Coulton, George CJordon, 1858- Medieval studies ... no. 14. .im ':¦ I': X5a ^it i A YJ4- YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Bought with the income ofthe EDWARD WELLS SOUTHWORTH FUND flb^Meval StuMee 1Pio. 14. Thfe Roman CathoHc Church and the Bible. SOME HISTORICAL NOTES. G: p. GOULTON M.A^.Tamb, Hon. I>,Litt, - Durham, SECQNI> EDITION Revis&d and Enlarged; PtJB.%ISif)ED BY SIMPKIN, MARSHA:LL,,. HAMILTON; KENT & CQ,^, Ltd,, 4, STATIONEttsk HALt' COURT, LoNDOIJ, %C,^ 4, 192 1, PRJCE TWO SHILLINGS^' PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. There is evidently a much wider general interest in his subject than the author had anticipated, for he is agreeably surprised by the call for a second edition after a few weeks. The pamphlet might easily be expanded into a book, but he has no leisure to do more than bring it into directer relation with that Catholic Bible Congress to which it owes its origin. He has learned much in this interval from the judgments which have come to his notice — public or private, favourable or adverse. The little that was said at the Congress itself was very significatit ; still more suggestive was the silence of speakers upon more important points. And one fact has very clearly emerged, that both approval and disapproval are mainly concentrated not on the brief comments, but on the plain facts contained in this pamphlet. The things which have given most offence to the hierarchy are precisely those things which nobody ventures publicly to deny or to defend ; it is not my adjectives which have cut to the quick, but my substantives. My critics will very likely carry on the old guerilla warfare for years in the comparative safety of their own journals ; but I am unable, upon diligent enquiry, to hear that there is any intention of taking up my direct challenge, and discussing any part of this pamphlet within the same covers as my replies. We must, however, make real allowance for the healthy dislike of public wrangling, which certainly weighs heavily with the average hardworking Catholic priest and doubtless with some also among his superiors. But no such plea can be urged in favour of those who are specifically exposed in the following pages. Cardinal Gasquet published in The DubUn Review, and re-published years afterwards in cold blood, a merciless attack upon two separate editors, confessedly amateurs in medieval history, which had not even the merit of strict accuracy in fact, and in which he quite illegitimately implied that these two were typical specimens of non-Catholic medieval scholarship* Dr Pope's name would have been almost unknown to me but for his grossly unfair attack upon Miss Deanesly ; Dr Barry and Father Thurston have grown grey in controversy against non-Catholics ; Mr Belloc has * This article made sport with the textual errors in Mr Kirby's edition of Wykeham's Register, and Dr Bridges's of the Opus Majus. Yet neither of these editions is comparable in textual inaccuracies with the only text of equivalent length which the Cardinal himself has ever edited — the so-called Collectanea Praemonsfratensia,- all the positive and negative virtues of a condottiere of the golden age ; and Father Knox will perhaps be remembered, fifty years hence, as one of the keenest satirists in our literature. If not one of these men has accepted a challenge which ought to leave me at their mercy, it is because those Roman Catholics who know most about these subjects are precisely those who most painfully realize the weakness of their general case. In France, the hierarchy have before now suffered equally damaging exposures with no less patient silence. Those who wish for further light on the more modern part of this subject may read A, Houtin, La Question Biblique (2nd ed., 11902), A, Fawkes, Studies in Modernism (1913), and the different articles contributed to The Contemporary Review by well-informed Roman Catholics between 1894 and 1900, together with the replies by other Roman Catholics who differed from them. The greater part of this pamphlet stands here as in the first edition ; nobody has yet pointed out any definite error of fact, except so far as my statement on p, 18 needs modification in the light of the long note which I now append. Portions were attacked, in a very desultory fashion, at the Congress ; with those attacks I deal in additional notes or appendices. One, however, must be specially noted here. A paid large- type advertisement in a Cambridge paper warned readers that I had been answered in The Tablet. Dr Arendzen, at the first meeting of the Congress, told his flock the same; and, when I rose to beg the audience, in a single sentence, to suspend their judgment until the following Tablet^ Cardinal Bourne warned me that this was not a place for " debate," but for putting questions to the speakers. Next day, when Father Langdon spoke for more than ten minutes, entirely off the order of the day, upon a point raised in my pamphlet, I rose again to protest that there was obviously no time to debate this fully at the moment, but that I was always ready to discuss it with him on paper ; whereupon the Chairman again referred me to the columns of The Tablet. It is in connexion with these facts that the pubhc must read Appendix i, which shows how desperately the Editor of that paper strove — though fortunately, with indifferent success — to deny me the promised fair-play in his columns. Vevey, Aug, 23, 1921, THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURcH AND THE BIBLE, By G. G. Coulton. TABLE OF CONTENTS. A. The Literary Record of the Speakers advertised FOR THIS Congress, Cardinal Gasquet has frequently reprinted quite indefensible mis-statements of fact, in spite of their pubhc exposure, p. 4, The same writer, having concealed for " many years " his conviction of the inaccuracy of certain widely-advertised statements in defence of his Church, publicly confessed that conviction only after those statements had been rendered untenable and ridiculous by non-Catholic critics. p, 6, Dr Hugh Pope has shown not only astounding carelessness and ignorance, but a definite want of candour, on the subject of the Wycliflfite Bible. p, 8. Father Ronald Knox has shown a naive ignorance of the actual spirit of his new Church. That spirit, in Bible matters, is exemplified in Pope Innocent III, p. 9. Canon Barry has made definite and important mis-statements which he has not dared to defend under public criticism, yet has not had the candour to retract, p, 10. ' Conclusion : let us give these coming speakers all credit if they succeed in rising above these bad precedents ; but let us narrowly observe their silences as well as their actual statements. p, 12. B, The Biblical Policy of the Roman Church. (i) St Jerome encouraged by a Pope, but without much substantial help from him or his successors, p, 16, I (2) His version had a hard struggle against the conservatism ofthe Church, p. 17, ((3) He himself deliberately retained certain inaccuracies in deference to that conservatism, p. 17. (4) And, in the natural ignorance of those days, committed a few more serious mis-translations, p. 17. (5) But when, after centuries, his version had become the Authorised Version of his Church {Vulgata^, it practi cally superseded the original Greek and Hebrew Bible, p. 17. (6) Hence Popes have refused to let the faithful publicly discuss the accuracy of Vulgate texts which few scholars, even among Catholics, would dare seriousty to defend. p. 18. (7) For, if once impartial criticism were admitted, much of the present Vulgate would become indefensible, p. 18. (8) Yet, while thus worshipping the very letter of the Vulgate, the Church has neglected ordinary business methods of keeping it uncorrupted. P- 19 (9) The greatest of modern Catholic scholars has confessed that the Vulgate was given over in the Middle Ages to " mere caprice." p. 20, (10) A few private scholars could do nothing, at that time, in the face of official indifference or hostility, p. 21. (11) Not until 1590 did any Pope publish an officially "correct" edition ; and that edition was superseded in 1592 by one differing in more than 3,000 places. p. 21. (12) Half a century ago, the great Vatican MS. of the Bible, printed by Papal scholars at a cost of £ii> per copy, resulted in an inexcusably inaccurate edition, p. 22, (13) The present Papal Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate is presided over by a man who has shown astounding ignorance of Vulgate Latin, of textual criticism, and even of Bible texts. This Bible-ignor ance is characteristic of other well-known Roman Catholic scholars of to-day. p. 23. (14) Until comparatively recent times the Bible was steadily kept away from the people by Popes and clergy. p, 24. (15) Brief exposure of the distortion df these facts by Johannes Janssen and Cardinal Gasquet. p. 25. (16) The idea of the "open Bible" for the laity is in fact quite modern ; from at least 1080 to 1846 not only Papal pronouncements but practically all priestly opinion was against it ; and it is no.w being attempted to cover this change of policy by the falsification of historical facts. p. 21. Notes. p. 29, Appendix. p. 3^ Upon the inner life of the individual Roman Catholic no man has a right to trespass ; to his own Master he stands or falls. Christ's general test of by their fruits ye shall know them, again, is less clearly applicable to the individual than to the community ; it is only gradually, and over a long stretch of time, that the world can hope to trace any clear distinction between the lives of Catholics and Non-Catholics, If the Roman Church contented itself with saying " We hold the only true faith among all the clash of beliefs and disbeliefs in this universe ; we hold the only true faith, and the whole world may see this in our lives," then it would be in an unassailable position. But this Church has never shown such implicit belief in its own faith ; its advocates have constantly appealed to history for confirmation of their claims. At this very moment, they are preparing and advertising such a public appeal, with considerable solemnity, here in Cambridge. To this town they are coming self-summoned ; neither officially nor unofficially has the University invited them hither ; the courtesies which are being extended to them would have been extended equally to a Wesleyan or a Baptist Conference. Yet, though they come thus uninvited, the English-speaking public will connect this Congress, and will be encouraged to connect it, with the University ; it will be noised abroad that the Roman Catholic hierarchy has publicly displayed its learning in this ancient seat of learning. Their very choice of a University town is a tacit challenge to University scholarship ; they are making a widely advertised appeal to history, and to history they must go. Discussion at the University of Cambridge is absolutely free ; we have two settlements of Roman Catholic students to whom the fullest privileges are extended ; and, if any lecturer here were in the habit of falsifying historical facts in an anti-Catholic direction, his position would soon become impossible. Therefore this present Congress, coming into such an atmosphere, must be content to plead before the bar of real history, and not merely before a packed tribunal of its own, carefully arranged on the most unimpeachable basis of intellectual subservience, and pledged beforehand to a verdict of triumphant acquittal. In 4 this twentieth century, the hierarchy — or, in default of the hierarchy, healthy Catholic opinion — must make an end of those scandals which have vexed the best souls in that communion, from the Middle Ages down to our own day. They must render it no longer possible for their most honest and ablest men to write, as Cardinal Newman wrote after 19 years' experience within the Roman Catholic Church, " nothing would be better than an historical review [for Catholics], but who would bear it ? Unless one doctored all one's facts, one should [sic] be thought a bad Catholic (1)." The present Catholic Bible Congress does indeed afford the fullest guarantees on one side ; the Pope has blessed it, and it is to be graced by two Cardinals with their attendant Archbishops, Bishops and Professors ; certainlj' all these men are not " bad Catholics," and on that score the orthodox may feel secure. But how is the Cambridge public, for its part, to know that this very orthodoxy may not be almost as sure a token of "doctored facts" as it seemed to Newman in 1867? The two most important addresses of the Congress will not be open even to any pretence of discussion, and the morning lectures themselves are evidently to be discussed mainly, if not entirely, by the good Catholics whose names are advertised on the official programme. (2) In default, therefore, of the ordinary safeguards afforded by free debate, we must seek for guarantees of scholarship and honesty in the speakers' previous records, i.e, in their own printed writings. And here the evidence is most disquieting. Of all the speakers advertised for this Congress, none has published so much, or has been so enthusiastically supported by his fellow Catholics, or has been rewarded with such high and repeated Papal approbation, as Cardinal Gasquet. Yet this writer has habitually employed literary methods which cannot be alleged, I believe, against any other living historian in the civilized world. He has based one of his most important arguments in favour of Roman Catholics and the Bible upon a misstatement of fact so ludicrous and so easily verifiable that he might almost as reasonably have denied the speUing of his own name. In itself, the blunder showed nothing worse than a very exceptional carelessness ; and few indeed are the writers who have not had their careless moments. But this particular blunder was, very naturally, exposed with a publicity corre sponding to its incomprehensible nature and its intrinsic importance ; the few scholars who had been following a very tangled discussion, now began to ask themselves how the Cardinal would be able to maintain his main proposition after this dramatic crash of one of its main props ; but their curiosity remained unsatisfied ; for at this very point the Cardinal, who had hitherto been most voluble in defence of his thesis in all its details, suddenly lapsed into complete silence. This, however regrettable, is unfortunately not unparalleled ; we see sometimes how, even in Science, a man of great reputation will rather seek refuge in silence than confess publicly to a published error. But the one quite unparalleled feature in Cardinal Gasquet's case is that, a second edition of his book having been called for some years later, when the scandal might have been thought to have died down, he nevertheless republished, without a word of excuse or explana tion, and without even the temptation of stereotype plates, not only the original falsehood but also the whole argument based upon it. Full details of this story will be found in my note ; and any reader who troubles to follow that page will realize how impossible it would be to match this in civilized modern society ; indeed, the very accusation is so gross as to reflect, in a superficial sense, upon the man who makes it. Yet I write here only what I have printed more than once elsewhere, with full publicity and under a sense of great responsibility ; no man has yet ventured to impugn my facts or to defend the Cardinal ; and, whatever shame there may be in this page, let it fall upon the writer who perpetrated, and upon the hierarchy which still continues tacitly or actively to countenance, the thing here exposed. For this incident, though the grossest and least complicated of its kind, is far from being unique. In the second edition of my Medieval Studies I published a list of nearly 200 blunders or literary dishonesties in the Cardinal's writings ; the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement drew attention to these as constituting "the chief interest in the new edition," and decided that my plain language was entirely justified, (3) Yet, so far as I am aware, nobody has dared to defend these any more than they dared to defend that other ; and now the hierarchy are sufficiently ignorant of the facts, or sufficiently impenitent, to bring this writer down as the main champion of Roman Catholic learning before a University town. Under such circumstances as these, the plainest speech becomes necessary, for Roman Catholic historians have already traded too long upon the contemptuous silence of other medievalists. It would be apposite to quote here, however, one most significant incident which I omitted from my list in that book, but which will enable the Cambridge audience to estimate the evidential value of the Cardinal's reticences when he lectures to us upon the history of Vulgate Revision. In 1893 Father J. B. Mackinlay -published a life of St Edmund, King and Martyr, which sought to prove that his bones, providentially saved from destruction at the English Reformation, had been brought safely to Toulouse. Amid a host of absurd arguments, one seemed to offer at least a striking coincidence. The great shrine at Bury St Edmunds contained the body minus one arm, since that arm was habitually carried publicly by the monks in solemn processions. The Toulouse skeleton, similarly, lacked the radius, or small bone of the fore-arm ; and this fact was claimed as clinching Father Mackinlay's proof ; " its recorded and unchallenged existence in England estabHshes the authen ticity of the rest of the body in France.'' The historical arguments in this book, one of the strangest that ever was written, convinced the English hierarchy, who obtained with great difficulty, by Papal intervention, these same Toulouse bones as a treasure for the Duke of Norfolk's magnificent new church at Arundel. The ceremony of translation was advertised with great solemnity. Then a Cambridge scholar of the highest reputation, Dr M. R. James, wrote to The Times exposing the historical absurdity of the whole theory (Aug, 2, 1901). This gave rise to a very long and lively correspondence, in which no Roman Catholic inter vened except to defend the relics, which were still more strenuously defended all this time by their official organ, The Tablet. At last, on Sept. 9, the position became so ridiculous and so obviously untenable as to compel Cardinal Vaughan, the Primate, publicly to confess that he had been deceived ; that he could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the bones so ostentatiously brought to Arundel ; but that the faithful might worship them at their own risk. Four days eariier than this, Sir Ernest Clarke, in a letter which had swept away the last defences, pointed out that this striking *' coincidence " of the forearm rested simply on an elementary blunder, and that there was no record of this arm ever being carried in procession at Bury. Next day, for the first time. Cardinal Gasquet intervened in the discussion {Times, Sept. 6), The blunder was his ; it was he who had misread a document in haste and had mistaken St Botolph's arm for St Edmund's ; and it was upon this mistake that the ingenious Father Mackinlay had based the one comparatively reasonable argu ment in his whole book. The chronology of these incidents is very significant. It was in 1891 that Cardinal Gasquet had first shpped into this blunder (Christmas number of The Tablet). In 1893 Father Mackinlay built upon it in that book which did much to encourage one of the most widely-advertised movements in his Church during this century. On August 2, 1901, a scholar of European reputation pricked the bubble ; on the 24th Cardinal Gasquet's name was imported into the con troversy ; on September 5, his blunder was explicitly exposed ; next day he himself intervened for the first time, abandoning an untenable position, pleading that he would have written " last week, but for reasons which I need not explain,'' and admitting that " since I first became acquainted with the subject, many years ago, I have never seen any reason to doubt that the entire body of St Edmund remained at Bury up to the time of the dissolution of that monastery." From these facts, without any speculative enquiries into circumstances and motives, we may see how easy it is that an absurd historical fiction should command the respect of the hierarchy during eight years; that its advocate should base one of his strongest arguments upon a fellow-Catholic's blunder ; and that this responsible fellow-Catholic, though disbelieving in the fiction for " many years," should still hold his tongue, even when the question had assumed almost international importance t, until an adversary had at last exposed the blunder, and the Archbishop himself must have foreseen that collapse which he had to acknowledge publicly only four days later. The author whose eight years' silence encouraged his co-religionaries to climb to that height of self-deception from which they so suddenly fell, is to be the chief lecturer at this coming Congress ; and the agenda allows no discussion of his lecture. Next to the Cardinal, the hierarchy seem most to rely upon the Very Rev. Hugh Pope, Doctor of Sacred Theology, who alone is privileged to deliver two lectures. What then is Dr Pope's record for learning and candour ? Twenty years ago, it was suddenly suggested that Wychf never translated the Bible into English at all, but simply stole a pre-existing orthodox Catholic version. No historical scholar outside the Roman communion, I think it may safely be said, accepted this theory ; and now there is pretty general consent that it has been finally exploded by Miss Deanesly's The Lollard Bible. But a certain number of Roman Catholics still cling to it ; and Dr Pope has made himself their spokes man in The Dublin Review (Jan., 192 1). The childish logic which he displays in that review ought not, perhaps, to be laid to his personal account ; he had an absurd thesis to defend, and a good deal of unreason was forced upon him by the necessities of this position. But at least Miss Deanesly's distinction as Mary Bateson Fellow of Newnham might have warned Dr Pope that it would be wise to verify his facts before accusing her of ignorance ; for The Dtcblin Revieiv is some times read by a certain number of non-Catholics, and such readers are generally able to see the difference between two disputants of which one has studied the relevant documents, while the other is simply writing at random. In three cases Dr Pope joins issue with Miss Deanesly on important questions of fact ; questions which, if he had been in the right, would have compelled her seriously to modify her conclusions. Yet, t A reference to The Times of those days will show that this is no exaggeration. in every one of those cases, it is Dr Pope who has blundered so hopelessly and so ignorantly that his shame will now stand confessed even in his own friendly Dublin Review, which, for once, has had the grace to make an exception to its usual rule, and is allowing a brief reply from the author so unjustly attacked. (4) The mention of Dr Pope's logic brings me to a third of the speakers advertised for this Congress, the Rev. Ronald Knox. His natural abilities are far greater than those of the other two ; as a new convert, he is untainted by those evil historical traditions which drove Newman to despair ; but he is pathetically unconscious of the road that lies before him. In his introductory essay to a recent manifesto by a group of representative Roman Catholic writers, he complains " those who criticise the Church as the enemy of reason, are among the first to cast a stone at her for being too logical." (5) But a very brief reflection might have shown him that there is no necessary inconsistency here ; and a little knowledge of the real history of the Bible in his own communion might have warned him off this ground altogether. Non-Catholics do indetd complain that the Church frequently drives Catholics to the unreasonable course of taking for granted the greater part of the real questions at issue between them and non- Catholics. This was Sir James Stephen's complaint against Cardinal Newman : that, even in friendly private discussion, he had " nothing to say to anyone who did not go three-fourths of the way to meet him." (6) After thus un reasonably begging more than half the question at issue, Catholics are accustomed to argue all the rest with a pitiless apparatus of formal logic which adds insult to injury. This habit is admirably exemplified by an incident in the life of Innocent III., who is often spoken of as the greatest of all the Popes ; and the incident also shows one side of the Roman attitude towards the Bible. In 1199, Innocent demanded formally of the Patriarch of Constantinople that he should submit himself and his Church to Rome. The Pope, in this celebrated letter, undertook to prove that " the primacy of the Roman See, constituted not by man but by God — nay, by the God-man — is proved by many evangelical and apostolical testimonies." Here are two of these evangelical 10 testimonies, (i) St Peter once -leapt into the sea (John xxi. 7) | now sea stands symbolically in Scripture for the whole world {see Gloss on Ps. ciii. 25) ; by that action, therefore, it is signified that Peter took the whole world for his spiritual province. Still more plainly is this proved by Peter's walking on the sea on a previous occasion (Innocent conveniently ignores the unfortunate sequel to this adventure): "for, seeing that many waters [in the Psalm] signifieth ' many peoples ' and that the gathering together of the waters is the seas (Gen. i. 10) therefore Peter, in that he walked over the waters of the sea, showed that he had received power over all peoples whatsoever." (Ep. hb. ii., No. 209 : Migne P.L., vol, 214, col. 758 ff). The rest of this long letter, in the light of modern Catholic or non-Catholic thought, is almost as absurd as the foregoing specimen ; Innocent follows faithfully all the forms of scholastic logic, but is fundamentally unreasonable because he postulates, instead of proving, all his premises. To the medieval mind, the authority of Roman tradition so far outweighed that of the Bible text, that a Pope or a prelate might commit himself unchecked to any absurdity of interpre tation ; a whole volume could be filled with extracts which even the most orthodox would find it hard to defend in these days. The last of the speakers whose writings I can criticize from personal knowledge is the Very Rev. Canon Barry, D.D. In an article in The National Review (June, 1905) he claimed " with past history open before me," to look at " present and undeniable facts . . . Crime does not diminish " (he is speaking of these days which are losing their faith in the Church). In The Independent Review for that August, I pointed out that homicide and rape and gambling were incomparably more frequent in the Middle Ages than at present, and that drunkenness was not even an offence recognized by the medieval University authorities. In re publishing the essay among my Medieval Studies, I vainly offered to print within the same covers anything that Canon Barry might have to plead in extenuation of his strange mis statement. In his history of The Papal Monarchy again, he seizes a flimsy excuse for ending in the very middle of his II subject, and avoiding all those later centuries during which the multiplication of Papal scandals compelled even the most orthodox Catholics to confess that religion could not be saved until the Court of Rome had been reformed. Even thus, however, he finds himself confronted with scandals which cannot be ignored ; but he does his best to excuse them, pleading on p. 133 "To manipulate ancient writings, to edit history in one's own favour, did not appear criminal, if the end in view were otherwise just and good." That same truth is put in far plainer language by a non-Catholic though sympathetic medieval scholar, Prof. T. F. Tout, on p. 15 of his Medieval Forgers and Forgeries (1920). Forgery ran rampant all through the Middle Ages. "Such great persons, such powerful societies, were accomplices in falsification that it required a rare share of public spirit for a humble critic to expose too coarsely their methods of manipulating documents." And on p, 6 : " all practitioners of forgery had the ' benefit of clergy ' , . , . I do not find that the church courts ever took cognizance of forgery at all." The great forgers were the monks. A distinguished Jesuit scholar of the 17th century, Papenbroeck, " was so puzzled how to treat the great structures of pious fraud that surrounded the early history of ancient monasteries and the lives of their saintly founders, that he came to the rash conclusion that all documents contained in ancient cartularies were deliberate falsifications by eleventh century monks" (p. 16). If the Church was tempted to these methods in the ages when (as the late Cardinal Vaughan used to plead) she had not "one hand tied behind her back," what are we to say of her temptations to-day ? In the Ages of Faith, it was comparatively easy to silence critics with torture and the stake ; nowadays, no church can survive but by persuasion ; so that there is still the same temptation to load the dice, though, of course, modern methods must be subtler and more refined. What guarantee have we then (for that is the point of this pamphlet), that the methods which Dr Barry treats so leniently in his Papal Monarchy, and which drove poor Newman to despair in 1864, will not be the methods of this present Congress, which is certainly not composed of bad c 12 Catholics, and of which (from the standpoint of the hierarchy) "the end in view" must appear "otherwise just and good." On this point the official Congress Programme seeks to reassure us. On p. 9 of his Foreword, the Bishop of Northampton writes {italics mine) -. " When the truth of facis has been ascertained, no Cause, however sacred, can be served by ignoring or questioning them. The robust intelligence and somewhat biting pen of St. Jerome never hesitated to subscribe to such postulates of intellectual morality ; and the same courageous spirit has always animated the Catholic schools. If we are convinced of the solidarity of all truth — that no truth in one department of science can ever contradict other truths in other departments, and, in particular, that no truth in any natural science can really be at variance with any revealed truth — such convictions will certainly restrain us from hastily adopting the latest loosely-constructed theory of the Higher Criticism, but will not induce us to juggle with evidence. Yet that is precisely ihe suspicion entertained about Catholic scholars in many quarters ; arui ii has led to a systematic and undeserved 'boycotting' of Catholic biblical literature. How often is the Catholic view of a biblical problem referred to in such works of reference as Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, or even a Catholic writer named in the various bibliographies ? // is hoped that ihe discussions ai ihe Congress may do so-mething io remedy the grievance.'' These are bold words : will this Bishop, who is the hierarchical chief of the Congress Committee, dare to back them up with corresponding deeds ? Will he dare to assert that he has spent half-an-hour in verifying the documents I cite, and that he has "ascertained " the Cardinal's assertions to be in any way reconcilable with " the truth of facts " ? Will he dare to deny that the Cardinal, with every opportunity of retracting his original falsehood, preferred deliberately to reprint it five years later ? Will he dare to deny that some similar instance of disingenuousness, if not quite so gross, could be pointed out in any fifty pages taken at random from the Cardinal's most widely-circulated books, while they are frequent also in the writings of two Catholic historians who have an even greater and juster reputation, and whose books have received even more direct Papal approbation, the Germans 13 Johannes Janssen and Ludwig Pastor ? These are plain business questions ; will the Bishop, when he speaks at the Conference, pledge his reputation for accuracy as definitely to the favourable answer as I have more than once pledged mine, with actual documentary evidence, to the other ? Or, if he cannot deny these things, will he act up to his words, and give something more than a vague assurance that the authority of his Church will in future be exerted against the dissemination of these falsehoods, which have hitherto been so steadily and so officially encouraged ? If not, all open-minded members of the audience will judge him and his friends by the professions of their own Programme, as contrasted with their daily deeds. We shall see that the public has still no guarantee against the continuance and the repetition of a policy which poisons the very fountain-head of religious discussion, and renders Christian unity hopeless. If only religious adversaries could have no adequate reason to suspect juggling with the plain facts, then the final religious significance of those admitted facts could be discussed in a spirit of friendly understanding which hitherto has been absolutely impossible. How can " the discussions at the Congress " remedy this evil, when the programme itself gives no hint of opening those discussions to anything like free criticism, and when previous Catholic Congresses of the kind have been discussed only by Catholics themselves, who obsequiously agree with the principal speakers on all really disputable points ? The Bishop will say that we are here taking him too literally and asking too much ; and, for once, the whole public will agree with him. Catholic and non-Catholic. How could this Bishop, under the iron discipline under. which he has grown up, and under which he will pass all the rest of his days, do such an independent act of justice, even if he would ? Titled prelate as he is, he may not even publish a book of any importance without submitting it to censors who, in their turn, are absolutely dependent creatures — bound hand and foot, body and soul, to others who with a stroke of the pen could deprive them of their rank, their hvelihood, and (what Father Tyrrell felt far more acutely) of all communion with their Church, That is the root of the whole matter ; the one 14 thing which renders intelligible the appalling literary methods of otherwise honest and religious men, all through the centuries down to the present moment. The strict and age long system of Roman censorship, however just and good may seem the end in view, is fundamentally incompatible with truth, in the sense in which the word is understood outside that institution. It divides even the most honest minds into watertight compartments. When a man has spent long years under a system where he may not write or say what he really thinks, then he grows gradually into a state of mind in which he cannot even think what he really thinks. It is not by means of the Censorship that Christianity will ever reconquer Europe. (7) The bitter anticlericalism of continental Europe is mainly due to this cause. Nations which suffered from this curse of intellectual repression right down to the French Revolution, and again in times of absolutist reaction, look upon it now with an indiscriminate hatred which is fortunately rare in Britain, where the Roman Church has been so long out of power. Even in Britain, at the present day, a man cannot join that Church without pledging himself implicitly, if the hierarchy were strong enough and mad enough to revive their old policy of persecution, to assist them in burning even his dearest friends who should obstinately refuse conversion*. When seventeenth-century Catholicism produced a very remarkable Biblical scholar in Richard Simon, he was pitilessly suppressed by his own Church. Simon's contemporary, Jean Mabillon, was perhaps the greatest historian that Church has ever produced ; yet he was twice within a hair's breadth of Papal condemnation for having written, even with extreme caution of language, things which are now admitted as true by scholars of all religious persuasions ; and on a third occasion he was actually forced to suppress one of the most important of his prefaces, in spite of his protest that this * Since this, again, may appear incredible, I may refer to the brief documentary justification of the statement contained in my Christ, Si Francis and To-day (Camb. Univ. Press, I9i9)p, 192, The book was reviewed by at least two Roman Catholic critics, neither of whom ventured to dispute my facts. IS censorship was suicidal, since, if the facts were not pubhshed to-day by an honest Catholic, they would be discovered and published some day by non-CathoHcs. So long as Rome does not abjure the right of burning those whom she calls heretics as plainly and as formally as she has hitherto claimed it, and so long as she retains her medieval system of censor ship, so long will incidents of the kind which I have exposed remain not only possible but inevitable. In spite of the valuable work done here and there by historians who have given her heartfelt allegiance, her system tends to poison history at its very source. Many scholars would single out Lord Acton as the greatest teacher of history whom Cam bridge has ever had, Acton was born, bred, and died in Roman Catholicism ; but his whole life was one long struggle against the obscurantism of his Church ; he fought against the Infallibility Decree as an outrage upon notorious historical facts ; and, if he had been a mere priest instead of a man of wealth, rank and social distinction, he would have been silenced at the very beginning of his historical career. It was necessary to begin by showing how much prima facie evidence we have for Newman's pessimistic dictum that Catholic history is apt to rest upon doctored facts. In so far as it is right to prejudge any man before he speaks, this Congress is justly prejudged. Yet it is still quite open to the speakers to prove the injustice of our prejudice in this particular case. If, disregarding the bad precedents of the past, they tell the truth, and the whole truth, then we, their hearers, must do them full justice. But, in order that the audience may decide how far the speakers have actually earned this commendation, it is necessary that people should go to the meetings prepared with a rough conspectus of all the main historical facts. I will therefore conclude with a list of things which Roman Catholic apologists have ignored or mis-stated in the past, and which these present apologists must be greatly tempted to ignore or mis-state before us at Cambridge, If they do not, all honour to them for their straightforwardness ; otherwise, we have the right to judge i6 them quite as emphatically by their silences as by their actual assertions. It will be seen that I here number my concluding paragraphs for convenience of reference. If any of the advertised speakers at this Congress, or anyone whom he formally chooses as his representative, will take the responsi bility of denying any one of these following statements under ordinary possibihties of cross-examination, I am willing either (i) to engage a hall in Cambridge and debate it publicly with him, or (2) to discuss it with him in an interchange of letters, which I engage myself beforehand to publish at my own expense. But (if I may judge from the uniform experience of the last 20 years, since first my studies brought me into close contact with Roman Catholic misrepresentations and compelled me to challenge them publicly in this way) it is not likely that either of these offers will be accepted. Every one of the statements here following, I think I may safely claim, rests upon the unimpeachable authority either of contemporary documents or of orthodox Roman Catholic historians. A. The Vulgate Bible. (i) The Roman Catholics claim that St Peter's primacy, and that of the Popes, was recognized in the Church from the first. Yet three centuries passed before any Pope'attempted to give to Europe any authoritative translation of the Bible into the only language which the vast majority ofthe reading public could understand — viz. Latin. This, the first translation which can be called Authorised, and which has since obtained the name of Vulgate^ was made by St Jerome under the patronage of Pope Damasus I., between 383 and 420 a.d. But, though Rome might encourage this private scholar, she had little or no scientific help to give him. The Old Latin version, which had grown up by private enterprise and which Jerome was now to bring up to date, had nowhere been preserved system atically from corruption ; Jerome himself says, with picturesque exaggeration, that scarcely any two manuscripts agreed with each other — paene tot exemplaria quot codices. His under taking would have been almost impossible but for the extra ordinary good fortune which brought him, in Palestine, across 17 a priest who possessed a correct (if not original) copy of Origen's Hexapla, and who allowed Jerome to make use of this. It was the scholarship of the Greek church which made Jerome's Vulgate possible. (2) This Vulgate had a hard struggle for existence ; the Popes could not or would not exert themselves officially to break down the conservatism which clung to older and less accurate versions. Even Gregory the Great, while he showed personal preference for the Vulgate, made a point of quoting also from the old, " because the Apostolic see, over which by God's grace I preside, uses both." It cannot be said that the Roman Church of those centuries cared enough for the exact form of the Bible to trouble about fixing it by an authoritative decree. It was only about 700 a.d. that the final victory ofthe Vulgate had become evident ; even then, the Old Latin version kept considerable influence throughout the Middle Ages. (3) Though it was mainly the scientific superiority of Jerome's version which secured this gradual victory, yet Jerome himself had not always dared to put accuracy before prejudice. Not only does he often translate a text differently in his other writings, but he explicitly confesses that he has sometimes purposely let old inaccuracies stand where they could safely be left. For the Roman Church, in its conviction. of the superior value of unwritten tradition, cared far less for the absolute accuracy of the original Bible text than for securing uniformity and cutting off all future occasion for discussions which she regarded as useless. (4) And, apart from these slight intentional inaccuracies, time revealed obvious mistakes in his translations from the Hebrew, some of which have real dogmatic importance. The Roman Cathohc Church, throughout the Middle Ages, while- it made no official attempt to correct those errors, gave rather discouragement than encouragement to the few scholars who individually strove to make such corrections. (5) The fact is, that the conservatism which at first had militated against the Vulgate now fought in its favour ; and it came to be regarded practically as an inspired translation.. Whatever a few scholars might vainly essay without official help, the Church authorities made no attempt, during the i8 thousand years preceding the Reformation, to get behind Jerome's text ; if they could get at his actual words, that was all they wanted. Even modern Roman Catholics, professing to write scientifically on theological subjects, will sometimes speak of " the original " words of Christ in the New Testament when they simply mean the Vulgate, (6) This worship of the letter of a mere translation has caused the retention, not only of numerous passages where Biblical scholars even of the Roman Church admit minor mis-translations, but even of some where the errors are of great dogmatic importance. The text of the Three Heavenly Witnesses, for instance (i John v. 7), which disappeared forty years ago from the Anglican Revised Version, not only remains still in the Vulgate, but a special Papal decree of 1897 has explicitly forbidden the faithful to " deny or call into doubt " the authenticity of this interpolation, which no theologian out side the Roman communion would dare to defend as genuine. For years, therefore, Roman Catholic Bible-study has been in this impossible situation. Every Roman Catholic theologian with an elementary knowledge of textual criticism is aware (a) that the suspected verse occurs in no manuscript of the original Greek written within fourteen centuries after the Apostles' time ; {h) that the authors of the early Syriac and Armenian versions knew nothing of it ; {c) that the earliest MSS. of the Old Latin version ignore it, and {d) that the majority even of the Vulgate MSS., during the first thousand years of the Christian era, ignored it also. Yet if, while this decree stands still unrevoked, a Roman Catholic Professor of theology should publicly draw from these universally-acknow ledged facts the common-sense conclusion which everybody else has drawn, and if he had the courage to stand by his own words, he would be cut off from his Professorship and from the communion of his Church. (8) (7) But this absurdity, on the face of it almost incredible, has behind it a very sufficient reason from the point of view of ecclesiastical discipline. In the great Ecumenical Council cf 1215 ('4th Lateran), Innocent III. incautiously argued from this spurious text in his condemnation of Abbot Joachim's doctrine of the Trinity ; and everybody who joins the Roman 1-^1 Catholic church has to subscribe to the Creed of Pope Pius IV., which binds him to " receive unhesitatingly all things handed down, defined and decreed " by this Lateran Council, among others, (9) It is therefore almost as difficult for the Church to admit the results of scholarly research in the case ofthe Three Witnesses as in that similar case of Genesis iii., 15, where she has for centuries supported her worship of the Virgin Mary by a Vulgate mis-translation of the original Hebrew which has long been recognized as indefensible by the large majority of Hebraists. Jerome's Hebrew scholarship was remarkable for his day ; but, if he had known just enough more to translate ipse instead of ipsa, one of the bitterest disputes between Catholics and non-Catholics would have been very much simplified. (8) Yet this worship of the letter in Bible study — not only of a translation as though it had been the original, but also of every letter in that translation — of which innumerable examples could be given from medieval history, did not rouse the Church to common-sense prudence in preserving that all- important letter. The hierarchy not only did not invent, but had not even the foresight to borrow in later centuries, the well-known precautions by which Jews checked the growth of further corruptions in their Old Testament text, and Mohammedans in their Koran. A single private scholar, Cassiodorus, did his best. Already, within a century of Jerome's time, the Vulgate had drifted into the same state as the Old Latin — quot codices, tot exemplaria. Cassiodorus, in the monastery which he founded, strove hard to get a correct text from old MSS., and framed a series of common-sense rules for the multiplication of trustworthy copies from this model. But neither his own brethren, after his death, nor any other of the innumerable monks who filled the monas teries of Europe during the next six centuries, were patient or far-sighted enough to follow a policy which their close organisation would have rendered easy enough. The Popes did not even pretend to give any help here. When Charles the Great, shortly before 800 a.d., attempted the educational reform of his whole empire, he found the corruptions of the Vulgate text at the bottom of the whole difficulty : there was D not a single model manuscript to be found which could be taken confidently as representing what St Jerome actually wrote. But Charles set the Englishman Alcuin to work ; Alcuin based himself upon ancient Bibles which probably derived from Cassiodorus's correction, though there had been no official attempt to keep their pedigree pure ; and thus he produced a text of which scholars recognised the superiority all through the Middle Ages. This was the Biblia Caroli Magni, which Roger Bacon treated with such respect. Nor is it by mere chance that this was called after an Emperor, while no medieval Bible-text took the name of a Pope. Damasus had given to Jerome little more than his encouragement ; Gregory the Great gave still less ; during the whole of the rest of the Middle Ages, no other Pope did even so much as these two. On the other hand, Charles not onl}' helped Alcuin with material resources, but lent all his official weight to the dissemination of these good copies ; his authority ensured their general reception. But here he found no worthy successor ; even the Monastery of St Martin de Tours, from whence Alcuin, as Abbot, had directed this reform, was pouring forth a stream of debased texts within a few years after his death ; by 850, these had become so corrupt that no scholar could have suspected their Tours origin, unless it had been possible, by the actual inspection of successive manu scripts, to trace this melancholy transformation step by step. (9) Time only increased this confusion. By the twelfth century the few scholars who seriously attempted correction were astounded to find the mass of spurious interpolations in MSS. of great reputation — 31, for instance, in the ist book of Kings alone 1 (i Samuel). One after another, these dis tinguished churchmen found themselves again in Jerome's case — scarcely any two copies agreed together, nor could a trustworthy model be found even by students who were able to travel from library to library. All books were much corrupted by transcription in those days ; but the Vulgate was even worse corrupted than the average. At last, in the 13th century, the University of Paris undertook to produce a standard Bible ; but this standardization, so far as it succeeded, was itself an evil ; for it was based on a corrupt text to which 21 it gave authority and permanence. The Dominican Father Denifle, who was perhaps the greatest medievalist of modern times, confessed in so many words that this proceeding " gave up the Bible to mere caprice. , , . Roger Bacon was not too severe when he wrote ' their [so-called] correction is an abominable corruption and destruction of the word of God, and it is beyond all comparison a less evil to use uncorrected Parisian Bibles than to use their correction or any other.' . . . Roger Bacon was quite right when he cried out ' the text, for the most part, is horribly corrupt in the Vulgate, that is, the Parisian, edition '." (lo) For now, at the height of its corruption, Jerome's translation began to be known everywhere as the Vulgate, i.e., the universally-accepted Bible. Different attempts were made by the Friars to amend this unfortunate Parisian text ; the Dominicans in 1236 — Bacon laughs at their failures — and again in 1256 ; the Franciscans about the same time. Private scholars wrote correctoria — one, evidently of Bacon's school, shows astounding patience and critical acumen in scenting out and utilising Charles the Great's purer texts — but all this was almost useless in the face of official inertia. The corrupt Paris text set the general standard for the rest ofthe Middle Ages, nearly all the printed editions were based upon it ; and to this day, it forms the foundation ofthe text which, by Papal decree, Roman Catholics must use to the exclusion of all others. (11) This papal decree dates from 1592. The Revival of Learning and the Reformation had gradually rendered it impossible for the Roman Church to continue its age-long policy of leaving the Bible to unofficial caprice. The Council of Trent formed a Revision Committee, whose labours were published in 1590 by Sixtus V. — the first instance of the kind in all Catholic history. Sixtus decreed that this edition alone should be used in all discussions public or private, and should be received as " true, lawful, authentic and unquestioned " ; an anathema was laid upon all infractions of this decree. Two years later his successor, Clement VIII., published under similar anathemas a new revision of his own, differing in more than 3,000 places from that of Sixtus ! The large majority of these differences were mere misprints in one or other of the 22 two editions ; but the Pope admits in his Preface that "even as some things have been purposely changed [in this new edition], so other things which it seemed good to change have been pur posely left, not only because St Jerome more than once warned us to do thus for the sake of avoiding popular offence," but also because it is our main purpose simply to reproduce Jerome's translation. This Preface, with Jerome's own Prefaces which are even more awkward for Papal authority, will not be found in the only English translation of the Vulgate which can even distantly claim the dignity of an Authorized Version — the Douay Bible, The Clementine Vulgate, as has already been noted, is the only Bible from which the faithful are allowed to argue; and the most important and most indefensible error in it, that of the Three Witnesses, has been further protected from discussion by the Papal decree of 1897, (12) But we shall soon have a new, and very different, Vulgate text ; and this will be the subject of a whole lecture, on the evening of July 18, by Cardinal Gasquet himself, the President of the Papal Revision Committee. It will not be beside the point to enquire what precautions have been taken here to avoid the failure of previous attempts. Is this a commission of scientific enquiry, in the ordinary sense ? or have non-scientific ecclesiastical considerations been as in fluential here as on previous occasions ? The Vatican Library possesses what is probably the most valuable Bible MS. in the world, the so-called Codex B. In 1587 it was printed under the auspices of Sixtus V., in a manner which did credit to the age, but which was naturally found inadequate when modern scholarship had realized the value of accuracy even in the minutest details. Therefore, in the years 1868 — 1881, a new edition was undertaken with great show of scholarship. The Roman printers worked from the actual MS., laid under glass before their eyes ; the scholars of the Roman court were responsible for looking through every proof at least twice ; they produced at the same time a companion volume of necessary explanations as to uncertainties in the text. The whole work took them thirteen years, and the book was sold to the public at £2^ per copy. On the strength of this official and so-called " facsimile " edition, non- 23 Catholic scholars found themselves taken to task for the carelessness with which they were said to have sometimes read this all-important manuscript. But the truth began to leak out through students who, at different times, travelled to consult the manuscript itself for disputed passages in which they were interested. The Papal authorities were obliged at last, in 1889 — 1895, to issue an edition in actual facsimile by photographic process, which they priced at 1,000 lire a copy (;^40 sterling) ; and then the few who were able to buy this new edition discovered that the so-called "facsimile " commission had, in numerous cases, blundered grossly even where they had the old print of 1587 to show them the way 1 We owe it not to that commission of Papal theologians, but to the common photographer, that Biblical scholars may now at last draw scientific conclusions from the priceless Vatican manuscript. (9) (13) The present Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate has had for its president Cardinal Gasquet, who is to read a paper on the subject on the evening of July 18. The Cardinal has betrayed, at different times, an ignorance of Latin, and of the Vulgate in especial, almost as startling as his inaccuracies in matters of fact. He has perpetrated, or innocently adopted, mistranslations of very ordinary words ; he has failed to recognize Biblical texts where he came across them ; he has printed whole sentences of gibberish in Latin without any attempt to emend them ; in other places, he has made unhappy attempts to emend perfectly correct sentences which owed their unintelligibility only to his own ignorance. (10) In this, he follows the modern traditions of his Church, A far better scholar. Prof. E. Michael of Innsbruck, quotes two familiar Bible texts as specimens of a medieval chronicler's personal style, he has evidently no suspicion of their actual origin. (11) The evidence of Bible ignorance, and even ignorance of Latin, among the ordinary medieval priesthood is over whelming ; in 1222, five priests out of seventeen parishes could not construe the very first sentence ofthe Canon ofthe Mass. A couple of generations later, the Dominican Etienne de Bourbon confessed that the heretics' Bible-knowledge con trasted painfully with Cathohc Bible-ignorance ; while Roger 24 Bacon complained of the clergy who knew as little, even of their own service books, as " brute beasts." Similar evidence could be multiplied down to the verge of Reformation, when the learned and candid Wimpheling related that of three monastic subdeacons, presented by their abbot for deacon's orders, " not one knew the meaning ofthe adjective manifestus or the adverb manifeste, or the verb manifesto, as I heard with mine own ears, and other most honourable men who presided at that examination." (12j When Dr Pope, in the Dublin Review, asserts that before the Reformation " the Latin of the Vulgate Bible was extraordinarily familiar to all who could read or write," he is making an assertion which nothing can excuse but the ignorance of actual medieval documents which transpires from every paragraph of that article. B. The Vernacular Bible. (14) The Popes and the hierarchy, who often dealt so carelessly and ignorantly with their own Vulgate, steadily denied the Bible to the people, Jerome's Vulgate had origi nally been made for the sake of the general reading public of the Western Church, which knew neither Greek nor Hebrew. A reading public grew up in the Middle Ages which knew little or no Latin ; this public naturally began to ask for a Bible in its own language. From 1080 onwards, we frequently find Popes, Councils, and Bishops forbidding such versions ; nobody has yet produced a decree freely permitting them. The laity were not allowed to read even Mass-books in their own language until shortly before the Reformation. The first orthodox Catholic who can be found explicitly recommending the faithful laity to read the Bible in their own tongue is the friar Otto of Passau in 1386. (13) But Germany was here beyond the general European standard. In England, the numerous pre-Wycliffite manuals of devotion, while they prescribe reading for the layfolk, never suggest EngHsh Bible-reading ; and only one of the writers, the celebrated Walter Hilton, recommends those who can read Latin to study the Gospels as a preHminary to meditation. Another goes out of his way to explain that the layman will get good from hearing the Latin gospel at Mass, " though 2S thou understand it nought," just as an adder is affected by the charm pronounced over her, though she does not under stand the words. About 1400 a.d., the lawfulness of an English Bible began to be debated ; there is no orthodox pre-reformation writer who explicitl}' approves of it. Quite characteristic is the Chastising of God's Children, possibly written for a nun, which says " many men reproveth to have the psalter, or mattins, or the gospel in English, or the Bible, because they ma}' not be translated into no vulgar word by the word as it standeth, without great circumlocution, after the feeling of the first writers, which translated that into Latin by the Holy Ghost," The Vulgate was inspired, and too sacred to be translated. Even in Germany, an Imperial decree was published under Papal influence in 1369 forbidding vernacular Bibles, "since it is not lawful, according to Church law [canonicas sanctiones], that layfolk of either sex should read any books of Holy Scripture whatsoever in the vulgar tongue." A Papal decree of 1375, though far less sweeping, and professing to object only to " heretical errors," was not calculated to modify the Imperial decree very radically in practice. When printing came, eighteen Bibles in German or Dutc'n were printed between 1466 and 1522, but not one of these editions received the approbation of the ecclesiastical censor ; and nearly all of them were printed before the unfavourable edict of the Archbishop of Mainz, who was also Imperial Chancellor, in i486. (15) Here we come up against two grave distortions of plain fact which have been perpetrated by the two most widely-read and loudly-acclaimed writers on this subject — the German Johannes Janssen and Cardinal Gasquet. The former vsrrote an enormously bulky History of the German People at tiic Close of the Middle Ages. At the end of the last chapter of the first volume, after a mass of comparatively futile matter, Janssen comes at last to this Bible question. He spares two and a quarter pages to it, which he heads " the Bible in the Hands of the People," but of which four-fifths are filled with complaints by orthodox theologians that ordinary folk misuse the Bible when they get hold of it. Speaking of the German Bibles, he asserts " the Church opposed no resistance 26 to their spread, so long as strifes and divisions within her own body brought to light none of the easily conceivable abuses.''* He has not a word to say concerning Charles IV's prohibition of 1369, with its appeal to the notorious prohibition in Church law also ; and the Archbishop of Mainz's prohibition of i486 is no less carefully suppressed, except so far as it may be under stood from the following footnote : " cf the important decree of censorship for books published in i486 by Abp. Berthold V. Henneberg of Mainz, in Gudenus, Codex dipl. 4. 469." Gudenus's book would be sought in vain on the shelves even of a good many German libraries, and English readers, since the authorised translation generally omits the notes as super fluous, are deprived even of this fragment of truth so ingeniously relegated to the footnote. In spite of plain criticism, these two and a quarter pages remained practically unaltered three years later in the 7th edition (1881). In my copy of the 18th edition (1897), revised after Janssen's death by L. Pastor, the passage is still essentially unaltered ; but the note has been lengthened by a brief textual citation of four lines from the Archbishop's decree, which gives a most mis leading impression of the whole document. The whole is a masterpiece of suppression of truth without too definite assertion of falsehood. Cardinal Gasquet, in his Eve of the Reformation (pp. 242 — 247; goes further than this. He writes " this absolute denial of any hostihty on the part of the Church to the translated Bible is reiterated in many parts of Sir Thomas More's EngHsh works. ... Sir Thomas More completely disposed of this assertion as to the hostility ofthe clergy to ' the open Bible,' " He bases these assertions upon fragmentary excerpts from the 14th — 16th chapters of More's Z)z«/o^7/,?, suppressing the many passages which contradict his thesis more plainly than these ¦other snippets seem to support it. The Dialogue is a book almost inaccessible to the ordinary public ; and for some time these bold assertions were taken at their face value. Since the contradictory evidence was produced, by people who took the trouble to verify his references, the Cardinal has kept silence. « The English translator, confused by Janssen's obscure stvie irenders this pet abuses. " ' 27 As a matter of fact, More is very far from contending that the clergy were inclined to suffer ' the open Bible.' He admits that, while it was forbidden in 1408 (and that under pain ofthe stake in the last resort) for any man to read any Bible trans lation made since Wyclifs day,yet the Church had done nothing since that date to provide a pure translation for the people. Heretics would club together to get their Tyndale's translation published, but no Catholic printer would risk his capital on a well-meaning edition which, after all, the Bishop might condemn. He adds " and surely how it hath happened that in ah this while [since 1408] God hath either not suffered, or not provided that any good and virtuous man hath had the mind in faithful wise lo translate it, and thereupon either the clergy, or at the least wise, some one Bishop to approve it, this can I nothing tell," Yet More would not allow even such an approved translation to be used by all men, but " all the copies should come whole into the Bishop's hand ; which he may after his discretion and wisdom deliver unto such as he perceiveth honest, sad and virtuous," under condition that, after the recipient's death, this copy should be returned to the Bishop, Moreover, the Bishop might allow a man to read Matthew or Mark or Luke, but forbid John ; permit the Acts or Ephesians, and refuse Romans or Revelation (Bk III. chaps. 14 — 16). It is astounding how any writer, on the strength of a few scrappy quotations carefully chosen to exclude this evidence, can claim this as a policy of " the open Bible." (16) Moreover, orthodox Catholics continued to repudiate the " open Bible " policy until the present generation. The contrary theory practically begins and ends with Cardinal Gasquet and his unlucky thirteen errors. Miss Deanesly, on pp 382 — 384 of her Lollard Bible, gives a long list of orthodox Catholics, from 1500 to 1846, who decide against the open Bible, and who agree with the hierarchy in condemning that Jansenist proposition "the reading of Holy Scripture is for all people." As late as 1824, Pope Leo XII. addressed to the Spaniards an encyclical in which he says that " if the Sacred Scriptures be everywhere indiscriminately pubHc, more evil than advantage will arise thence." 28 By all means, therefore, let the Roman Catholic Church of to-day leave the Bible free, and do all she can to give the laity an Authorised Version — for the Douay Bible is only permitted, not authorized, and no attempts have been made to bring it abreast even of 17th century scholarship, let alone modern. Let us heartily applaud her for this present policy ; but let her not falsify the past by contending, as these speakers have contended in their writings, against notorious historical facts. If the Catholic laity are to have the same Bible-freedom as the non-Catholic laity, this can onl)' be by an act of definite repentance on the part of their rulers ; nor can it help even the hierarchy, in the long run, to disguise this change of attitude. We need not be very deeply learned in moral theology to have discovered that there can be no effective absolution without confession, repentance, and (so far as possible) restitu tion ; and that it is a sin against the Holy Ghost to attempt any circumvention of this Sacrament of Penance. Nobody will accept the present word of men who cannot be persuaded to face the true st^ry of the past. That whole story, it will be seen, is one of hand-to-mouth shifts, and of inaccuracies so consecrated by conservatism that they came at last to be regarded as inspired and indisputable. Nor can it be pleaded that these inaccuracies are insignificant ; some are of crucial importance, lilce that of the Three Witnesses which has been protected from criticism by a recent official decree of the Pope ; moreover, the cumulative effect of the whole is very great, however small any separate error maybe. It has widened the sepanition between Christians and Jews, who for centuries have mocked at the masses of spurious stuff ill the Vulgate copies of the Old Testament. Again, many of those other inaccuracies which, in themselves, seem small, have been important enough in Catholic eyes to justify the burning of a Protestant. Even at the present moment,. this much-advertised effort is not directed towards the conection of Jerome's text, but only towards finding what Jerome actually wrote, with all the errors incident to a man of his day. No institution can hold its own, in the long run, under such a policy as this ; its frank abandonment is only a question of time. For it widens the gulf between Catholics and Non- 29 Catholics, neutralizing our respect for better things which, to her real honour, that Church does champion. Doubtless modern society has many faults ; but at least it has one virtue. It insists upon strict accuracy in things which pretend to be accurate ; and the modern man is less easily persuaded than his forefathers that convenient errors do not matter. He knows that everything matters : that verbal errors, like other faults, may grow by habitual indulgence to almost incredible proportions ; and the worst plagues come from a ferment of almost invisible bacteria. NOTES. All new matter of any impoi-taiice which has been added to tbe Notes in this Second Edition is distinguished by thick square brackets []. Tho Appendices are altogether new. I page 4. Newman's letter of July 4, 1864, to Father Coleridge, first printed in The Month, ]-An. 1903, p. 4. "To avoid any suspicion of wrenching these words from their proper context, I quote them as repeated in an article by Father W. H. Kent in the American Catholic Historical Revinv of Oct. 1920, p. 279. " Nothing would be better than an historical review, but who would bear it ? Unless one doclored all one's facts, one should be thought a bad Catholic. The truth is, thei'e is a keen conflict going on just now between two parties, one in the Church, and one out of it — and at such seasons extreme views alone are in favour, and a man who is not extreme is thought treacherous. I sometimes think of King Lear's daughters, and consider that they, after all, may be the truest who are in tpeech more measured." It is hardly necessary to add that the " keen conflict " which Newman noted in 1864 between Catholic and non- Catholic opinion is at least equally real at the present day, with its laccompanying temptations to extreme assertions and doctoring of inconvenient facts. [A modern French Roman Catholic makes ;a similar complaint, that the more " competent " a scholar is reputed to be within his own communion, the more justification is there for ;a general suspicion of his real scholarship, since the hierarchy 30 bestow their prizes mainly on the subservient, (P, Desjardins Caiholicisme ei Critique. 1904. p. 87.) ] 2 page 4. At the Catholic Eucharistic Congress of 1908, under similar Papal approbation, the numerous papers were discussed by something like a hundred speakers in all ; I have failed to find among them a single non-Catholic, or any sign of free criticism. The first three paragraphs of the Official Report (p. 49) are typical of the rest. The first two lectures had been on The Holy Eucharist in Pre-Re/oi mation Times and The Mass and ihe Reformation. The so-called "discussion" which followed might almost as truly have passed for a discussion of any other two subjects taken at random. " The discussion of tlie papers was opened by the Bishop op Namuh, President General of the Eucharistic Congresses, who spoke in English. His Lordsliip dwelt on the union of his Belgian ancestors with England in the One Faith, and in devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.— Father David Fleming, English Provincial O.F.M., urged the necessity of remembering that Christianity is Jesus Christ, and that to understand it we must reject subjective speculation and attend to objective truth. The Catholic Church, lie said, might be described as the spiritual telephone of tne truth of Jesus Christ throughout tlie ages. Men Mont ks Die Oca, Bishop ol san Luis Potosi, Mexico, followed with a pathetic account of his first visit to England in the days of Cardinal Wiseman. He lound that so fivr God had answered the prayers of himself and of many others for the conversion of England." [My anticipations here did less than justice to the organisers of the Congress, who at the last moment permitted a discussion on the Sunday afternoon paper ; but this was extremely brief and perfunc tory. I was allowed, again, to speak for five or ten minutes upon Father Ronald Knox's paper on Monday ; but in each case the discussion simply showed how unsatisfactory it is to debate technical questions viva voce, as compared with more leisurely discussions on paper. On the Sunday afternoon, for instance, Father Arendzen complained that Protestantism had " given over the Bible to specu lation, we know with what result" ; and he went on to satirize the "weird and wild theories" bred from this license. Neither phrase will be found in the official report of his paper (W. Heffer & Sons) : but I read them aloud word for word from my notes, and the speaker made no attempt to repudiate what his whole audience had heard. I then asked him to quote an}' Protestant interpretations more absurd than those of Pope Innocent III. which I had cited in my pamphlet (p. 9), and which I could parallel to the extent of a whole volume. He diverted this plain question to the very different matter which I had also quoted from Innocent III. on p. 18 ; no attempt was made by him or any other speaker to answer the actual question which I asked. He, again (and to a less extent Father Knox after him), spoke of the infallible teaching commission given by Christ to the Apostles. I asked Father Knox how far this was reconcilable with {a) the hot dispute between Peter and Paul as to an essential point, the ad mission of Gentiles to Christ's Church, and (6) the still greater