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We have then data on which to affirm with entire confidence, that emancipation in our southern states would be safe-alike useful to the bondman and the white. Let the force of the argument be tested by its application to another case. Let us suppose that as far back as we could trace any historical records, we found these facts; that whenever and wherever a republican government had been established, in whatever clime, age, or circumstances, that there, always and invariably, industry, good order, social improvement and wealth, had been the result; and that invariably and certainly, the establishment of a monarchical government had been

followed by war, insurrection, and crime and peril. Would not the argument be strong and even demonstrative, in favor of a republic? Would not he be considered as hardly less than insane, who should in the face of these facts, select or perpetuate a kingly government? Yet thus strong is the argument in favor of emancipation. Surely then, he who affirms the dangers and mischiefs of emancipation, in view of such an array of historical facts, must take counsel of his interest or his prejudice, and not of his reason.

We should like to add a variety of additional considerations, but our space compels us to postpone our remarks to a future time.

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC FAITH.

WE have already exhibited the doctrine of Roman Catholics in respect to the church, the Scriptures, and the sacraments in general, with a particular account of baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist, as defined in their standards. Before considering the four remaining sacraments, and the important doctrines relating to the character of man and the way of salvation, we shall present one or two facts of recent origin, which exhibit more clearly the position of the Romish church toward the word of God. That word being, in our view, the only authoritative and infallible source of theological opinions, the position assumed toward it by any class of men, affords a fair presumption concerning the truth or falsity of their religious system.

We stated in our last number, that the indiscriminate reading of the Bible in the vulgar tongue is prohibited by the rules of the "Congregation of the Index," and that Bible societies had been anathematized by the supreme pontiff. It

may gratify our readers to have a specimen of these prohibitions and anathemas. Ten rules respecting prohibited books were enacted by the fathers to whom the work of preparing the "Index" was com mitted by the Council of Trent, and sanctioned by Pope Pius IV, in a bull issued March 24th, 1564. The fourth commandment in this Romish decalogue is as follows:*

"Inasmuch as it is manifest from experience, that if the Holy Bible, translated into the vulgar tongue, be indiscriminately allowed to every one, the temerity of men will cause more evil than good to arise from it, it is on this point referred to the judgment of the bishops, or inquisitors, who may by the advice of the priest or confessor, permit the Bible translated into the vulgar tongue by Catholic authors, to those persons whose faith and piety they apprehend, will be augmented, and not injured by it; and this permission they must have in writing.

* Harduin, tom. x, p. 208.

But if any one shall have the presumption to read or possess it without such written permission, he shall not receive absolution until he have first delivered up such Bible to the ordinary. Booksellers, however, who shall sell, or otherwise dispose of Bibles in the vulgar tongue, to any person not having such permission, shall forfeit the value of the books, to be applied by the bishop to some pious use, and be subjected by the bishop to such other penalties as he shall judge proper, according to the quality of the offense. But regulars shall neither read nor purchase such Bibles without a special license from their superiors."

According to the third rule different" versions of the Old Testament may be allowed, but only to learned and pious men, at the discretion of the bishop; provided they use them merely as elucidations of the Vulgate version, in order to understand the Holy Scriptures, and not as the sacred text itself. But versions of the New Testament made by authors condemned in the Index (such as Luther, Calvin, &c.) are allowed to no one, since little advantage, but much danger, generally arises from reading them." And to cut off, as it were, the last hope of a correct interpretation of the Scriptures, by the fifth rule, lexicons, concordances, indexes, &c. edited or compiled by the same proscribed class, may be used only when duly revised and corrected by the bishops and inquisitors.

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In accordance with these rules several popes in succession have anathematized Protestant Bible societies. Pius VII, writing to the archbishop of Gnezn, in 1816, calls the Bible Society a most crafty device, by which the very foundations of religion are undermined," a "pestilence," and a "defilement of the faith, most imminently dangerous to souls." Leo XII, in 1824,

speaking of the same institution, says that it "strolls with effrontery throughout the world, contemning the traditions of the holy fathers, and contrary to the well-known decree of the Council of Trent, labors with all its might, and by every means, to translate, or rather to pervert, the Holy Bible into the vulgar languages of every nation, from which proceeding it is greatly to be feared, that what is ascertained to have happened to some passages, may also occur with regard to others; to wit, that by a perverse interpretation the gospel of Christ be turned into a human gospel, or what is still worse, into the gospel of the devil."

The present pontiff, Gregory XVI, determined not to fall behind his predecessors in his endeavors to suppress the word of God, within a few months past has issued an encyclical letter addressed to "all patriarchs, primates, archbishops, and bishops," throughout the world; in which, after enumerating the decrees of former popes against the general circulation of the Scriptures, he says, "We confirm and renew the decrees cited above, delivered in former times by apostolic authority against the publication, distribution, reading and possession of books of the Holy Scriptures translated into the vulgar tongue.

... It is therefore enjoined upon you to remove from the hands of the faithful alike those Bibles in the vulgar tongue, which may have been printed contrary to the above mentioned decrees of the sovereign pontiffs, and every book proscribed and condemned, (by the Index,) and to see that they learn, through your admonition and authority, what pasturages are salutary and what pernicious and mortal."

His Holiness" then fulminates his anathemas against the Christian Alliance, (a society formed about a year ago for the promotion of religious freedom and the dissemi

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nation of religious truth in Italy,) which "strains every nerve to scatter corrupt and vulgar Bibles secretly among the faithful," together with "tracts designed to banish from the minds of their readers all respect for the church and the Holy See." This society, the fear of which this senile pontiff can ill disguise, he publicly reprobates "by name!"

Such then is the present attitude of the church of Rome toward the Bible. The same spirit which led the Council of Toulouse in the thirteenth century, in a decree against the Albigensian and Waldensian "heretics," to forbid to the laity the sacred books "translated into the vulgar tongue;" the same spirit which led Pope Gregory XI, in the fourteenth century, to issue his bulls against Wicliffe ;* which in the following century dragged so many of the Lollards, both men and women, to prison and the stake, for "daring to read and keep God's word in their own tongue"-and which by decree of the Council of Constance, even violated the grave of the reformer, and burnt his bones and scattered his ashes to the waves; the same spirit which caused seven persons to be burned at Coventry, in 1519, for "having in their possession, copies of the Scriptures or portions of the same," and for "having taught their children and families the Lord's prayer and the ten commandments in English,"of which they were convicted by the testimony of their terrified children,t-and which kindled the fires

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of Smithfield, twenty-five years before, for Joan Boughton, a Wicliffite, then eighty years of age !—the same spirit which in the sixteenth century caused Tyndale's New Testament to be publicly burned at Paul's Cross, and which brought both Tyndale and his associate Frith to martyrdom; the same spirit which caused twenty five hundred copies of the " great Bible" then printing under Coverdale's supervision at Paris, to be consigned to the flames; the same spirit which led the British Parliament, in 1542, even after it was politically divorced from Rome, to prohibit Tyndale's or Coverdale's version of the Scriptures ;* the same spirit which in the reign of Mary, of bloody memory, brought Rogers, and Hooper, and Cranmer, and Ridley, and Latimer, and Bradford to the stake, and which in later times perpetrated all the hor rors of the Inquisition; this old Romish spirit of hostility to the Bible, the open Bible, the Bible "without note or comment," the Bible for the people; the spirit against which Luther fought, and Von Wesel†

this discovery, Mourton said: 'Ah, sirrah, come; as good now as another time!' and then led her back immediately to the bishop, who at once condemned her to

be burned with the six men who had been previously sentenced. They all suffered together, April 4, 1519, in a (Bagster's Hexapla, p. 39.) For several of the facts place called Little Park." referred to in this paragraph consult Fox's Book of Martyrs. Others like them may be found in "Rome's Policy toward the Bible," a spirited pamphlet by an "American Citizen."

* "The king and parliament, soon after the publication of the Scriptures, retracted the concession they had formerly made; and prohibited all but gentlemen and merchants from perusing them." Hume, I, 573.

↑ Johan Von Wesel was a native of Wesel on the Rhine. "He was professor of theology in Erfurt, and afterwards a distinguished preacher at Worms. He regarded the Scriptures as the only guide of the Christian. He refused to accept even the interpretation of them at the hands of the church. The Bible must be its own interpreter. 'We have,' said

almost a century before him-this same spirit still lives in the Romish church. It shows itself here and there in the arrest of some unlucky bookseller or colporteur in Italy or France; in the condemnation of a helpless widow in Madeira for denying that transubstantiation is taught in the New Testament; in the burning of Bibles at Plattsburg; and (somewhat farcically, we own) in the thunder hurled from the Vatican against "the Christian League, and every other society which is or may be associated with it."

But this spirit, whose horrid workings we have traced through six hundred years, knows how at times to be as gentle and accommodating as Charity herself. The church of Rome has discovered, that in spite of her anathemas, the common people will have the Bible. To meet this demand, she sometimes suffers an edition of the Holy Scriptures, in the common language, to go forth with her own imprimatur. But in that case she endeavors by mutilating the text, or glossing it over with bewildering notes, to secure the sanction of the word of God for her peculiar dogmas. The Vulgate is her standard, from which all other translations must be made.* A

he, to demand of the pope, and the priests as successors of Christ and the

apostles, that they give us the word of God. If they will feed us with that, we will listen to them as we would to Christ himself; but if they will not, we will disregard them.' He flourished in the middle of the fifteenth century." (Bib. Sacra, I, p. 434.)

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Harduin maintained that the apostles and evangelists wrote in Latin,-that the Vulgate was the original, and the Greek New Testament a version, and that consequently the latter ought to be corrected by the former, and not the former by the latter. Cardinal Ximenes compared the Vulgate as printed in his edition (the Complutensian) between the Hebrew and the Septuagint, to our Lord crucified between two thieves, making the Hebrew represent the hardened thief, and the Greek the penitent."-(Campbell's Four Gospels, Díss. XI, Part 1.)

Harduin also pretended that Virgil's

specimen of the Rhemish version of the New Testament, was given on p. 428. The publication of this version, in the sixteenth century, was an anomaly in the policy of the Romish church toward the Bible. "After persecuting men, women and children, for two centuries, on account of their determined zeal in reading and circulating the word of God in English,-after separating husbands and wives and brethren, and committing to prison, to the scaffold and the flames, as obstinate heretics, hundreds and thousands who persisted in searching the Scriptures contrary to her edicts, canons, decrees, restrictions, anathemas and excommunications, she suddenly changes her policy, meets her enemies with their own proscribed weapons, and publishes a version of the New Testament in English, by which she aims to supersede all existing translations, and to prove that all her doctrines are inculcated by the word of God." The Rhemish Doctors justified this gross inconsis tency by the state of the times. They say that this translation of the Scriptures was made, not because they "generally and absolutely deem it more convenient in itself, and more agreeable to God's word and honor, or the edification of the faithful, to have them turned into vulgar tongues, than to be kept and studied only in the ecclesiastical and learned languages," but merely upon special consideration of the present time, state and condition of our country, to which divers things are either necessary, or profitable, or medicinable now, that otherwise in the peace of the church were neither much requisite, nor per

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Eneid was "a fable invented by a monk to exhibit the triumph of the church over the synagogue;" an absurdity happily ridiculed by Boileau when he said, "I should like much to have conversed with friar Virgil, and friar Livy, and friar Horace; for we see no such friars now." -(Ib.)

chance wholly tolerable." It seems then that the Romish church consents that her children shall read the Scriptures for themselves, and even makes a translation for their benefit, "upon special considerations."

Such considerations seem to exist at this " present time" in our own country, if we may judge from the following advertisement which recently met our eye.

"To the Catholic community. A new and finely illustrated FAMILY BIBLE, to be completed in twenty-four numbers, at twelve and a half cents per number! The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate, diligently compared with the Hebrew, Greek and other editions, in various languages; the Old Testament, first published by the English College at Douay, A. D. 1609; and the New Testament, first published by the English College at Rheims, A. D. 1582; with annotations, references, and a historical and chronological index. The whole revised and diligently compared with the Latin Vulgate. Published with the approbation of the Rt. Rev. Bishop of New York. The publisher does not hesitate to express belief that this edition of the Bible will prove in every way equal to the requirements of the Catholic body in America at this juncture, and he trusts that it will find among Catholic families, the clergy and the laity generally, that extensive sale to which only, it is obvious, at a price so very low, he must look for remuneration. E. DUNIGAN,

his

151 Fulton-st. New York."

Now what are the "requirements of the Catholic body in America at this juncture," which call for a new edition of the Bible? Is it their degraded spiritual condition, which, in the judgment of †John Hughes, calls for the general circulation of the Scriptures among the laity? Or is Harpers' pictorial Bible finding its way into Roman Catholic families? Is the "school question" leading Roman Catholics to examine for themselves that Bible which their bishops forbid their children to read? Have the events of the last six months in Philadelphia awakened a spirit of inquiry among "the faithful," respecting that Bible which Protestants profess to fight for, and for which they have often died?

How is it, that the Bishop of New York, in full face of the Pope's encyclical letter, which commands him to "remove from the hands of the faithful (all) Bibles in the vulgar tongue," authorizes the publication of the Scriptures for the use of "the laity generally," and that too in a form so attractive, and at a price so low, as to ensure an extensive sale?" Has not that " crafty device," the Bible Society, been "strolling with effrontery" into the very bosom of the Roman Catholic church? Is it not to counteract the

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known influence of the Bible among her adherents, that the Romish church thus wears two faces, and gives herself the lie? This confirms what we have already quoted from Dens, that "when Roman Ca tholics live among heretics, greater indulgence is allowed" them in reading the word of God. Finding that she can not hinder them from reading the Bible, the church, as a judicious mother, at once offers her children a Bible "in every way equal to their wants at this junc ture," and fills it with pictures to please them, and make them contented.

Well, we are glad of it. True, this edition will be a transcript of the Douay Bible; it will teach that Jacob "worshiped the top of his staff," and that "the unwritten tra ditions of the Apostles are no less to be received than their written epis tles;" but after all, such a Bible will be vastly better than none. Common sense will soon distinguish between the notes and the text, and the errors of the latter are com paratively few. We pledge our selves as subscribers for this new edition, and shall do what we can to put it in the hands of Irish Catholics in our service, "with the ap probation of the Rt. Rev. Bishop of New York." If any trouble comes of this with "his Holiness," we will trust the bishop to "accommo date the difference." We moreover

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