He talked Down to Them

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 31, 30 July 1903, Page 1

He talked Down to Them

Sane peopJe as little dream of going to an Orange anniversary for fact regarding the Catholic Church as to a mud-puddle for cut diamonds or to a goat for wool. For history you get hysteria there, for reason, abuse, and the incense of its* worship is assafoetida. A famous English barrister found it necessary, though somewhat difficult, to talk down to the me»agre intellectual level of the average jury. And in the same way an educated and otherwise fair-minded man may, by strenuous endeavor, reach down to the depths of the slip-slop that is deemed appropriate to* the celebration of « the glorious twelfth.' This may account for some of the serious— even absurd — lapses from historical truth that marked an Orange discourse recently delivered by an Anglican dignitary in Christchurch. Among other things, he slogged the Catholic Church with slung-shot for her alleged neglect of the Bible in pre-Reformation days. Surely it is time for men whose position demands a decent meed of scholarship to leave such idle and exploded legends to Orange lodges and itinerant imposters of the sham ex-priest order. The whole voice of Protestant scholarship is in open revolt against the statement of the Anglican dignitary referred to. Let one or two eminent names suffice here. Dr. Maitland in his ' Dark Ages ' (p. 507) says :—: —

1 The writings of the Dark Ages are, if I may usejflhe expression, made of the Scriptures. I do not mean that the writers constantly quoted the Scriptures and appealed to them as authorities on all occasions, as other writers have done since their day ; though they did this, and it is a strong proof of their familiarity with them : but I mean that they thought and spoke and wrote the thoughts and words and phrases of the Bible, and that they did this constantly and habitually as the natural mode of expressing themselves. They did it, too, not Exclusively in theological or ecclesiastical matters, but in histories, biographies, familiar letters, legal instruments, and documents of every description.'

Another foremost Protestant writer, the Rev. Dr. Blunt, amply bears out the testimony of Dr. Maitland. In his ' Reformation of the Church of England,' chap, x., vol. 1., pp. 501-502, Dr. Blunt says :—

1 There has been much wild and foolish writing about the scarcity of the Bible in the ages preceding the Reformation. It has been taken for granted that the Holy Scripture was almost a sealed book to clergy and laity until it was printed in English by Tyndale and Coverdale, and that the only real source of knowledge respecting it before them was the translation made by Wieklifie. The facts are that the clergy and monks were daily reading large part ions of the Bible and had them stored up in their memory by constant recitation ; that they made very free use of Holy Scripture in preaching, so that even a modern Bible-reader is astonished at the number of quotations and references contained in their sermons ;i that countless copies of the Bible were written out by the surprising industry of cloistered scribes , that many glosses or commentaries were written which aie still seen to be full of pure and wise thoughts ; and that all laymen who could read were, as a, rule, provided with their Gospels, their Psalter, or other devotional portions of the Bible. Men did, in fact, take a vast amount of personal trouble with respect to the production of copies of the Holy Scriptures, and accomplished by head, hands, and heart, what is now chiefly done by paid workmen and machinery. The clergy studied the Word ol God and made it known to the laity, and those few among the laity who could read had abundant opportunity of reading the Bible, either in Latin or in (English, up to the Reformation period.'

Another Protestant writer says : ' Certain it is that during the middle ages the minds of the most popular preachers and teachers (and, we might add, of the laity too) were saturated with the Sacred Scriptures With the Reformation came the disintegrating principle of private judgment, which split up Protestantism into hundreds of warring sects. In his last speech in Parliament Henry VIII. summed up the results of the religious revolution at the time by saying that ' charity was ne\er in a more languishing condition, virtue never at a lower rbb, nor God Himself never less honored and worse served in Christendom' (Collier's 'Ecclesiastical History,' vol v , p 208, London cd., 1852) So much for England Mattel s were even worse in Ger. any, the cradle of the Refoimation Luther Ined long enough to bitterly deplore the hopeless religious dissensions that the grevous abuse of the Sacied Book by his follow cis and produced, and to sum up its lesuHs in the following melancholy words 'Our evareelicals aie now sevenio'd more wicked than they weic befoie In piopoition as we hear the Gospel, we he, cheat, gorge, and commit e\civ crime. If the de\il has Lcen din en out of us, "-even worse ha\e taken their place, to nidge fiom the conduct of princes, lords, nobles, buiEressc s, and peasants the'r utterly shameless acts, and their di-.u*ganl of God ana Ihs menaces ' Cahin, lk*/a, Melancthon, and other Rife rmers were equally emphatic in dcplomig the state ol things that 4 , v. as bi ought about in the Gciman Fatheiland and elsewhere by the change Imm the pio;v>i and icsjuctful use of the Bible th.it had pie\ ailed m the Catholic days to the new principles that tame in with tie meat religious revolution of the nxUenth cenlisi\ 'Ihcse new fangled principles 01 using the Bible bet' an then unhappy work by creating; religious disunion , they continued it by increasing and pcipeti'ating tlcin till tl.ov have become a laughingstock to the heathen aid a scandal to the Chriatian name, they ha\e ended by leavim-, the Protestant denominations without an> fixed benel in the Sacred Scnptuics as the instiled VW rd oi Cod, and with a rapid drift towards the ia,tion?]ism that has made Germany— which was the cradle of the Refoimai ion— the gra\e of the Reformed faith