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Version correctly puts, Ram and Shealtiel. St. Luke mistook Juda for Joda, and St. James seems not to have known that the right name of Elias was Elijah. Unless it should turn out that the Revisers were really inspired to correct the New Testament as well as the Universal Church, we think them guilty both of great presumption and a gross blunder. These modern scribes would make the Gospel yield to the Law, and the Church bow to the synagogue. They prefer the silly pedantry of a few wrongheaded Reformers of the sixteenth century to the practice of Christendom in every age. Are they ignorant of the fact that the inspired writers of the New Testament took their quotations as well as their proper names, not from the Hebrew, but from the Greek Septuagint? To be consistent, they should have corrected the quotations too; perhaps they may yet do so on further Revision.

Lastly, we come to the most serious point of all—viz., the passages the Revisers have thought proper to leave out altogether. So far it has been a question of translation and of names, but here the vital integrity of Sacred Scripture is affected. By the sole authority of textual criticism these men have dared to vote away some forty verses of the Inspired Word. The Eunuch's Baptismal Profession of Faith is gone; the Angel of the Pool of Bethesda has vanished; but the Angel of the Agony remains-till the next Revision. The Heavenly Witnesses have departed, and no marginal note mourns their loss. The last twelve verses of St. Mark are detached from the rest of the Gospel, as if ready for removal as soon as Dean Burgon dies. The account of the woman taken in adultery is placed in brackets, awaiting excision. Many other passages have a mark set against them in the margin to show that, like forest trees, they are shortly destined for the critic's axe. Who can tell when the destruction will cease? What have the offending verses done that textual critics should tear them from their home of centuries in the shrine of God's Temple? The sole offence of many is that the careless copyist of some old Uncial MS. skipped them over. Some, again, have been swallowed up by "the all-devouring monster Omoio-Teleuton" -the fatal tendency which possesses a drowsy or a hurried writer to mistake the ending of a verse further down for the similar ending of the verse he copied last. The Angel of Bethesda may have cured "the sick, the blind, the halt and the withered," but modern science has no need of his services, for it has proved, without identifying the site, that the spring was intermittent and the water chalybeate. But our intelligent critics forgot to get rid of the paralytic, whom the Lord cured, and as long as he remains in the text his words will convict

them of folly. To take another instance. In many places in the Gospels there is mention of "prayer and fasting." Here textual critics suspect that "an ascetic bias" has added the fasting; so they expunge it, and leave in prayer only. If an "ascetic bias" brought fasting in, it is clear that a bias the reverse of ascetic leaves it out. St. Luke's second-first Sabbath (vi. 1) puzzled the translators, so they reduced it to the rite of an ordinary Sabbath by omitting the perplexing word δευτεροπρώτῳ. Yet one of the fundamental rules of textual criticism, and they have only two or three, says, "ardua lectio præstet proclivi." Perhaps the reading here was too "hard" for the translators, and so they changed the rule. We have no patience to discuss calmly their shameful treatment of the "Three Heavenly Witnesses." The Revisers have left out the whole verse in 1 John v. 7, 8, without one word of explanation. Surely no one but a textual critic could be capable of such a deed. Nor would any one critic have had the hardihood to do such a thing by himself. It required the corporate audacity of a Committee of Critics for the commission of such a sacrilege. But textual critics are like book-worms-devoid of light and conscience, following the blind instincts of their nature, they will make holes in the most sacred of books. The beauty, the harmony, and the poetry of the two verses would have melted the heart of any man who had a soul above parchment. Fathers have quoted them, martyrs died for them, saints preached them. The Church of the East made them her Profession of Faith; the Church of the West enshrined them in her Liturgy. What miserable excuses can these Revisers have for such a wanton outrage on Christian feeling? They cannot find the words in their oldest Greek MSS.! The oldest of them is younger than the Sacred Autographs by full three hundred years, and the best of them is full of omissions. Most of them are copies of copies; and in families of MSS., if the father sins by omission, all his children, whether uncial or cursive, must bear the loss. The textual critics of the seventeenth century left out the second half of the 23rd verse of the 2nd chapter of this very Epistle of John, because it was not found amongst the few MSS. which formed the slender stock-intrade of Incipient Textual Criticism. Since then older and better MSS. have been added, containing the missing sentence; and the critics of the nineteenth century have been forced to restore to the Sacred Text what their fathers stole. Who knows but that another Tischendorf may arise, and find in some secluded monastery of the Nitrian Desert a MS. older than the Sinaitic, containing the "Heavenly Witnesses ?" But true critics, who are not merely textual, know that there is a higher criterion of genuineness than MS. authority. There is what Griesbach

calls an "interna bonitas;" there is what Bengel calls an "adamantina cohærentia," which he says, speaking of this very passage, "compensate for the scarcity of MSS." But our enlightened Revisers contend that the passage is a gloss of St. Augustine's, which has slipped from the margin into the text, when nobody was looking. How, then, did Tertullian and St. Cyprian quote the words a century before? How is it that the Santa Croce "Speculum," which Cardinal Wiseman thought to be St. Augustine's own, gives the words three separate times as the words of Scripture? It is beyond dispute that the Old Latin Version, made in the first half of the second century, and revised by St. Jerome in the fourth, contained the words. Still, they persist, the Peshito Syriac omits them. So does it omit four entire Epistles, to say nothing of the Apocalyse. Yet St. Ephrem, who certainly knew what was in the Syriac Bible, quotes, or rather alludes to the words. But they say the Fathers did not make much use of the words against the Arians. There is many another handy verse, the genuineness of which no one doubts, though the Fathers never cited it. The Fathers were not always quoting Scripture with chapter and verse, like modern Bible-readers and tract-distributors. But here is a fact, worth more in point of evidence than a cart-load of quotations. In the year 483, at the height of the great Vandal persecutions, four hundred African bishops in synod assembled drew up a Confession of the Catholic Faith containing the disputed text. This Confession they presented to the Arian Hunneric, King of the Vandals. Many of them sealed their testimony in their blood. About fourteen hundred years later some two dozen Anglican prelates, aided by Methodist preachers, Baptist teachers, and one Unitarian, assembled in synod at Westminster to revise the New Testament, and without a semblance of persecution they yielded up to modern unbelief a verse which Catholic bishops held to the death against Arianism. These men are worse than the ancient Vandals, who only killed the bishops, but did not mutilate the text of Sacred Scripture. In this Socinian age the world could better spare a whole bench of Anglican bishops than one single verse of Holy Writ which bears witness to Christ's Divinity and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. Well might Strauss ask the question in one of our English periodicals, "Are we Christians?" Well may M. Renan cross the water to lecture England on the origin of Christianity.

But these modern excisers have committed a blunder as well as a crime. They stealthily cut out the verse, but they have joined the pieces so clumsily that any one can detect the fraud. As the passage now stands in their version is without sense, though they foist in the word "agree" to smooth over the

difficulty. "The witness of God" in the following verse is meaningless without the Heavenly witnesses. Their new-made Greek text will make schoolboys wonder how the first Greek scholars of the day could have so forgotten their syntax as to try and make a masculine participle agree with three neuter nouns. The Article too, as Bishop Middleton foretold, will reproach them with a half measure, for they should either have kept both verses in or cut both out. Yet strange to say these Revisers have no shame, no remorse for what they have done. One of them likens what they have done to getting rid of a perjured witness! Another talks calmly of the Revisers being in Paradise, and this after they have dared to take away from the words of him who prophesied that God would take away such men's part from the tree of life and out of the Holy City.

Cardinal Franzelin concludes his masterly defence of the Three Heavenly Witnesses with a remark as true as it is sad. Protestants, he says, have given up the verse because they have first given up the doctrine it supports. St. Jerome says that after a certain council which left the word Homousion out of its Creed, the world awoke and shuddered to find itself Arian. On the 17th of May the English-speaking world awoke to find that its Revised Bible had banished the Heavenly Witnesses and put the devil in the Lord's Prayer. Protests loud and deep went forth against the insertion, against the omission none. It is well, then, that the Heavenly Witnesses should depart whence their testimony is no longer received. The Jews have a legend that shortly before the destruction of their Temple, the Shechinah departed from the Holy of Holies, and the Sacred Voices were heard saying, "Let us go hence." So perhaps it is to be with the English Bible, the Temple of Protestantism. The going forth of the Heavenly Witnesses is the sign of the beginning of the end. Lord Panmure's prediction may yet prove true-the New Version will be the death-knell of Protestantism. But one thing is certain, that, as in the centuries before the birth of Protestantism, so after it is dead and gone the Catholic Church will continue to read in her Bible and profess in her Creed that "there are Three who give testimony in Heaven and these Three are One."

We have spoken of the admissions, the peculiarities, and the omissions of the newly Revised Version. It only remains to express our deep anxiety as to its effect upon the religious mind of England and Scotland. It cannot but give a severe shock to those who have been brought up in the strictest sect of Protestantism. Their fundamental doctrine of verbal inspiration is undermined. The land of John Knox will mourn its dying Calvinism. The prophets of Bible religion will find no sure word from the Lord in the new Gospel. But assuredly the Broad Church

will widen their tents yet more, and rejoice in the liberty wherewith Textual Criticism has made them free. Already one of their great oracles, himself a Reviser, has declared that Inspiration "is not in a part but in the whole, not in a particular passage but in the general tendency and drift of the complete words." And he teaches a new way to convert the working-classes from their unbelief. "The real way," he says, "to reclaim them is for the Church frankly to admit that the documents on which they base their claims to attention are not to be accepted in blind obedience, but are to be tested and sifted and tried by all the methods that patience and learning can bring to bear." Then Heaven help the poor working man if his sole hope of salvation lies in the new Gospel of Textual Criticism! But what will those think who, outside the Catholic Church, still retain the old Catholic ideas about Church and Scripture? How bitter to them must be the sight of their Anglican Bishops sitting with Methodists, Baptists, and Unitarians to improve the English Bible according to modern ideas of Progressive Biblical Criticism! Who gave these men authority over the written Word of God? It was not Parliament, or Privy Council, but the Church of England acting through Convocation. To whom do they look for the necessary sanction and approval of their work, but to public opinion? One thing at least is certain, the Catholic Church will gain by the New Revision, both directly and indirectly. Directly, because old errors are removed from the translation; indirectly, because the "Bible-only" principle is proved to be false. It is now at length too evident that Scripture is powerless without the Church as the witness to its inspiration, the safeguard of its integrity, and the exponent of its meaning. And it will now be clear to all men which is the true Church, the real Mother to whom the Bible of right belongs. Nor will it need Solomon's wisdom to see that the so-called Church which heartlessly gives up the helpless child to be cut in pieces by textual critics cannot be the true Mother.

ART. VI.-CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN EQUATORIAL

AFRICA.

1. To the Central African Lakes and Back.

THOMSON, F.R.G.S. London. 1881.

2. Les Missions Catholiques. Lyon.

IT

By JOSEPH

T is now nearly twenty years since a European traveller crossing a series of swelling heights, all tufted with sheeny plumes of plantain and banana, saw before him a great unknown freshwater sea which no white man had ever looked upon before.

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