oppression, and it has lifted up the minds and hopes of men and centred their affections upon the things of the spirit. In the ages gone it could proclaim and enforce among warring nations its "truce of God," and at the sound of its angelus bells contending warriors in every land dropped for a time at least the sword and sank upon their knees to pray. The savage barbarian, triumphant in his desolating march, it converted into an instrument of beneficence, and in countless lands during the myriad years its apostles, its missionaries, its soldiers of the Cross have stirred the imaginations, aroused the enthusiasms, fired and sustained the faith through all the world, and undaunted, unwearied, unfaltering have preached the doctrine of the Communion of Saints in the true spirit of a universal brotherhood of peace and good-will, with hearts linked indestructibly by ties of unfaltering affection to the Regent on Earth of the Christ whose saving grace and noblest purpose is the progress of humanity through peace.

In our days, as of old, the Fisherman at the helm of the Barque of Peter steers true. Twenty-one years ago the great Leo XIII wrote: "The Church is the inspirer of concord between the princes and the people." Five years later, when the Queen of Holland invited him to send a representative to the first Hague Peace Conference and to give to the undertaking of the Powers "his moral support," he answered: "It is my special function not only to lend moral support to the work of pacification, but effectively to coöperate in it.”

Italy and England protested effectually against his admission to the Conference and so excluded the Vice-Regent of the Prince of Peace from participation in its Councils, but all undismayed by their hypocrisy and pettiness, Leo XIII, whose predecessors had seen the rise of Italy and England and whose successors will see the fall of both, proclaimed to

the Consistory of Cardinals in 1900: "The religious authority is in its very nature equitable and disinterested; and that is why it is efficacious in bringing into operation a true peace among men not only in the domain of conscience, but also in public and social spheres, to the extent to which its influence is allowed to make itself felt. The action of religious authority has never failed to be of public benefit, whenever it has intervened in the great affairs of the world."

At the call of Germany he acted as international arbitrator in the dispute with Spain in the matter of the Carolina Islands, and again, when the two Republics of South America submitted to him their warring claims and in commemoration of a perpetual peace erected on the highest peak of their Andean boundary line the great statue of Christ, he helped to prove, as he phrased it, that "the power with which we are endowed by its very nature extends to all times and places."

Benedict XV is the latest in the long line of sovereign pontiffs. In the desperation of their malignancy and in their programme of truth distortion to poison the mind of America, false statements are ascribed to the Pope and attempts made to align him upon one side of this mighty conflict. You and I, without other responsibility than our loyal allegiance to our country, may give voice to our sentiments if we will and may be governed therein by our passions and our prejudices, but the Sovereign Pontiff is a power apart and above. His spiritual children battle in every army. They are dying everywhere the armed hosts face each other, and his great heart is torn by the woes of all his human family. He will hold the scales of justice even, and from his lips will fall no word that will further intensify men's hatreds and passions and so prevent the word of peace from falling upon receptive ears in the coming day when that word may be spoken with effect.

With him there will be no sham neutrality, but open-minded, forgiving, kindly, to him the war-weary nations will turn with respect and confidence, for in him they will see Christ's Vicar upon Earth that Christ from whom their hearts have been so long estranged and that Christ who measures man's iniquities not by fallible human judgments, but, sifting to the heart's core, punishes out of the abundance of His mercy.

And so in all reverence, springing from what race we may, let us as Americans pray that God shall keep from us the blighting ravages of war; that this great conflict shall be the last that will afflict men; that nobler tribunals than that of passion's arbitrament shall be devised to settle even nations' ambitions; that humanity shall be purified and ennobled by the bloody sacrifice it is making; and that sustained and soothed by the trust in the new old faith which is stirring everywhere in the hearts of men, the world shall be brought nearer to the throne of the God who made it.

THE BIBLE AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

ADDRESS TO A NON-CATHOLIC AUDIENCE

BY THE REV. J. A. M. GILLIS, A.M.

I HAVE to speak on a subject most dear to every Christian; a subject with which are associated the most valued and the most cherished recollections which ever touched the heart of man; a subject so vast, so deep, so comprehensive that, like a broad and mighty ocean, it reaches from the limits of time to the limits of eternity. In a word, I have to open the Book of God and unfold the teaching of the Catholic Church touching the sacred volume.

Catholics are accused of not reading the Bible; Catholics are accused of trying to do away with the Bible; Catholics are accused of being the enemy of the Bible. This accusation appears to us, to say the least, most astonishing. For over fifteen hundred years a long time, even in the annals of the world the Catholic Church alone, save the scattered remnants of the once proud and history-making Hebrew nation, scattered far and wide through every land and clime, without a home or a fatherland, who treasured as precious relics copies of the Ancient Law - - the Catholic Church alone was the custodian of the sacred volume.

The liturgy of the Mass, which is said in every Catholic church, in every age since the days of the apostles, and in every land, keeping time with the hours, from the rising of the sun to its going down in the prophetic words of Malachias, is made up almost entirely of the most beautiful and most touch

ing passages of Holy Scripture. The Breviary, that the priest reads every day and which is the prayer of his sacred office, is, with short passages from the lives of the saints, a collection of psalms and lessons taken from Sacred Writ. Indeed, from the day on which he enters the theological seminary to prepare himself for his exalted office, the priest lives in an atmosphere of Scripture.

An expression of the doctrine which will be admitted by the bulk of believing non-Catholics is found in the sixth of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Established Church of England. This article says:

"Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of Faith or be thought requisite or necessary for salvation."

The same rule of faith is expressed by Chillingworth in the oft-quoted words: "The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants."

The doctrine of the Catholic Church on this subject is given in the definition of the Council of Trent:

"The sacred and holy œcumenical and general Synod of Trent, lawfully assembled in the Holy Ghost, the same three Legates of the Apostolic See presiding therein keeping this always in view, that errors being removed, the purity itself of the Gospel is preserved in the Church, which [Gospel] before promised through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, first promulgated with His own mouth, and then commanded to be preached by His Apostles to every creature, as the fountain of all, both saving truth and moral discipline, are contained in the written books and the unwritten traditions, which received by the Apostles from the mouth of Jesus Christ Himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us transmitted as it were from hand to hand [the Synod] following the examples of the orthodox Fathers receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety and reverence all the books, both of the Old and the New Testament seeing that the one God is the Author of both – as also the said Traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals, as having been dictated either by Christ's own word of mouth or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by continuous succession."