Mgr. Louis de Ségur: Plain Talk about the Protestantism of Today [1868]

[Stone]

PART SECOND.


XVI. "The Bible, the Whole Bible, Nothing but the Bible."

— Such is the incessant cry of Protestants, small and big, against Catholics. The Bible is the whole religion! Read the Bible and you are sure to find faith and salvation! The Bible will rid you of all Romish superstitions! Do you pant after a religion easy, free of all superfluous baggage? Have a Bible! Do you aspire to be one of God's elect? Accept of this Bible, my dear sir!

False and impossible as the principle is, which makes a book, interpreted in many and opposite ways, the Rule of Faith, one may be tempted to think that Protestants accept it with reverence and reflect on its behests. Nothing of the kind; and we have only to open the Bible to see at once the glaring contrast between the Sacred Text and Protestant doctrines on some of the most important questions.


PROTESTANT BELIEF AND PROTESTANT PRACTICE. / SACRED TEXT.

The ministers say: "The Bible is the only authority in religion. Whatever man teaches, unless it is the text of the Bible, is an usurpation and a falsehood."

Jesus Christ says to his Apostles: "As the Father hath sent me, I also send you." (John xx. 21.) "All power is given to me in heaven and on earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations, . . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." (Matthew, xxviii. 18.) "He that heareth you, heareth me: and he that despiseth you, despiseth me." (Luke x. 16.)

The ministers say: "In fact of religion, we must believe no person but the Bible, the pure word of God."


And St. Paul says: "Obey your prelates and be subject to them, for they watch as beings to render an account of your souls." (Heb. xiii. 17.)

The ministers say: "Bishops claim too much; their ministry is an usurped one."


And St. Paul says to the Bishops: "The Holy Ghost has placed you Bishops to rule the Church of God." (Acts xx. 28.)

The ministers say: "The Bible's meaning can be easily caught, and the very reading of it shelters us from all errors."


But St. Peter thus speaketh of St. Paul's Letters: "In all his Epistles are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction." (2 Peter iii. 16.)

We know that the Saviour wrote nothing. He never told his Apostles to write; he left not a word enjoining upon the Christians to read what the Apostles might write. Hence we see that in the primitive Church they prayed, they fasted, were baptized, received holy communion, followed all the practices of religion most faithfully, and secured the salvation of their souls without reading the Gospel, which had not as yet been written. This very little remark, which we have already previously made, and upon which we lay a particular stress, blights, to a very considerable extent, the grand Protestant dogma that we must needs read the Scriptures in order to know religion and be saved. Well, then, what has Jesus Christ done to establish and to preserve religion? He has commanded his Apostles to preach: that's all. The Apostles thought fit to put in writing some of the teaching they had received, and some of the most striking facts in the life of their Divine Master, — that is the whole of the Gospels. The balance of those teachings and of those facts they have only delivered by word of mouth. They wrote them not on paper: they are the Tradition. Hence Tradition has in itself as much authority as the Gospel. Let us now take up the text, and examine whether the saying of ministers is in accordance with the saying of the Scriptures: —

The ministers say: "We'll have none of traditions."

St. Paul says: "Brethren, . . . hold the Traditions, which you have learned, whether by word, or by our Epistle." (2 Thess. ii. 14.)


The ministers say: "All that Jesus has done or said is found in the Gospel."

St. John says at the close of his Gospel: "There are also many other things which Jesus did, which, if they were written every one, the world itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be written." (xxi. 25.)


The ministers say: "There is no more of the Apostles' doctrine than what they have written."

St. Paul says to the Bishop Timothy: "The things which thou hast heard of me by many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men, who shall be fit to teach others also." (2 Tim. ii. 2.) And St. John: "I had many things to write unto thee; but I could not by ink and pen write to thee. But I hope speedily to see thee, and we will speak mouth to mouth." (2. i. 14.)


The ministers say: "Justification and salvation are to be obtained only by faith. Works are useless and without any efficacy."

St. James says: "What shall it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Shall faith be able to save him? . . . So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself . . . Was not Abraham, our father, justified by works, offering up his son upon the altar? . . . Do you see that by works a man is justified; and not by faith only?" (2. ii. 14, and seq.)


In the days of the Reformation, an engraver represented the institution of the Eucharist. [A copy of it can be seen in the Library of Georgetown College.] There is our Divine Lord distributing the Holy Sacrament to the Apostles, and by his sacred lips are uttered these words: "This is my body." On the right Luther offers the holy communion, and says: "In this is contained my body." At the left, Calvin does the same, and declares: "This is the figure of my body." At the bottom of the picture the engraver wrote in prominent letters, Whom shall we believe? There is a great truth, expressed with impressive eloquence, in those words.


The ministers say: "The Saviour never meant to give his own flesh for our food. It is an error forged by the Romish church."

Our Lord said: "I am the bread of life . . . the bread that cometh down from heaven: that if any man eateth of it, he may not die . . . If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give himself to eat? Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you; except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you . . . for my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." (John vi. 36, et seq.)


The ministers say: "God alone forgives sins. He has given no power to men to forgive them."

Jesus Christ says to his messengers: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." — (John xx. 22.) And: "Amen, I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven." (Matt. xviii. 18.)


Nothing easier than to continue this parallel. It sets forth the great opposition between the teaching of the ministers and that Word of God which said ministers vaunt so much to follow as the only Rule of Faith. In the face of such incontrovertible truths, what becomes of the great Protestant principle, — the Bible, the whole Bible?

No wonder that Protestants, startled by such incongruities, end by rejecting the Bible altogether, inasmuch as they cannot base their belief on it any more. Many parsons look upon the Bible as man's work. "We cannot deny," says M. Coquerel, "that the holy books contain contradictions, and errors in point of fact." (Lien, May 6th, 1852.) The Mayor of Berlin, addressing the king in behalf of the Protestantism of the city, said: "As for the majority of Protestants, the Bible and the symbolic books only bear witness to the labors in establishing Christianity; they are works purely human; they contain not what may be called an absolute truth." (Memoire sur l'Instruction publique en Allemagne, par E. Rendu.) To finish this picture, Professor Schoerer of Geneva, calls the holy Scriptures, a ventriloquism cabalistic. (La Critique et la Foi, pp. 20, 22.)

There! you have what Protestants have made of the Bible.