of His, brothers and sisters in Him, wills that we all help
one another with the gifts He has given us; and the more we can realise
that all separate gifts are parts of one great harmonious whole, the
more fully we shall live and feel and enjoy.

There is, of course, a delight in exquisite typography, and hand-made
paper, and binding into which the soul of a true artist has gone. People
may be willing to give large sums for these things, independently of the
value of what is under them; or people may value books for their age, or
because they are rare, or because they are records of facts which it is
well to know and good to be able to verify.

But there is a better way of love than all of these. One may love the
book through which one holds communion with the spirit of its writer,
being ready to learn from him by direct learning, or by the learning
received through suggestion, or through the rousing of the spirit of
enquiry, or the spirit of opposition. Is not this the best kind of love,
the love by which the thought of man is used by man, the spirit of man
holds communion with the spirit of man?

All through the ages, great things have been handed down by written
words, and people of all nations have shared one another's national
heritage of written thought, and in that sharing made it larger and
greater. We are now considering the earlier story of English Catholic
literature, and it is surely well that people should know something of
what things were said and sung in the olden time; the time when all art,
all literature was fed by the great Mother of all Christian art and all
Christian literature, the Holy Catholic Church.

You will find our Catholic literature saturated with sacred lore and
knowledge of Holy Scripture. Before printing was invented people could
not multiply copies of the Sacred Books as they can now, but they knew
them probably much better than many of those who can easily now buy them
for a few pence. We have translations of various parts of the Bible in
these early times. You will remember how in St Bede's last days he
finished his translation of part of St John's Gospel. We have lovely
manuscripts, such as that of the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in fine
clear writing, which can be seen at the British Museum; and facsimiles
of parts of them can be had for a small sum. It is simply an uneducated
error to suppose that the heretical editing, as I may call it, of Holy
Scripture in the mother-tongu