s
their meaning, thereby falling into miserable error." (_Cath. Encycl_.
II, 545.) The writer whom we have just quoted says: "The fundamental
fallacy of private interpretation of the Scriptures is presupposed by
the Bible societies." These papal pronunciamentos arc directed chiefly
against the Canstein Bibelgesellschaft and her later sisters, such as
the Berliner Bibelgesellschaft, and against the British and American
Bible Societies.

The face of the Roman Church is sternly set against the plain text of
the Scriptures. To defeat the meaning of the original text, she not only
mutilates the text and adds glosses which twist the meaning of the text
into an altogether different meaning, but she declares that the Bible is
not the only source from which men must obtain revealed truth. Alongside
of the Bible she places an unwritten word of God, her so-called
traditions. These, she claims, are divine revelations which were handed
down orally from generation to generation. The early fathers and the
councils of the Church referred to them in defining the true doctrine
and prescribing the correct practise of the Church. Nobody has collected
these traditions, and nobody will. But to what extent the Roman Church
operates with them, is well known.

Speaking of learned Bible-study in the Middle Ages, Mosheim says:
"Nearly all the theologians were _Positivi_ and _Sententiarii_ [that is,
they taught what the Church ordered to be taught], who deemed it a great
achievement, both in speculative and practical theology, either to
overwhelm the subject with a torrent of quotations from the fathers, or
to anatomize it according to the laws of dialectics [that is, the laws
of reasoning, logic]. And whenever they had occasion to speak of the
meaning of any text, they appealed invariably to what was called the
_Glossa Ordinaria_ [that is, the official explanation], and the phrase
_Glossa dicit_ (the Gloss says), was as common and decisive on their
lips as anciently the phrase _Ipse dixit_ (he, viz., the teacher, has
said) in the Pythagorean school." (III, 15.)

In his controversies with the theologians of Rome, Luther found that
they were constantly wriggling out of the plain text of the Bible and
running for shelter to the traditions, to the fathers, to the decrees of
councils of the Church.

At the Council of Trent some one rose to inquire whether all the
traditions recognized as genuine by the Church could not be named; he
was told that