THE OPPOSITION OF THE JEWS AND CATHOLICS TO THE READING OF THE BIBLE IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

That these two great religious bodies, the Jew as preserver of the "oracles of God," as contained in the Old Testament, and the Catholics, through the dark ages, the preservers of the New Testament, should not only join forces, when usually so averse one to the other is perhaps not more surprising than that in doing so they should also necessarily make common cause wih infidels and agnostics, in their strenuous efforts to exclude the Bible from the public schools, and that too when no fact is more obvious than that it is the "open Bible” which bears the glorious message that God so loved, not alone the Jew, nor the Catholic nor Protestant nor infidel, but "the world," including all of these and also every other tribe and kindred and nation, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life; a promise that includes every other blessing that hath entered the heart of men.

It was this love of God always to the "Jew first" which was embodied in the "new commandment, that ye love one another" and so fulfill the law, that makes of this land "the melting pot" of all nations, for it is the love of God

shed abroad in the human heart, that is the only alchemy that can transmute race hatred, religious prejudice and even the ill will of our enemies into a fellowship so comprehensive that the command to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and to observe the golden rule can be made to embrace in its fulfillment all mankind, whether loving friends or persecuting enemies.

It is not surprising that infidels should be opposed to the reading of the Bible in the public schools because the Bible assertion that "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God" cannot be very pleasing to them.

Paul explains to us, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fulness of the Gentiles be become in "and as Jerusalem is still trodden down of the Gentiles" their opposition to the teaching of the New Testament is also understood, and perhaps no statement was ever more fully confirmed than this one-in their rejection of the Bible in the public schools-for no fact is more notable than that in no nation except those of the English speaking people, where the Bible is an open book and regarded by their rulers as the inerrant word of God, are they treated as brothers, neighbors and friends, because they alone understand from the teaching of the New Testament that the Jews are God's chosen people still, and that all blessings that are bestowed on mankind are "to the Jew first and also to the Gentile."

But the opposition of the Catholics is less apparent, for Jesus, whom they worship as the "Son of God" the same as Protestants, said "In secret have I said nothing," and he also

commanded all men to "search the Scriptures. But let me say that it was this church that gave to us, albeit, not willingly, such great religious teachers as Luther, Whitefield and Father Newman late in life and among the most devout and consecrated Christians in the world today are thousands of members of this church, especially the Sisters of Charity, without whom the world would be "poor indeed," and there are also many priests who are living lives of selfsacrifice and renunciation, beyond even any obligation except that imposed by the church, for if this church is founded on the "Rock Peter" instead of his confession that "Thou art the Christ the son of the living God," as Protestants believe, it is difficult to understand their requirement of celibacy when Peter is the only disciple whose wife is specifically mentioned. "Peter's wife's mother lay sick of a fever," whom Jesus healed, and who "arose and ministered to him." There are fewer skeptics and "vain philosophers" in the Catholic church than in that of any other today. There are of course good and bad Catholics, however, as there are true and false members in all human organizations, and taking the little band of Christ's twelve disciples as a possible guide there would seem to be about one in twelve who cared only for worldly gain, and with the large body of this faith, it is inevitable that taking a much less percentage, there would in time, arise a sufficient number of this class to partially at least account for the terrible abuses of that dear church, one of which is the prohibition of the Bible in the public schools.

I shall here take the liberty of quoting from "The Watchman” a small Adventists' periodical, an article copied by it from "The Bible and The Ministry" by the late Dean Farrar of Westminister, which may throw some light on the subject. It reads as follows:

1. We find that though the New Testament, from end to end, is full of accounts of Christian ministers, their lives and doings, the name of hiereus, or "priest," is never once applied to them, or to any one of them. Surely this alone should be decisive to every plain mind. It would be an absurdity to suppose that the one name which Romanists and ritualists apply to Christian ministers, and regard as so important, should be exactly the one name which the New Testament resolutely and deliberately refuses them.

2. I say resolutely and deliberately refuses them; for that it is not and cannot be the result of accident may be proved at once, to say nothing of the fact that had the New Testament been the sport and prey of such accidents it could not possibly be our final guide since it would then say much about less essential points in the Christian ministry, and nothing about the very point which the sacerdotalists regard as the most important of all.

3. We all know that the New Testament does apply ten other names to Christian ministers of every class, and never once even strays into this name of hiereus, or sacrificing priests. It calls them apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, ministers, overseers, presbyters, deacons, stewards. Would it not be strange

indeed that it should never give them the one name which so many of them covet, if that were an admissible name? Even St. Peter, one of the greatest of the apostles, so far from coveting the name "priest," says, "The presbyters which are among you I exhort, who am also a presbyter." Even St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, chose no name for himself but "John the Presbyter."

4. And that the refusal of the name "sacrificing priests" to the Christian presbyters was deliberate is transparently obvious from the fact that this name hiereus-if the Christian minister had even in any secondary and analogical sense been meant to be a hiereus-was the very one which lay most easily, obviously, and intelligibly at hand. For the ancient world was full of sacrificing priests, and of sacrificing priests only. The only priests of the pagan world were sacrificing priests. The only priests among the Jews were sacrificing priests. Yet while Christ, and all the evangelists, and all the apostles, and all the earliest Christian writers deliberately went out of their way to shun this world, they at the same time chose such purely civil words as presbyter, overseer, and deacon. That "presbyter" was a non-priestly word, and that the word priest in our prayer-book was never meant for anything but presbyter, and is derived from it, every one knows; and recent explorations in Palestine have conclusively shown that the two other names chosen to describe the Christian ministry, namely, episkopoi and diakonoi, which were deliberately selected by the apostles and early Christians, were the names of purely civil offices.