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Suppression of the Bible.

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in the vernacular tongue was forbidden to the common people in Spain.

But nothing could be more mistaken than for the minister of religion, who has at heart the renovation and sanctification of the world, to reject the aid of such an auxiliary as the Bible.

The Bible is the mightiest moral agent that has ever wrought upon our earth. Men disagree and dispute about the nature and extent of its inspiration, yet the universal and involuntary homage that is paid to it is conclusive proof of the fact. "The wind bloweth whither it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth." There are parts of the Bible which no one can read without feeling the divine afflatus, and being convinced that its wisdom and its power are not of earthly, but of heavenly origin.

The Bible is the best theological manual for the busy, toiling masses of mankind. It puts God into the world, and makes him the object of a saving faith and a sanctifying reverence. It points out his radiant footsteps throughout the universe. It gathers into the grand idea every thing that is sublime, commanding, attractive, and lovely. It makes us live as ever in the presence of the Holy One. It translates the laws of nature into the volitions of his will. It gives the human heart what it most craves, the comfort of a Father's care. It rescues the course of events from the blind guidance of a hopeless fatality, rolling on from the thick darkness of the past to the thicker darkness of the future, and places it in the hands of a benignant Providence, beginning in a plan of infinite wisdom, and having its consummation in a glory which the human imagination has never conceived.

The God of the Scriptures has been the motive power of the progression of the world, the central sun whose beams have warmed into life whatever of purity and philanthropy there is which elevates Christendom above the attainments of ancient or contemporary Paganism. Devotion, directed to such a Being, becomes the most powerful means of elevating the human mind and sanctifying the human heart. He who daily walks with the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, with that

Heavenly Father to whom Christ has taught us to pray, will go from strength to strength, from sanctity to sanctity, from glory to glory. Discard the Bible, and the love of the true God is eclipsed, and the mind will be prone to wander away and worship other and inferior deities, and will be apt to substitute in the place of " Our Father which art in heaven," "Holy Mary, Mother of God."

The Bible is the grand educator of the conscience. In it human duty is mapped out in its broadest features and its minutest details; it is prescribed with a spirituality so searching, and a definiteness so explicit, that it not only cannot be mistaken, but it cannot be escaped. It is exhibited, not only in the abstract, but embodied in the concrete. The history which the Bible details is the practical illustration of the principles it lays down. There is no vice whose odiousness and whose misery are not displayed in some real personage in the sacred history, and there is no virtue which does not shed its beauty and its peace over some actual life.

The Bible is the true confessional. No subtle ecclesiastic deals with the conscience with such searching power as the word of God. "For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." He who reads the Sacred Scriptures finds his heart laid open before God, its inmost disguises are torn off, and the conviction is forced home upon the mind, that "there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight, for all things are naked and opened in the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." No human language addresses us with such wise discrimination, or with such irresistible authority. The high and the low, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant, as they read the Holy Oracles, are struck with the same conviction, that "the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold;

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Value of the Free Bible.

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sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. Moreover, by them is thy servant warned, and in keeping of them there is great reward." He who readeth them will "understand his errors, and be cleansed from his secret faults; he will be kept back from presumptuous sins, and they shall not have dominion over him, and he shall be innocent from the great transgression."

The Bible is the chief source of that purity of sentiment and refinement of manners, which distinguish modern society from the coarseness and sensuality of heathen antiquity. In this does it manifest that it had a divine, and not a human origin. It was not a human development, it was not the culmination of humanity in a cultivated and felicitous age. It was not a conception suggested by any perfection that man and society had anywhere reached. It was an ideal which came down from above, of supernatural, celestial origin. It was far in advance of that age, and though the Church has been ever since pressing on to realize perfection, the Bible still seems as far in advance of it as ever. Its daily reading in the family circle, and at the domestic altar, does more than any thing else to train up the successive generations of the young to sobriety, religion, and usefulness.

The Church of Rome, then, as it seems to me, cannot commit a greater error, than to permit her conflict with Protestantism to engender any real hostility to the circulation of the Sacred Scriptures. The mission of the Christian Church was most clearly pointed out at the very hour of its institution, "Go, teach all nations," "Go, preach the Gospel to every creature." When books were few, and the power to read them limited, this was a mighty task. Preaching, oral instruction, was almost the only means of sowing the divine seed in the soul of man; and how imperfect the power to comprehend the Gospel even in the most cultivated minds! What measureless aid, then, was brought to the cause of evangelizing the world by the art of printing! which places the Book of books in every dwelling, and gives the most destitute, the most isolated and obscure, the knowledge of the way of salvation. The very suspicion of unfriendliness to such a cause must weigh like lead upon the VOL. LV.- 4TH. S. VOL. XX. NO. I. 6

advancement of any church in the light of the nineteenth century.

Finally, the time has been when the Catholic Church has boasted of the advantages it has derived by its ultraconservatism, its corporate strength, its immutable dogmatism, paramount in authority to the Scriptures themselves, and superseding their use.

The time will at length come, nay, has already come, when these very characteristics begin to be a bar to its further progress, and may work its downfall. It is a dangerous position for any thing human to take, to say, "I can never change. I will ignore the great law of progress, I will live and act as if the world remained where it was six centuries ago." The Catholic Church has taken this position, and she must abide the issue. Her only hope is in stopping that advancement, or in reigning over that portion of mankind which she can detain among the shadows of the past.

This whole subject is coming home to her experience in this country at the present time. She has become strong in numbers, by the immigration of a multitude accustomed to her discipline, and not educated beyond the circle of her ideas. Can she keep them there? In crossing the Atlantic, that emigrating Church is placed in a condition of things entirely new. In coming to our shores, she finds the index moved at least two centuries forward on the dial-plate of time. She left a world of fixtures, she has come to a world of change. She left the quiet realm of custom and proscription, she has come within the turbulent domain of individuality and conventions. She was accustomed to repose under the shadow of authority. Here she is compelled to submit all to the searching scrutiny of intellect.

On the other side of the water, she ruled by the power of the overwhelming associations of the past. Here she has no past to back her authority, and she must stand or fall as do other forms of Christianity, by her utility alone. All that she teaches, and all that she does, must be subjected to the cool reason and keen-eyed utilitarianism of the American mind. The splendid processions and solemn pageants of the Old World will never be repeated here. Nothing that she can do or say will carry back this great nation one step towards the errors and

1853.] The Character of Archbishop Cranmer.

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superstitions of the ages that are gone, and she must quietly submit to become one of the elements of the broadest and most comprehensive nationality that the world has ever seen, and suffer such modifications as her proximity to Protestantism must inevitably bring about.

ART. V. THE CHARACTER OF ARCHBISHOP

CRANMER.*

Ir is not necessary to criticize Mr. Todd's little book, the title of which we give below. Its effect upon any unbiased reader is to remind one of the advice of Dr. Calamy to his pupils, "Gentlemen, before you raise the Devil, take care how you may lay him." Bringing into a condensed form many of the strongest objections to the Archbishop's course, its feeble, wordy, and illogical extenuations rather provoke one to greater severity of judgment. Most of the biographies of this leader of the English Reformation injure their subject in the same way they omit to notice some of his saddest evasions of truth and duty, and offer, for those which they feel unable to pass by, excuses more dishonorable to themselves than profitable to him who would never have urged them in his own behalf. It surely cannot be necessary, in order to exhibit the signal service rendered to Protestantism by the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, to cloak over his many weaknesses of character, his servility to power, his readiness to persecute while so unwilling to be persecuted, his characteristic cowardice, or his final fall from a position which presented every motive for keeping one's faith to the end. The abundant evidence which we have as to his remarkable learning, especially in the canon law, his soundness of judgment and courtesy of manner, his industry and perseverance in religious

*A Vindication of the Most Reverend Thomas Cranmer, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and therewith of the Reformation in England, against some of the Allegations which have been recently made by the Rev. Dr. Lingard, the Rev. Dr. Milner, and Charles Butler, Esq. Second Edition. By the Rev. H. J. TODD, M. A., F. S. A., and R. S. L. London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, & Joy; and for A. Barclay, York. 1826. pp. 148.