph Smith. It did not suddenly appear upon the
earth through the instrumentality of angel or seraph,
but it was written by men like ourselves who used
a pen or reed and wrote on parchment in the orig-
inal languages of the Orient. They were divinely in-
spired, but they were human beings chosen by God
for the work.

7. Was the Bible written all at once by one man?
NO. About 1500 years elapsed between the writing

of Genesis (the first book of the Old Testament) and
the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John (the last
Book of the New Testament). The word Bible comes
from the Greek plural word “biblia" which means
“books." The Bible is not a single book but a num-
ber of books written at different times by different
men. If you lived at the time Moses died all that
could be given to you of the Bible was the first five
books of the Old Testament, written by Moses him-
self. His writings formed the first record of the in-
spired Word.

8. In what language was the Bible written?
It will not be out of place to say here that the Bible

wasn’t written originally in English as so many seem
to believe, judging from their arguments. Some be-
lieve that the Scriptures were written first in English
and then set forth in the barbarous languages of Latin,
Greek or Hebrew for the sake of inquisitive scholars
and critics. The Old Testament was written in He-
brew and the New Testament was written in Greek.
The Hebrew text of the Old Testament was translated
into Greek, before the time of Christ by 70 translators.

,
9. When was the Old Testament compiled?
The fact that the Old Testament was already trans-

lated into Greek more than 100 years before Christ,
indicates that the original Hebrew text existed long
before that time.

10. What do you mean by the Septuagint Bible?
Because of the “Dispersion" of the Jews and their

growing familiarity with Greek which was then the
universal language, it was necessary to furnish the
Jews with a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament



THE BIBLE USED BY CHRIST>

in the Greek language. The first Greek translation
was done by 70 translators, who worked at Alexandria.
Septuagint means 70 in Latin hence the name of that
first Greek version. Our Lord and the Apostles used
this version whenever they referred to the Scriptures.
It contained the Catholic number of Old Testament
books, namely 46 and not merely 39, as found today
in the Protestant Bibles. The Septuagint version used
by Christ and the Apostles was begun about 280 years
before Christ and finished in the next century. It
was the acknowledged Bible of all the “Jews of the
Dispersion*’ in Asia, as well as in Egypt, and it was
used not only by Christ, His Apostles and Evangelists
but by Jews and Gentiles and Christians in the early
days of Christianity. It is from this list of 46 books
that Christ and the New Testament writers and speak-
ers quote when referring to the Old Testament. Of the
350 quotations of the Old Testament found in the New
Testament, 300 are taken directly from the Greek Sep-
tuagint Bible. Pope, the Biblical scholar in his “Aids
to the Bible,” i., 54, mentions 18 passages, citing Wis-
dom, Ecclesiasticus and Judith books rejected by the
reformers. The early Christians of Rome were ac-
quainted with the 7 books rejected by Protestants,
for the frescoes of the Catacombs picture Susanna and
the elders as well as Moses and Jonas. The writers
of the first three centuries often quote or allude to
the books eliminated from the Protestant Version.

11. What books are not found in the Protestant Bi-
ble?
They are Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Ba-

ruch and the two Books of Machabees, together with
fragments of Esther (x. 4; xvi, 24), and Daniel (iii,
24-90; xiii.; xiv). These books were contained in
the Alexandrian List or Canon of Books, which was
used by the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, Asia
Minor, Greece and Italy.

12. Well it may be that the clergy knew the Scrip-
tures but certainly the lay people did not.
The usual statement is that it was a closed and

sealed volume to the poor lay people, because it was
found only in the Dead Language of Latin. Dr. Mait-
land declared that all civil and historical as well as
religious writings were saturated with Scripture when
he says of the writers of the Middle Ages, “They
thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words
and phrases of the Bible . . . not exclusively in theo-
logical or ecclesiastical matters, but in histories, biog-
raphies, familiar letters, legal instruments, and docu-
ments of every description.” How many lawyers, doc-
tors. professors, and lay folk of today qubte the Scrip-
tures? We have millions of copies of the Bible and



INDULGENCES TO BIBLE READERS 5

they had but the common Bible of the monastery or
parish church. The Catholic Church had to do the
best she could in the circumstances of those days be-
fore the discovery of printing and she did a mar-
vellous job. Vast numbers could not read and the
Church was not to blame for that. Latin was not a
dead language, but the universal language of all who
could read. For those who could not read, the Church
had the medium of art, sculpture, Passion and Miracle
Plays, to teach the people the contents of Christian
doctrine. The evidence brought out by the Protestant
scholar. Dr. Maitland, gives the lie to those who hold
the Church despised, hid, and dishonored the Bible.

13. Is your Church doing anything to encourage
Catholics to study the Bible?
The Church is trying to get Catholics to read and

study the Bible by granting them indulgences for do-
ing so. On a page in front of the Old Testament or
else in front of the New Testament you will find
printed these words, “An indulgence of 300 days is
granted to all the faithful who read the Holy Gospels
at least a QUARTER OF AN HOUR. A plenary in-
dulgence under the usual conditions is granted once
a month for the daily reading.'* Certainly, this does
not look as though the Church was striving to keep
the Bible out of the hands of the people.

14. Were the people acquainted with the Bible in
the Dark Ages?
The Dark Ages were not Dark but they were the

AGES OF FAITH. Protestants in general have the
false notion that from the eighth to the fifteenth cen-
tury, the centuries were the ages of ignorance, oppres-
sion, superstition and what not. The people were
supposed to be in that period illiterate, immoral, half
civilized and constantly at war like barbarians. All
this chaos of darkness was attributed to the blighting
yoke of Rome which held the masses in ignorance
of the Word of God. The light of the Reformation
shone out in this darkness and gave light and free-
dom to these European masses. No, the Dark Ages
were ages full of light in comparison to what 400
years of Protestantism have brought upon the world,
which has been deformed instead of reformed. Two
centuries from now writers can call our twentieth cen-
tury the century of injustice, misery, free love, de-
bauchery, banditry, drunkenness, dishonesty, immoral-
ity, unbelief, etc., compared to which the so-called
Dark Ages can be termed the Holy Ages. The Dark
Ages built the gorgeous Cathedrals, and Abbeys whose
architecture has not been rivalled by any architec-
tural genius of the twentieth century of progress and
high education. Look at the terrible contrast between



6 DARK AGES OF GREAT FAITH

the paintings of our century and those of the Dark
Ages. Are our universitie-s producing philosophers,
thinkers of perennial thought like St. Thomas Aquinas
and St. Bonaventure, and Albertus Magnus and Scotus
and Bacon? Has this age a scholastic system that
betters that of the Schoolmen, whose method of learn-
ing and thinking is now being imitated in our uni-
versities after years of shunting true education? An
age which produced such sociologists as Francis Xa-
vier, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, and a host
of others could not be intellectually dark and barren
of Scriptural lore. The practical teaching the people
of those reputed dark days received from priests and
monks in church and school was of far more real
moral and intellectual value than what our youth is
getting today. The mediaevalists had the knowledge
of God in their souls and that is why the Protestant
scholar, Dr. Maitland, writes in such high praise of
the Dark Ages. His book on the Dark Ages will show
that it is the Middle Ages which have been a closed
and sealed book to Protestants. His impartial schol-
arship unlocks the treasures of those grand centuries.
On page 469 in his “Dark Ages’' he writes, “The fact
is . . . the writings of the Dark Ages are, if I may
use the expression, made of the Scriptures.” Another
Protestant historian says, “The notion that Bible-read-
ing was frowned upon by ecclesiastical authorities of
that age is quite unfounded.” Proof is quite abundant
that the Church made ample use of the Bible in in-
structing the people before the Reformation. The
Mass is almost all Scripture and at every Mass it was
customary to read a portion of Scripture and explain
it to the people. The people were asked to stand in
respect for the Holy Word of God whilst the Gospel
was read to them. Sermons of the Middle Ages abound
with more Scriptural qbotations than are heard from
the pulpits of today.* The divine office or breviary
said each day by the clergy is made up from the
Bible. The Rosary was another Bible in the hands
of the people for this pious devotion taught the Cath-
olics to meditate on the Biblical mysteries. The funda-
mentals of the New Testament teaching are meditated
on when the Rosary is properly said. Before the
printed Bible came, the Church instructed people
through, “Miracle and Passion Plays.” If the Church
kept the Bible* from the people, how explain the in-
timate knowledge of the Scriptures on the part of
Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare and other Christian au-
thors? How explain the statement of Ruskin that the
walls of St. Mark’s at Venice were the poor man’s
Bible? How could Michelangelo, Murillo. Raphael
and other Catholic sculptors and artists portray on



BIBLE IN THE DARK AGES 7

canvas and in stone such Biblical scenes if the Church
kept the Bible from the people?

15. Were the clergy of the Dark Ages ignorant of
the Bible?

They had a profound knowledge and understanding
of the Bible, for Bishops and Abbots required all
their priests to know the Scriptures. In the old Con-
stitutions of different dioceses we find that the clergy
were obliged to know the Psalms, the Epistles, and
Gospels. The Council of Toledo, 835, issued a decree
that Bishops were bound to inquire throughout their
dioceses whether the clergy were sufficiently instructed
in the Scriptures. The documentary history, as Dr
Maitland shows, proves that multitudes of ordinary
priests and Bishops had the Scriptures on their lips.
Abbots caused the whole of the Old and New Testa-
ments to be read through every year, and they had
the Scriptures read daily during meals in monasteries.
Sermons of today are valueless because they are like
fishing nets without fish, whilst sermons of the reputed
Dark Ages are invaluable because they are like fishing
nets overloaded with fish as a result of their incessant
Scriptural quotations. What a silly legend it is for
modern pamphleteers to be still stating that Martin
Luther first discovered by accident the Scriptures, a
book which, as a monk, he was bound to have known
and studied and recited for years! No modern min-
ister can equal the priest of the Middle Ages in
knowledge and familiarity with the written Word
of God.

16. Was Martin Luther the first one to translate
the Bible into the language of the people?
No. The Bible had been translated into Spanish.

Italian, Danish. French. Norwegian, Polish. Bohemian
and Hungarian long before Martin Luther gave out
his Lutheran Bible. Sevep hundred years before the
birth of Luther we had an English translation. At
the end of the seventh century we have in the English
tongue the work of Caedmon, a monk of Whitby. In
the next century we have the well-known translation
of Venerable Bede, a monk of Jarrow. The Preface
of the Authorized Version refers to previous transla-
tions of the Scriptures into the language of the peo-
ple and after speaking of the Greek and Latin Ver-
sions, it says, “The Godly-learned were not content
to have the Scriptures in the language which they
themselves understood. Greek and Latin . . . but also
for the behoof and edifying of the unlearned which
hungered and thirsted after righteousness, and had
souls to be saved as well as they. They provided
translations into the Vulgar for their countrymen, in-
somuch that most nations under Heaven did shortly



LUTHER’S BIBLE

after their conversion hear Christ speaking unto them
in their Mother tongue, not by the voice of their
minister only but also by the written Word trans-
lated.”

* 17. When did Luther’s Bible come out?
It came out in 1520 and before his Bible appeared

there were exactly 104 editions of the Bible in Latin;
there -were 9 before the birth of Luther in the Ger-
man language, and there were 27 in German be-
fore the Lutheran Bible appeared. Before the Prot-
estant Bible appeared there were already in Italy
more than 40 editions and 25 of these were in the
Italian language with the express permission of Rome.
In France there were 18 editions before 1547. Spain
began her editions in 1478. In all, 626 editions of the
Bible with 198 in the language of the laity, had been
edited before the first Protestant Bible was sent forth
into the world. With all this evidence why should
there be those intellectuals who declare that the
Church despised the Bible? This testimony shows
that the Church fought to preserve it, translate it,
and multiply it. She saved it from utter destruction
at the hands of infidels; she saved it from total ex-
tinction by guarding it as the greatest treasure of all
ages.

18. Why did the Church keep the Bible in Latin
until the Reformation gave the people the Bible in
the vernacular?

The usual belief is that the Church kept the Bible in
Latin so that the masses could not read it, and thereby
discover the wiles of priestcraft. That nobody but
priests could read the Bible is nonsense. There were
just two classes of people in the Middle Ages: those
who could read, and those who could not read. Those
who could read read Latin and were perfectly con-
tent with the Scriptures in Latin, and those who
could not read Latin could not read at all. So why
should the Church prior to the spread of education
in the vernacular translate the Bible from Latin for
them? Latin was then the language of all cultured
men and it was the common language of Europe.
Students heard their lectures in Latin and they talked
Latin. Retreats to nuns were preached in Latin and
they understood the discourses. Hence, Latin was
not a dead language but a living one. If the Church
desired to keep the Bible from the people then why
did the Church translate the Bible out of Greek into
Latin and call the Vulgate Version of the fourth
century the “Bible of the People”?



COUNTERFEIT BIBLES 9

19. Did the Catholic Church burn all Bibles, and"
punish those who had copies?
No. The Catholic Church would have been very

stupid to have copies multiplied by her monks and
nuns only to destroy them. She did burn Bibles that
were counterfeits of the Bible, such as the Coverdale,
Tyndale, and Wycliffe Bibles. When the printing press
was invented by the German Catholic Gutenberg
called in English (Gooseflesh) the first book ever
printed in the world was the Bible and that was in
1445, 80 years before Protestantism had been heard of.

20. Yet does not the Catholic Church scoff at Bible
societies as dangerous to Christianity?
She condemns the principle that Bibles should be

peddled indiscriminately to people on the under-
standing that they will be able to ascertain the truth
without the guidance of the Church, and by their
own unaided efforts. The wildest fanatical religions
have resulted in America from the theory of pri-
vate judgment or interpretation of Scripture, and if
it is not dangerous to Christianity to have a new
pretended Christian Church arising every 10 years
from some madcap reading of an isolated text, what
is really dangerous to Christianity? The fact that
60 millions or more of Americans have no church
affiliation whatsoever today is due to madcap readings
of the Bible. In the city of Chicago recently the
newspapers took an account of all those who went to
Church on Sunday within the confines of the city.
The final count showed that 85 per cent of the Sunday
Churchgoers went into Catholic Churches and the
remaining 15 per cent went into Protestant Churches
and Jewish Synagogues. Hence, the multiplication
of Bible societies creates agnosticism, indifferentism,
for truth cannot be divided.

21. Does your Church prohibit the reading of Scrip-
ture in the vernacular?
No. There are various Catholic societies for the

diffusion of the Holy Gospels in the vernacular, such
as the Society of St. Jerome, approved by the Church.
In the front of every Catholic Bible you will find that
Pope Leo XIII. on December 13, 1898, granted “An
indulgence of 300 days to all the faithful who read
the Holy Gospels at least a quarter of an hour. A
plenary indulgence under the usual conditions is
granted once a month for the daily reading.” Well,
this doesn’t look like keeping the people ignorant of
the Word of God.
The following letter of His Holiness Pius VI.,

to the Most Rev. Anthony Martini, on his Transla-
tion of the Holy Bible into Italian, shows the benefit
which the faithful may reap from their having the



10 CORRECT BIBL.fi

Holy Scriptures in the Vulgar Tongue, "At a time
that a vast number of bad books, which most grossly
attack the Catholic Religion, are circulated, even
among the unlearned, to the great destruction of
souls, you judge exceedingly well, that the faithful
should be EXCITED TO THE READING of the Holy
Scriptures; for these are the most abundant sources
which ought to be left open to everyone to draw
from them purity of morals and of doctrine, to eradi-
cate the errors which are so widely disseminated in
these corrupt times, etc.”

22. Then why did Pope Clement XI., in 1713, con-
demn the doctrine that the Bible is for all to read?
He did not condemn the doctrine that it is good to

read Scripture. He merely condemned the theory
that it is necessary to do so in order to know what
is Christianity. Christ’s method was to establish a
teaching Church, it being necessary to be taught by
that Church. He did not order the Apostles to peddle
Bibles. If the reading of Scripture were necessary to
salvation, Christ would have written a book instead of
giving the commission to His Apostles to teach, adding;
“He that heareth you, heareth me.” And before the
discovery of printing could Christ make the possibility
of His religion dependent upon that discovery by John
Gutenberg? How about the illiterate and the unlearned
of all history? It is absurd to make the Printed Page
the Pope of religion. Pope Clement XI. wisely con-
demned the proposition that the reading of Scripture
is necessary to all.

23. Have you a correct translation of the Bible?

Yes. We have one that is recognized by Protestant
scholars as being a substantially true translation.
A Catholic is forbidden to read those Protestant Ver-
sions in which there are many mistranslations and in
which the text is often distorted to suit the enemies
of the Catholic Church. Counterfeit texts are no
longer the Word of God.

24. You Catholics seem afraid that Catholics will
be harmed by the reading of Scripture.
Even granted a most perfect and correct version,

thousands of people have been harmed by the reading
of Scripture, thinking themselves capable of inter-
preting it aright. The Pharisees read Scripture, yet
managed to use, or misuse, quotations from the Bible
as an argument against Christ, just as men today
quote Scripture as an argument against the true
Church of Christ, the Catholic Church.



THE SEVEN MISSING BOOKS 11

25. You say that you have a Bible and that Catho-
lics can read the Bible, but do they do so?

Some do and some don’t. All are free to do so, but
it is not absolutely necessary that they should give
themselves to the private reading of Scripture.

26. I know many Catholics who have no Bible in
their homes.
Catholics are quite free to possess and read ap-

proved versions of the Bible; good Catholics will see
to it that they have in their homes the One Book
given to the world by God.

27. I have known Catholics to admit that they have
never read the Bible, so why doesn’t the Catholic
Church teach it to them?
The doctrines of the Bible are taught to her people

by the Catholic Church more faithfully than by any
other Church on earth. The Bible tells us that Christ
is God and this, Protestant ministers in growing num-
bers deny. The Bible tells us that Christ established
a living, visible Church and this Protestants deny.
The Bible tells us that the consecrated bread and
wine is the true Body and Blood of our Lord and
this Protestants deny. The Bible tells us that Christ’s
ministers of reconciliation have the power to forgive
sins and this Protestants refuse to believe. The Bible
condemns divorce even in the case of adultery and
this Protestants by practice consider as nonsense.
Catholics know more fundamental doctrine than the
man who, parrot-like, can quote the Bible. Knowledge
of text is not knowledge of doctrine. Some Catholics
do not read the Bible very much, but they know the
doctrines taught by the Bible more clearly than any
other Christian people on earth.. A Catholic may be
at a loss when you quote some particular text, but
he knows clearly what must be done to save one’s
soul and he knows all that Christ condemns; namely,
divorce, birth prevention, mercy killings, sterilization,
prohibition, the injustices of Capitol and Labor, etc.

28. You must admit that Protestants love the Scrip-
tures more than Catholics.
How can they when they slaughter all the doctrines

taught by Christ?

29. Protestants have a true copy of the Bible.
How can they when they cut out seven books from

the Old Testament; namely, Tobias, Judith, Wisdom,
Ecclesiasticus, the two Books of Machabees, and the
various sections of other Books. They have many
errors in their supposedly true copy of the Bible.



12 BIBLE TAMPERING

30. Do you accuse the Protestant translators of
grossly infamous conduct in tampering with the text?

I absolutely do. Dixon, in his ‘‘Introduction to
Scripture” says, “That the early Protestant translations
were full of gross errors no unprejudiced Protestant
will now deny, and that these errors were willful.
Ward, in his ‘Errata,* satisfactorily proves.** Blunt, in
his “Key to the Knowledge and Use of the Bible” says,
“The characters of the translators were not such
as to command the respect of men.** Robert Gell
writes that “Truth was often outvoted. Dogmatic in-
terests were in some cases allowed to bias the trans-
lation. The Calvinism of one party, the prelatic
views of another, were both represented at the expense
of accuracy.’*

31. Is not the Douay Version poorer in English than
the Protestant Version?
The Douay Version is not a version deliberately ac-

commodated to Catholic teaching. It is a substantially
true Version which, because true, necessarily indi-
cates the Catholic Church as the true Church. For
that is the truth of Scripture. From a literary point
of view, it is a less beautiful translation than that
of the Authorized Version, because it is a more exact
translation. When a foreign language, classical or
modern, is translated into English, the more one
clings to the text, the less purely literary beauty one
attains in the new language. To obtain a more beau-
tiful rendering one must translate more freely, thus
more or less forfeiting the exact sense of the original.
But in the matter of God’s Word, we want, not so
much literary beauty, but just what God intended.
And for that, the Douay Version far surpasses the
Authorized Version, despite its rather awkward lit-
erary structure at times.

32. It is much better to have the Bible out of the
hands of Rome.
Henry VIII. himself will answer that for you in his

last pathetic speech to Parliament: “I am extremely
sorry to find how much the Word of God is abused;
with how little reverence it is mentioned; how it is
turned into wretched rhymes, sung and jangled in
every ale house and tavern; and all this in a false
construction and countermeaning to the inspired writ-
ers. I am sorry to perceive the readers of the Bible
discover so little of it in their practice; for I am sure
charity was never in a more languishing condition,
virtue never at a lower ebb, nor God Himself less
honored or worse served in 'Christendom.** Due to
taking the Bible out of the hands of Rome by the
end of the sixteenth century we find 270 sects and



BIBLE ALONE THEORY 13

because of this, Dr. Walton writes in the Preface to
his own Polyglot Bible, “There is no fanatic or clown
from the lowest dregs of the people who does not give
you his own dreams as the Word of God. For the
bottomless pit seems to have been set open from
whence a smoke has risen which has obscured the
heavens and the stars, and locusts are come out with
wings—a numerous race of sectarians and heretics,
who have renewed all the old heresies, and invented
monstrous opinions of their own. These have filled
our cities, villages, camps, houses—nay, our churches
and pulpits, too, and lead the poor deluded people
with them to the pit of perdition."

33. Is not the Catholic Church arrogant in claiming
the Bible as her own?
The Bible is her book and you cannot disprove it.

She has preserved it and she alone knows what it
means. No one else has any right to it whatsoever,
or any authority to declare what the texts mean.
The work of translating it, of printing it, and editing
it, belongs strictly to her alone and if she cannot pre-
vent those outside her jurisdiction from tampering
with it and misusing it then she will take care that
her own children must avoid perusal of counterfeit
Bibles. History shows that the Church has been wise
in prohibiting private persons from translating the
Bible without ecclesiastical authority. For instance,
look at what Judge Rutherford has done with the
Bible. The Church is very wise in prohibiting the
faithful from reading Bibles that are not approved
by her, for she desires that the pure, uncorrupted
Gospel should be placed into the hands of the people.
Mr. Allnatt (in his “Bible and the Reformation") says,
“That all the early Protestant versions of the Bible
literally swarmed with gross and flagrant corruptions

—

corruptions consisting in the willful and deliberate
mistranslation of various passages Qf the sacred text,
and all directly aimed against those doctrines and
practices of the Catholic Church which the ‘Reformers’
were most anxious to uproot. They did give the peo-
ple an ‘Open Bible,’ but what a Bible." Hence, to
hate the Bible is one thing, and to prohibit a false
version like the notorious Wycliffe, Tyndale and Cover-
dale Bibles is quite another.

34. The Bible, and the Bible alone, is enough for
me.

Which Bible? Have you the right Bible? Are you
certain that your Bible contains all and only the true
words that came down from the hands of Apostles
and Evangelists? Are you positive that no other



14 THE PROPER LORD’S PRAYER

word has been inserted by man or dropped out de-
liberately by man? Have you an exact copy of the
Holy Scriptures identical with the writings from Moses
to St. John? If you haven’t then why talk about the
Bible and the Bible alone theory? How do you know
the Bible came from God? Do you prove it by the
intrinsic merit of the writings or do you rely upon
the religious quality of the Scriptures as sufficient
evidence? The intrinsic merit of the Bible and the
inspiration it gives the reader is no argument that
it has God as the author for we have other books
as, for instance, “The Following of Christ,” which is
much more inspiring than some parts of the Bible.
We know that the Bible is the Word of God, because
the Catholic Church that gave the Bible to the world
says so. You, to believe in the Bible/ must admit some
third party to come between you and God. The
Catholic has as his third party, the Catholic Church
which comes between him and God to tell him what’s
what about the Bible.

35. The Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father is in the
Bible, but the Catholic prayer differs from the Prot-
estant.

Protestants use a conclusion which was not in the
original Greek copies of the New Testament, namely,
“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the
glory, forever. Amen.” Catholics say the Lord’s
Prayer properly, for the Protestant conclusion taken
from the King James Version is a marginal gloss, put
in there by some copyist, who had in mind words
borrowed from the Greek liturgy. They were rejected
as not authentic by St. Jerome in the fourth century,
as they have been rejected by the authors of the
Revised Version of 1881. Some versions put these
words today in parentheses. Even the King James
Version omits this gloss in Luke xi. 4. Such an addi-
tion was not uttered by Our Lord and that is why
Catholics do not use it. This is an excellent example
of how errors occur in the various copies made by
old scribes. Pious Bible students may hold up their
hands in horror and cry out, “There are no mistakes
in the Bible. It is all inspired. It is God’s own Book.”
Yes. But God never guaranteed . that every individual
scribe who took in hand the copying of the New Tes-
tament would never copy wrongly. The original
Scripture is free from error because God is the au-
thor of the original.

36. Are any of the original writings of Moses or
Paul, or John in existence today?
No. None of the originals exist today, but we know

from history and tradition that these were the books
they wrote. What we have now is the printed Bible;



REJECTION OF SEVEN BOOKS 15

but before the invention of printing in 1438, the Bible
existed only in handwriting or manuscript form. We
have in our possession now copies of the Bible in
manuscript which date back as early as the fourth cen-
tury. We have not the originals but copies of the
originals for several reasons: (1) The persecutors of
the Church for the first 300 years destroyed everything
Christian they could lay their hands on. (2) The
material upon which the inspired writers wrote was
papyrus, a frail, brittle, perishable, substance not
destined to last long. (3) When copies were made
of the originals for the various Churches there was
not the same necessity for preserving the originals.
The early Christians certainly did not consider it nec-
essary for salvation that the very handwriting of St.
Paul, etc., should be preserved. Since they had the
living, infallible Church to teach and guide them, they
were content with mere COPIES of the original works
of the authors. Manuscript or handwritten copies of
the Bible known to be in existence number about
3,000 today. None have yet been found earlier than
the fourth century.

37. Why did Luther reject 7 books from the Bible?
Because they did not suit his new doctrines. He

had arrived at the principle of private judgment—of
picking and choosing religious doctrines; and when-
ever any book, such as the Book of Machabees, taught
a doctrine contrary to his taste he rejected it over-
board and overboard that book went because it says:
2 Mach, xii 46, “it is a holy and wholesome thought
to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from
sins.’* He not only cast out certain books, but he
mutilated some that were left. For example, not
pleased with St. Paul’s doctrine, “we are justified by
faith,” Luther added the word “ALONE” to make the
sentence read: “We are justified by faith alone.” His
explanation of this insertion is found in his own
words, “I know very well that the word ‘alone* is
not in the Latin and Greek texts; but Dr. Martin
Luther will have it so, and I order it to be so, and
my will is reason enough.” St. Paul writes under the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Luther creates a
Lutheran Bible under his own audacity. He shows
little respect for the Bible when he calls the Epistle
of St. James “an Epistle of straw with no character
of the Gospel in it.” He spoke disparagingly about
the Epistle of St. Jude, the Epistle to the Hebrews,
and the beautiful Apocalypse of St. John.

38. Were there other writings besides the New Tes-
tament esteemed as Scripture?
Before 397 A. D. there were 3 classes of sacred

writings being read in the Churches. First, there



16 INTENTION OF APOSTLES

were the genuine writings accepted universally by
the Christian Church which hailed this first group of
writings as actually written by the Apostles whose
names they bore. The second class of sacred writ-
ings, which were being used by the Churches, was
the disputed class. In some places they were accepted
as genuine Scripture and in other places they were
not so accepted. In this second class, or disputed list,
were St. James, St. Jude, the second Epistle of St.
Peter, the second and third Epistle of St. John, the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation
(Apocalypse). Then there was a third class of writ-
ings spread about, which was never accepted by
any of the Churches as genuine Scripture, books
which contained all sorts of fanciful stories or fables
of the early life of Our Lord. In 397, the Catholic
Church gave a definite decision as to which should
be admitted into the Bible and which should be re-
jected, and every book which is in the Protestant
New Testament today, was put there by Pope Siricius
and the Catholic Bishops in the year 397 A. D. If
Christ had intended that men should learn Christianity
from the New Testament, what about the hundreds
who lived before the first Bible was given to the world
by the Catholic Church?

39. You seem to undervalue the written Word of
God.
No. I am simply showing the position it was meant

to occupy in the Christian Church. It was written
by the Church; it belongs to the Church and it is
her prerogative to declare what it means. It is in-
tended for enlightenment, meditation, spiritual read-
ing, encouragement, exhortation, devotion, and it also
gives testimony of the Church’s doctrines. It is not
a complete guide to heaven.

40. Is the Old Testament a civil and political history
of the Jews?
No. It is their history as the Chosen People of

God, chosen as the receivers and carriers of His pro-
gressive Revelation through Adam, Noah, Abraham,
Moses and the Prophets. The Old and New Tes-
taments can be called a great work of UNITY, since
the Old Testament looks forward to the one central
figure, the Messiah, Jesus Christ and the New Testa-
ment looks back to that Messiah.

41. Didn’t the Apostles intend to make the New
Testament a compendium of Christian doctrine?
The books of the New Testament were produced as

a result of special circumstances that arose among the
converts. They were written to meet the particular
demands and emergencies of the time. The authors



300 YEARS WITHOUT A BIBLE CHRISTIAN 17

never dreamed of writing the New Testament or com-
posing works which would one day be taken as the
sole rule of religion. The Apostles would stand dazed
if told that what they wrote would one day be held
up as the complete and exhaustive statement of
Christian doctrines. No writings were ever intended
to be used as an easy guide in faith and morals, in-
dependent of any living and teaching authority to
interpret them. St. Paul himself says, “How shall
they hear without a preacher? How shall they preach
unless they be sent? Faith cometh by hearing, and
hearing by the Word of Christ.” When the Apostles
speak they claim to speak with Divine authority and
they nowhere claim to be laying down a system of
Christian doctrine. Their teaching was at first ORAL,
and it was no part of their intention to create a per-
manent literature. They wrote to believers, not to
unbelievers. The Church existed and functioned be-
fore they wrote anything. Before a line in the New
Testament was written (1) Christ established His
Church; (2) the Apostles preached Christ’s Gospel;
(3) St. Peter converted 3,000 Jews; (4) Council of
Jerusalem was assembled; (5) Jewish ceremonial law
was abrogated.
Before the last book in the New Testament was

written (1) the Catholic Church celebrated her golden
jubilee; (2) 11 of the Apostles had died.
Hence, THE BIBLE CAME FROM THE CHURCH.

THE CHURCH DID NOT COME FROM THE BIBLE.
Christianity existed over 300 years without one single
Bible Christian.

M2. Did Jesus Christ write any of the New Testa-
ment?
Our Blessed Lord Himself never, so far as we know,

wrote a line of Scripture. He never told His Apostles
to write anything, and He certainly did not command
them to commit to writing what He had revealed to
them. He never said, “Go and write,” but he did
say, “Go ye and teach all nations,” “Preach the Gos-
pel to every creature,” “He that heareth you heareth
Me.” He, therefore, commanded them to do just what
He was doing; namely, delivering the Word of God
to the people by the living voice—by which they were
to convince, persuade, instruct, and convert. Faith
was to be won by hearing, not by reading. Christ
did not entrust His message to a dead book which
might perish and be destroyed, mutilated, counter-
feited, misinterpreted by man. The very action of
Christ proves that the Word of God was to be pre-
served by a Living Tradition and not by a Written
Message.



18 66 AND 73

43. "What is the Protestant and Catholic position on
the Bible?

The Protestant, believing in Christ, holds that He
left no authoritatively teaching Church, but only the
Bible, which each individual may read and interpret
for himself on the principle of “private judgment.”
All churches are man-made. No one of them was
founded by Christ.
The Catholic, believing in Christ, holds that He

founded an authoritative Church which has the right
to guide all her members in matters of faith and
morals. The Catholic believes the Church is infalli-
ble and cannot make a mistake or teach error. The
Catholic goes to the Church as his immediate Guide
and Teacher. The Catholic believes in the Bible and
Tradition, whilst the Protestant believes in the Bible
alone.

44. What is the difference between the Hebrew,
Protestant, and Catholic Bibles?
The Hebrew Bible contains only books of the Old

Testament, since the orthodox, reformed, or liberal
Jew does not accept our Lord as the Messiah. The
Palestinian Jews had 39 books in the Old Testament
and the Alexandrian Jews and the Jews of Dispersion
had 46 books in their Bible.
The Protestant Bible contains in the Old Testament,

39 books of the Palestinian Jews and the 27 books
of the New Testament, 66 books in all.
The Catholic Bible contains 46 books of the Alex-

andrian Canon or list of Old Testament books and
the 27 books of the New Testament, 73 books in all.

45. Besides the difference of numbers of books is
there any other difference between Catholic and Prot-
estant Bibles?

A serious difference is in the accuracy of transla-
tion. Protestant preachers and Bishops have written
volumes to point out the errors in the King James
Version and the Revised Version. In a convention
of ministers at St. Louis, Mo., some years- ago, a
Presbyterian minister urged the necessity of a new
translation of the Protestant Bible and held that
there were no less than 30,000 errors. Another dif-
ference is the titles of books: “Canticle of Canticles”
for “Solomon’s Song,” “Apocalypse” for “Book of Reve-
lation,” “First and Second Kings,” for “First and Sec-
ond Samuel,” etc.

46. Why are the names in the Protestant Bible
spelled differently from those in the Catholic Bible?
The Protestant version has,

-
for instance, Nebuchad-

nezzar, the Catholic Nabuchodonosor. The Protestant
forms follow, the Hebrew, the vocalized text of which



CHURCH BEFORE THE BIBLE 19

was fixed by the Massoretes between the fifth and
seventh centuries after Christ; the Catholic forms
follow the Greek which was fixed about the second
century before Christ. The Catholic spelling has
been in some cases confirmed by archeological dis-
coveries.

47. You say the Church came before the Bible.
YES. The books of the New Testament were scat-

tered around the Mediterranean civilization for 300
years before the writings were gathered up and com-
piled into one collection. It is a fact of history that
the Council of Carthage (397 A. D.) settled the Canon
Table of Contents of the New Testament as we Cath-
olics have them today.

48. Was there ever a collection of the Scriptures
before 397?
We find lists of books of the New Testament drawn

up by St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and
many other authorities, but their lists do not corre-
spond perfectly to the collection we possess now.
It was the Council of Carthage (397 A. D.) that settled
all doubts on the canon or list of books which all
Christendom had until the Reformers changed that
list. If other lists of books existed before 397, then
the action of the Council of Carthage teaches the
world that the Catholic Church selected, sifted, and
stamped with her authority the Scriptures of the New
Law. It is through the Catholic Church that Protest-
ants get their Bible. Imagine what standing Prot-
estantism would have if the Catholic Church were
indeed the enemy of the Bible and had destroyed all
manuscripts in the days of the infant Church.

49. What do you mean by Inspiration of the Bible?
Does God act as the author, of every word written?
Inspiration means the fact that God as the author

of each and every book of the Bible did not take
away from Moses, David, Isaias, the Apostles, etc.,
anything at all except the power to write something
God did not want them to write. Moses, for instance,
could not write what God did not want him to write
or in a way God did not want him to write. His writ-
ing was controlled by God, yet it still left him a free
human agent and author. God allowed freedom of
style to each writer, but God was responsible for
each and everything the writer wrote. God may in-
spire the very words they use, but this is not essen-
tial to the motion of inspiration. We may hold, for
example, that Moses is the author of the first 5 books
of the Bible, but the Biblical Commission tells us that
we are not bound to believe that Moses wrote or dic-
tated everything himself. Writing under inspiration



20 OFFICIAL BIBLE

he may have “committed it to one or more to write,
yet in such a way that they should faithfully express
his meaning, write nothing or omit nothing against
his will, and that the work . . . approved by Moses,
the chief inspired author, should be published in his
name/*

50. What do you mean by the Vulgate Edition?
Translations of the Bible were made into Latin,

Armenian, Syriac and Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic
for the benefit of Christians in these lands. Latin
first appeared in 150 A. D. and other translations into
Latin later. The best and grandest Latin version was
made by St. Jerome and this was called the “Vul-
gate”—that is, the common, or current or accepted
version. St. Jerome, who was a monk, and the most
learned scholar of his day, at the request of Pope St.
Damascus in 382 A. D. made his fresh Latin transla-
tions correcting the existing Latin versions with the
Greek manuscripts he could find.

51. Is the Vulgate the official version of your
Church?

St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate is the official text in
the Catholic Church, and all Protestant and Catholic
scholars admit it to be the best down to the Reforma-
tion. The Council of Trent, in 1546, issued a decree,
stamping it as the only recognized and authoritative
version allowed to Catholics. The English Douay
Version comes from the Vulgate.

52. The Bible was not printed in any language until
1500 years after the birth of Christ.

How could it when there was no such thing as print-
ing? What would happen to the Protestant principle
“the Bible and the Bible alone,” if printing were never
discovered? If we lived before Mr. John Gutenberg
discovered the art of printing in the fifteenth cen-
tury we should have to read manuscripts of some
monk or nun who wrote out a copy of the Bible on
pages of parchment or vellum. Are we to convert
the world by peddling printed Bibles to the heathen
and unconverted sinners? How about those who lived
before the Bible was printed? How were nations
made familiar with Christianity before the discovery
of printing? Christ desired to save those who lived
before printing was discovered as well as those who
lived after its discovery. If the reading of the Bible
is the only medium of salvation, how about those
who cannot read and those who are too poor to buy
one? THE BLUNDERING BLUNDER OF ALL HIS-
TORY is that people fail to understand that for the
first 300 years of Christianity there was not one single
BIBLE CHRISTIAN in the world and that they do



ATTITUDE OF MINISTERS 21

not sufficiently realize, read, mark, learn, and in-
wardly digest the fact that the Bible was not multi-
plied in printed copies until 1,400 years after Christ.

53. Do all ministers believe that the Bible is the
inspired Word of God?
No. Professor G. H. Betts, of the Northwestern

University, not long ago sent out a list of 56 questions
on religion and theology to 1,309 Protestant ministers
then in active service, and to 5 Protestant theological
seminaries. Between 700 and 800 ministers replied,
and also a large number of students in the 5 semina-
ries. Here are the results concerning the Bible as
published by Prof. Betts, himself a Protestant: 2 per
cent of the Lutheran ministers, 38 per cent of the
Baptist ministers, 56 per cent of the Presbyterian min-
isters, 60 per cent of the Episcopalian ministers, 65
per cent of the Methodist ministers, 83 per cent of
the Congregational ministers, and 92 per cent of the
students denied or doubted the divine inspiration of
the Scriptures. In view of this astounding revelation
we see who, indeed, is the enemy of the Bible.

54. Protestant sects claim to be founded on the
Bible, and the Bible alone. THEN WHY IS IT THAT
WE HAVE SO MANY OF THEM?

It is just because there are so many different inter-
pretations as to what the Bible means. It is the sad
result of the doctrine of the right of private judg-
ment. Every Protestant denomination claims to be
founded on the Scriptures. Then how can they all
be right? Is the Methodist right, or the Lutheran, or
the Baptist or the Episcopalian? They can’t be right,
for they all differ in doctrine and government. If
they do not differ, then why are they separated?
Protestantism says, “Let each one read the Bible for
himself and then the Holy Ghost will guide him into
the truth.” Well, then the Holy Ghost must be
blamed for the Babylon of religions around us. If
the Holy Ghost guides one man he becomes a Bap-
tist, if he guides another he becomes something else
and so on until people give up religion entirely. The
Holy Ghost inspires no one using his own private
interpretation. The Holy Ghost was guaranteed to
the Church and not to individuals in the teaching of
truth.

By way of analogy, suppose our Constitution of
the United States could be termed our Bible of De-
mocracy Just think what confusion would happen
if every Tom, Dick, and Harry using the right of
private judgment interpreted the laws of our nation
as he felt himself inspired by the Holy Ghost. See
what would soon happen to our 48 states if we didn’t



22 LUTHER AND PRIVATE JUDGMENT
have the Supreme Court to tell us what the Constitu-
tion is saying. Without the Supreme Court our nation
would come to an end as a democracy if we tolerated
in government the absurd and fallacious principle of
private judgment. As we must maintain a Supreme
Court in government is it not all the more rational
and reasonable that we have a Supreme Authority
to interpret the Bible, our Constitution of Christianity,
to avoid religious confusion? The proper authority
to interpret the Bible is the Supreme Court of the
Catholic Church, which gave the Bible to the world.

55. Was Luther responsible for the private judgment
theory?
Yes. It was inaugurated by him and shortly after,

when he saw the numerous sects growing and multi-
plying, he said in his Epis. ad. Zwingl (ap. Balmes, p.
423), “If the world lasts for a long time, it will again
be necessary, on account of the many interpretations
which are now given to the Scriptures, to receive
the decrees of councils, and take refuge in them, in
order to preserve the unity of faith/’

56. Did Luther ever acknowledge the danger of pri-
vate judgment?
He says this, as quoted in “An Meine Kritiker’* (by

Johannes Jorgensen, p. 181), “There are almost as many
sects and beliefs as there are heads; this one will
not admit Baptism; that one rejects the Sacrament
of the altar; another places another world between
the present one and the day of judgment; some teach
that Jesus Christ is not God. There is not an indi-
vidual, however clownish he may be, who does not
claim to be inspired by the Holy Ghost, and who
does not put forth as prophecies his ravings and
dreams.’’ We have over 60 millions of Americans
quite indifferent to the doctrines of their Protestant
ancestors precisely because

—
“In Religion,

What damned error, but some sober-brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text?”

57. Some books speak of 72 books and others speak
of 73 books in the Catholic Bible.
Some editors unite the Prophecies of Jeremias with

the Lamentations of Jeremias and make one book out
of both, thereby accounting for 72 books, and other
editors separate Jeremias and Lamentations entirely
into two books making thereby 73 books.

58. Where do you get the statement that Luther
discovered the Bible?
In the Lutheran World Almanac and Annual En-

cyclopedia for 1923, you will find the hoary falsehood
running thus: The “incomparable Luther’* gave to



SIMPLICITY OF BIBLE 23

the world “The Open Bible . . .M “In the university
he discovered a chained Latin Bible/' the study of
which “brought him the peace of mind which he craved
the assurance of justification and of salvation by faith
alone, without the works of the law . . .” That there
was a “chained” Latin Bible in the university is very
likely. Even today public telephone books are chained
for the purpose of keeping them in their proper place.
Bibles were chained down to the pulpit, rostrum or
monastery table, for there were thieves in those days
as there are thieves today. The Church chained the
Bible not to keep the Bible from but for the people.
A Bible in those days, declares the Protestant scholar.
Dr. Maitland, would cost anywhere from $1,000 up,
because it was a manuscript copy made on costly
parchment or vellum. You will find Bibles still chained
down today in churches on the continent of the Old
World, in monasteries, and twentieth century museums,
for obvious reasons. That Luther had access to the
Bible in his youth is attested by himself in his “Table
Talks” (ed. 1566, p. 22). “When I was young, I acquaint-
ed myself with the Bible, read the same often, so that I
knew where any reference was contained and could
be found when anyone spoke about it.”

59. The Gospel of Christ is simplicity itself.
In one way it is. It tells us clearly that Christ

established a definite Church which He commissioned
to teach all nations. It is very simple from this
point of view, for men have but to accept the Cath-
olic Church, and be taught by that Church. But the
Gospel is not simplicity itself in the way you intend.
Men have devoted their lives to the study of the Gos-
pels, preparing themselves for the task by profound
research in the Hebrew, Syrian, Arabic, Greek, and
Latin languages. And even then, many passages are
most difficult to understand.

60. But at least the plan of salvation can be under-
stood by the simplest person. We Protestants even
tell our children to read their Bibles in order to dis-
cern it.
According to the findings of your simple readers

there must be hundreds of conflicting plans of salva-
tion, all revealed by the one Christ. As for the capaci-
ty of your children, you might as well give them the
article in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on “Spectro-
scopic Analysis” as the subject matter of their studies.
But the Bible itself is against your theory. Thus, St.
Peter says that in Scripture there are certain things
“hard to be understood, which the unlearned and
unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures,
to their own destruction.” II. Pet. III., 16. To his



24 RIGHT OF INTERPRETING #
’

mind the private interpretation of Scripture can be
most dangerous.

6J. God has given us brains to think for ourselves.
We do not need help to understand Scripture.
God had given men brains before He came to teach

them Himself, and He came to teach them precisely
because their brains could not succeed in finding out
the things which were to their peace. If you say
that His revealed teachings in the Scriptures together
with our brains are enough, those very revealed teach-
ings tell you that they are not. Even in the Old Law,
God said, “The lips of the priest shall keep knowledge,
and they shall seek the law at his mouth.” Mai. II., 7.
In the New Law, Christ sent His Church to teach men,
transferring to His Church that authority of God
once possessed by the priests of the Old Law. In
the New Testament itself, we find Philip the Deacon
saying to the Ethiopian, who was reading the Scrip-
tures, “Thinkest thou that thou understandest what
thou readest?” and the Ethiopian replying, “And how
can I unless some man show me?” Acts VIII., 30.
St. Peter, too, explicitly refutes your ideas. “No
prophecy of Scripture,” he writes, “is of any private
interpretation.” II. Pet. I., 20.

62. St. Peter means that the prophets did not proph-
esy by their own will, but by the Holy Spirit. He
does not refer to interpretation by us.
Your own Protestant Bishop Ellicott says of these

verses. “The words ‘private interpretation* might seem
to mean that the sacred writers did not get their proph-
ecies by private interpretation, but by divine inspira-
tion. But this is certainly not the meaning. The real
meaning is that the reader must not presume to inter-
pret privately that which is far more than ordinary
human thought.**

63. Any man who can think has the moral right
to interpret anything.
He has not. The very laws of the state are not

subject to the interpretation of each and every cit-
izen. There is such a thing as thinking erroneously.
In difficulties of civil law a man consults' a lawyer
who knows legal practice and parallel statutes. Who
gives you the right to take greater liberties with di-
vine legislation? A man who knows nothing of He-
brew or Greek, and is quite untrained in Scriptural
exegesis, would misapprehend the sense of Scripture
in hundreds of places.

64. Did not Christ promise that He would send the
Holy Spirit to teach us all truth?
He did not promise that the Holy Spirit would teach

each individual separately. If every individual were



BELIEVING WHAT PRIESTS TELL 25

under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, all who read
Scripture sincerely, should come to the same con-
clusion. But they do not. The frightful chaos as tc
the meaning of Scripture is proof positive that the
Holy Spirit has not chosen this way of leading men
to the truth. It is blasphemy to say that the Holy
Spirit does not know His own mind, and that He
deliberately leads men into contradictory notions.
Christ promised to preserve His Church as a Church
by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the only
Church which shows signs of having been preserved
is the consistent Catholic Church. The individual is
guided by the Holy Spirit to a certain extent in the
ways of holiness, but in the knowledge of revealed
truth he is to be guided by the Catholic Church which
Christ sent to teach all nations.

65. I don’t see the need of learning to understand
a simple story for simple people.
The Bible is not a simple story for simple people.

We live thousands of years after the Bible was writ-
ten, and our language and customs are very different
now. No book written at one age is easy for another
age. The study of antiquities demands a knowledge
of primitive languages of which few are capable, and
for which still fewer have the time. Anyway, God
never intended the Bible to be the sole guide to re-
ligion for all time. Christ taught orally and with
authority, and He sent His Church to teach in the
same way and with the same authority.

• 66. How does it help to know Hebrew or Greek?
Because one must khow what the original words

meant in the language in which Scripture was written.
A knowledge of Hebrew and Greek soon shows that
the translators do not always find an English word
to express the exact sense of the original. God in-
spired the thoughts of the original writers, not the
work of the translators. And if you read a sense
into Scripture which God did not intend at all, you
no longer have God’s Wor£.

67. Christ chose poor fishermen, not learned men.
He trained them personally, and infused into their

minds an exact knowledge of His doctrine. We can-
not claim to have received a similar revelation, that
we should rank ourselves with them.

68. Then Catholics have to believe Just what the
priest likes to tell them?
The priest cannot tell the people just what he likes.

He is obliged to teach just what Christ taught, and
which has been taught him in the Name of Christ
by the infallible Catholic Church.



26 ONLY RULE OF FAITH

69. Is your Church afraid that people will form
opinions for themselves?

If we consider some of the opinions people have
formed for themselves from their private reading of
Scripture there is need to be afraid. Christ’s method
was to establish a teaching Church. Protestants have
a peculiar method of their own, but you cannot blame
the Catholic Church for not using the Protestant
method, a method which has led to nothing but un-
certainty and widespread unbelief.

70. Admitting the necessity of guidance, are not
our Protestant ministers as capable as Catholic priests
in telling us what Scripture means?
They might be, if priests had not an infallible Cath-

olic Church to guide them. The Catholic Church re-
joices in the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, and
the priest has the help of her defined doctrines and
the constant Catholic tradition as a safeguard. But
your Protestant ministers do not claim to be spokes-
men of an infallible Church. On their own principles
they have to admit that they are possibly wrong. And,
as a matter of fact, where all priests are agreed in
the essential teachings of Scripture, your ministers
come to all kinds of contradictory conclusions. The
unity of teaching among Catholic priests is a greater
indication of capability than the chaos which pre-
vails outside the Catholic Church. But the capability
of Catholic priests has little to do with authoritative
teaching. It is derived from the authority of the in-
fallible Catholic Church.

71. You speak of the authority of the Church and
the weight of tradition. But I have been taught that
Scripture is the only rule of faith.

You have been taught wrongly. Scripture itself
denies that it is the only rule of faith. The last verse
of St. John’s Gospel tells us that not all concerning
our Lord’s work is contained in Scripture. St. Paul
tells us over and over again that many might be able
to cite hundreds of texts yet not know Christian
doctrine by any means. In fact, the adoption of
the Bible only has led to as many opinions as there
are men amongst non-Catholics. Finally, Scripture
tells us most clearly that the Catholic Church is the
rule of faith, that Church which Christ sent to teach
all nations and which He commanded men to hear
and obey. He who believes in Scripture as his only
guide ends by believing in his own mistaken inter-
pretations of the Bible, and that means that he ends
by believing in himself.



SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES 27

72. Is not the Church built on the knowledge it
gets from the Bible?
No. The Catholic Church was tfuilt by Christ and

upon Christ before a line of the New Testament was
written. She received her doctrine immediately from
the lips of Christ, and is safeguarded from error in
her teaching by the Holy Spirit. Between 40 and 80
years after her foundation, some of her members
wrote the books of the New Testament. If the Gos-
pels were the only rule of faith, then before they were
written there could have been no Christian rule of
faith at all!

73. Christ gave us the command to search the Scrip-
tures. Jn. V., 39.
That was a retort, not a command, and you cannot

turn a particular rebuke into a universal law. Were
it a universal law, it would have been impossible of
fulfillment by the vast majority during the 14 cen-
turies prior to the invention of the printing press!
But take the context. The Jews, who boasted of their
fidelity to the Mosaic Law, would not believe in Christ.
He challenged them: “(You) search the Scriptures,
for you think in them to have life everlasting; and
the same are they that give testimony of me.” The
Catholic Church could say in the same way to Prot-
estants: “You are ever speaking of searching the Scrip-
tures as opposed to my methods, and think in them
to have everlasting life independently of me; yet
the same are they that give testimony of me.”

74. Do we not read that the early Christians searched
the Scriptures daily? Acts, XVII., 11.
They first received the true doctrine from the teach-

ing Church, and then merely checked it in the Scrip-
tures. That is the right procedure, and Catholics to-
day do the same. But your way is not first to be
taught by the Church, and then verify, but to try to
make out your own religion from the Bible with an
untrained mind and by that private interpretation
which Scripture itself forbids.

75. Well, I am afraid of nothing as long as I have
the pure Word of God to fall back upon.
Without the Catholic Church you cannot prove it

to be the pure Word of God. Nor need anyone be
afraid of the pure Word of God. What we must fear
is the Word of God adulterated by people who read
into it whatever they like.

76. I object to the way ^ou put human traditions on
the same level as Scripture.
As a source of doctrine the Catholic Church relies

upon divinely guaranteed tradition, not upon merely



28 BIBLE AND TRADITION

human tradition. This divine tradition is the teach-
ing of Christ, given orally to the Apostles and handed
down in the Church, although not written in the
pages of the New Testament.

77. Then you appeal to tradition in addition to
Scripture?

Yes, and I am quite Biblical in doing so. Christ
sent the Apostles to teach all things that He had
taught them. In the last verse of his Gospel, St.
John tells us that not all is written in Scripture. If
all is to be taught, and all is not set down in Scrip-
ture, part of Christian doctrine must be elsewhere.
Where? St. Paul tells us clearly, “Brethren, stand
fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned,
whether by word, or by our Epistle ” II. Thess. II.,
14. “Hold the form of sound words which you have
heard of me in faith.” II. Tim. I., 13. “The things
thou hast heard of me by many witnesses, the same
commend to faithful men, who shall be fit to teach
others also.” II. Tim II., 2 All Christians from the
very beginning believed that Christian revelation was
contained not only in Scripture, but also in tradi-
tion. Acts II., 42, tells us that “they were persever-
ing in the doctrine of the Apostles,” that is, in the
oral teaching of the Apostles which they taught to
one another, and handed on to their children. Those
who repudiate tradition have lost the complete doc-
trine of Christ.

78. I do not question traditions contained in Scrip-
ture. I object to the Roman traditions which are "not
in Scripture and which are against Scripture.
The Catholic Church rejects all traditions which are

against Scripture. She accepts divine traditions which
are complementary to Scripture, and which are in
perfect harmony with the principles taught in Scrip-
ture. The traditions themselves cannot be in Scrip-
ture for the traditional Word of God cannot be the
written Word of God. But Scripture itself says that
tradition exists, and that it is of equal authority with
that written Word of God.

79. Did not Christ blame the Pharisees, saying,
“Why do you transgress the commandment of God
for your tradition”? Matt. XV., 3.

He did, but he called it their tradition, condemning
their erroneous and merely human tradition, not the
right traditions to which, according to St. Paul, we
must hold fast. You quote this text merely because
it happens to contain the word tradition, and without
any appreciation of its true sense.



APOSTOLIC TRADITIONS 29

80. St. Paul himself warns us, “Beware lest any
man cheat you by philosophy and vain deceit; accord-
ing to the tradition of men, according to the elements
of the world, and not according to Christ.” Coloss.
II., 8.

The text warns us against wrong traditions, but in
no way condemns traditions which are not merely of
human invention, but which are according to Christ.
St. Paul does not contradict his own teaching.

81. St. Peter condemns tradition, saying, “You were
not redeemed by your vain conversation of the tra-
dition of your fathers.” I. Pet. I., 18.
This is not a condemnation of Christian traditions,

but of doctrines held by those to whom St. Peter
wrote, and handed on to them by human tradition
from their fathers. These were the traditions our
Lord condemned in Matt. XV., 3.

82. I admit the force of Apostolic traditions for the
early Christians. But they could be sure of them as
we cannot today.
Were the Apostolic traditions part of the Christian

faith then? Is it therefore impossible to know the
full Christian truth now? Did Christ mean it when He
said that He would be with His Church all days till
the very end of the world? Or would you suggest
that He meant it, but could not accomplish it? He
sent the Church to teach all things, yet you say that
it is impossible today. Be sure that the Catholic
Church has all necessary traditions embodied in her
teachings. Within her fold each succeeding generation
of Bishops has taught faithful men who have been
fit to teach others also. But you refuse to be taught
by that Church. You rely upon your own fallible
judgment. And as long as you adopt that method
you will never be sure, not only of the Christian tra-
ditions, but even of the true Christian doctrine to
be derived from Scripture itself.

83. You keep insisting, not only upon tradition, but
also upon the teaching authority of your Church.
Why follow her interpretations?
Because we cannot safely follow the interpretation

given by anybody else. All guides except the Catholic
Church confess to being fallible. The Catholic Church
alone claims infallibility, and proves her claim. I
prefer to follow so sure a guide. Those who refuse
to do so are at sixes and sevens as to the true mean-
ing of Christianity.

84. Have not laymen as much intelligence as priests?
Apart from the fact that priests give, not their own

human ideas, but the teachings of the Catholic Church,



30 QUALIFICATIONS TO INTERPRET

it is certain that the layman cannot know theological
matters as do priests, even as you are not as well
acquainted with jurisprudence and surgery as lawyers
and doctors. A specialist in a subject, by years of
study, is bound to know more of that subject than
the man in the street. If an average man is so liable
to error in the interpretation of human law, how can
he have the vanity to think himself expert in the
interpretation of divine legislation?

85. What special qualifications has the Catholic
Church in the interpretation of Scripture?

1. The New Testament was written by members of
the Catholic Church. She existed before a line of
the New Testament was written. Protestantism came
on the scene centuries afterwards. The Gospels are
really the family papers of the Catholic Church, and
she alone, possessing the family traditions, can inter-
pret what those family papers really mean.

2. The Catholic Church carefully and jealously pre-
served the Bible through the ages, so that Protestants
would have no Gospel were it not for her.

3. She has been much more faithful to Scripture
than any of the Protestant Churches. Whilst many
Protestant leaders are prepared to sacrifice the Bible
in order to appear scientific and modern, the Catholic
Church consistently demands that every jot and tittle
of God’s Word must be accepted in the original sense
intended by God.

4. The Protestant Churches owe their separate ex-
istences to the fact that each denies that the others
really know what Scripture means.

5. The Catholic Church was established by Christ
as the rule of faith, and He declared that a man is
to be regarded as a heathen if he will not hear the
Church. The Catholic Church is the only qualified
interpreter of Scripture.

86. The Bible tells us to prove all things. I. Thess.
V., 21. The Catholic Church demands that her ad-
herents prove nothing, accepting all on her authority,
and without question.
Have you proved all things? Your own fantastic

interpretations show that you have not. The text
you quote has a meaning very different from that you
attribute to it. It refers to conduct. The full text is,
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
From all appearance of evil refrain yourselves.” In
other words, “Reflect, test, examine your conscience
before you act. and do the right thing.” In the same
way, St. Paul said that one who desires to receive
the Holy Eucharist must “prove himself, and so let
him eat, for he that eateth and drinketh unworthily,



SAYINGS OF MINISTERS 31

eateth and drinketh judgment to himself.” I. Cor.
XI., 28. Your interpretation of Catholic requirements
is just as fantastic. The Catholic Church does not
demand that her adherents prove nothing. She wants
them to examine the reasons for their Catholic faith,
and prove the claims of their Church. We prove
that she is the only possible Church historically. Scrip-
turally, and logically, and that she must be infallible.
Then when she speaks in the Name of Christ we rea-
sonably accept her teachings. If I consult a doctor
whom I know to be competent, I accept his decisions.
I do not fight every inch of the way, disputing, argu-
ing, and challenging his statements. So, once I know
that the Catholic Church is divinely qualified to speak
the truth in religious matters, I accept her decisions
and definitions. Nothing could be more wise than that.
In fact, it would be sheer folly to do otherwise.

What Non-Catholics say about Protestantism and the
Bible:

Addressing the “Bible League,” Dr. Booth says:
“If the assaults on the* Scriptures continue, the time

will come when to those always faithful to God there
will be but one refuge, and that will be the Homan
Catholic Church.”

Says the Rev. C. Tinsley, a Methodist minister:
“The Bible is a very embarrassing book because of

its many contradictions.” ^
In “History of Literature” by Hallam, we read:
“The translation of the Old and the New Testaments

by Luther is more renowned for the purity of his
German idiom than for its adherence to the original
text. Simon has charged him with ignorance of He-
brew and when we consider how late he came to a
knowledge of that or the Greek language, and the
multiplicity of his employments, it may be believed
that his knowledge of them was far from extensive.”
The Rev. Dr. Aked, a Baptist minister, writing in

“Appleton’s Magazine,” Sept., 1908, said:
“In the pages of the Protestant Version of the Bible

are to be found historical errors, arithmetical mis-
takes, inconsistencies and manifold contradictions*
and, what is far worse, one finds that the most horri-
ble crimes are committed by men who plea, ‘God said,*
in justification. of their terrible misdeeds. Moreover,
the English Bible is a version of a version which is a
translation of a translation. It has come down through
Hebrew, Greek and Latin into English. In all its
earlier stages it was copied by hand from one man-
uscript to another by different writers, a process cer-
tain to result in many mistakes.*’ <



32 DEFENDER OF THE BIBLE

The Anglican Bishop of London, Eng., Dr. Ingraham,
says:

“At the present moment, there is only one Church
in England that officially accepts the Scriptures as
the infallible Word of God, and that Church is the
Church of Rome.'’

Dr. Decosta said:
“The Church of Home stands before the English-

speaking world and Protestants everywhere as the
solitary defender of the Bible in its integrity and en-
tirety.**

The Rev. O. J. Nelson, of Bellingham, Wash., says:
“Strictly speaking, none but the Catholic has an

infallible Bible and none but the Catholic can be
rightly called an orthodox Christian. . . . There is
only 1 Christian Church of real and consistent au-
thority and that is the Catholic Church.

Charles Butler, in his “Horae Biblicae,” says:
“For the sacred writings which contain the Word

of God, and for the traditions of the wise and good
respecting it, we are almost wholly indebted, under
Providence, to the zeal and exertion of the priests
and monks of the Church of Rome.**

The Protestant Biblical critic, George Campbell,
says:

“The Vulgate may be pronounced, on the whole,
a good and faithful version.’*

An editorial in the New York “Sun,” says:
“The time is coming, if, indeed, it has not already,

when these Churches must take their stand definitely
and decidedly on the question whether the Bible is
of God or only of man. As it is now, the Pope is the
sole bold, positive and uncompromising champion of
the Bible as the Word of God.’*

Rev. Dr. A. S. Crapscy, addressing the “Free Re-
ligious Association”:

“Most of the Protestant denominations are drifting
backward, gravitating toward the Catholic. They are
losing their intellectual leadership by not keeping pace
with the scholars. Protestantism will follow and obey
the law of gravitation, disintegrate, and thus lose all
power.**

The Methodist Bishop, Dr. Sellew:
“The spirit of Protestantism is declining in America

with the progress of Catholicism. It is dying, and will
soon be a thing of the past.**



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9