ll)

apostates, Luther and Calvin, if it was not the Catholic Church? Before these two monsters of impurity had troubled the peace of the world, deceiving people by their sophisms and errors of every sort; before there was even one single Protestant in the world, the Catholic Church not only preserved the sacred writings as her most precious treasure, but she neglected no possible means of spreading their knowledge amongst all nations. During the short space of time which had elapsed between the wonderful invention of printing and the day that Luther published his first Bible, from seventy- five to eighty editions of the Bible. translated into the different lan- guages of Europe, and forming not less than two hundred thousand copies, had been circulated amongst the people, with the authoriza- tion, and often at the expense, of the Catholic ecclesiastical authori- ties. If the Church, during a few years, was obliged to put certain restrictions on the diffusion and reading of the Bible in modern lan- guages, Protestants alone were the cause of it. These sectaries had so changed the text in their false translations ; they had by their ignorance, or rather by the corruption of their minds and hearts so poisoned this source oflliufe, that those coming to drink of it found in it rather the death than the life of their souls. Europe was for a time inundated with bibles in which the true text, as acknowledged by well , educated Protestants, had disappeared to give place to the senseless and impious dreams of the sectaries. Then, but then alone, the Church, rightly fearing, or rather, seeing that those falsified bibles were being taken for the true word of God, put some restrictions for a time on the reading of the Bible in modern languages. She did then what wise and able physicians do in times of epidemics; they forbid us certain foods which are excellent at other times, but which become dangerous on account of the impure disposition of the air or of our temperaments. But never has the Church shackled the diffusion of the Holy Bible in the Greek or Latin text. Now, at that time, nearly everybody who knew how to read at all understood Greek or Latin ; for these two languages were then taught far more universally than they are to-day in all the prin- ciple schools of Europe. But the unhappy epoch when a deplorable epidemic forced the Church of Jesus Christ to take this extreme measure in order to prevent the contagion of evil attacking the very heart of the nations, was not of long duration. The devouring fever which Satan had, by the hands of Luther and Calvin, infused into the veins of Europe, had scarcely lost its intensity and contagion, when the Church once more invited her children to nourish their souls by the reading of the Holy Bible, and put it within the reach of all by the numerous authorized translations. which She recommended everywhere by the voice of Her chief pastor.

Certain Protestants still repeat that the Church forbids the reading of the Holy Bible by the people; this is a cowardly and absurd lie, and it is only the ignorant or the silly amongst Protestants, who at the present day believe this ancient fabrication of heresy; some unscrupulous ministers, however, are constantly bringing it up before the eyes of their dupes to impose upon them and to keep them in a holy horror of what they call Popery. Let Protestants make the tour of Europe and America; let them go into the numerous Catholic book-stores they will come across at every step ; let them, for instance,