pit of Wittenberg to a
hospital for the insane."(145)

And even _at the present day_, with all the aid of steam printing presses,
with all the Bible Associations extending through this country and
England, and supported at enormous expense, it taxes all their energies to
supply every missionary country with Bibles printed in the languages of
the tribes and peoples for whom they are intended.

But even if the Bible were at all times accessible to everyone, how many
millions exist in every age and country, not excepting our own age of
boasted enlightenment, who are not accessible to the Bible because they
are incapable of reading the Word of God! Hence, the doctrine of private
interpretation would render many men's salvation not only difficult, but
impossible.

Second--A competent religious guide must be clear and intelligible to all,
so that everyone may fully understand the true meaning of the instructions
it contains. Is the Bible a book intelligible to all? Far from it; it is
full of obscurities and difficulties not only for the illiterate, but even
for the learned. St. Peter himself informs us that in the Epistles of St.
Paul there 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."(146) And consequently he tells us elsewhere "that no
prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation."(147)

We read in the Acts of the Apostles that a certain man was riding in his
chariot, reading the Book of Isaiah, and being asked by St. Philip whether
he understood the meaning of the prophecy he replied: "How can I
understand unless some man show me?"(148) admitting, by these modest
words, that he did not pretend of himself to interpret the Scriptures.

The Fathers of the Church, though many of them spent their whole lives in
the study of the Scriptures, are unanimous in pronouncing the Bible a book
full of knotty difficulties. And yet we find in our days pedants, with a
mere smattering of Biblical knowledge, who see no obscurity at all in the
Word of God, and who presume to expound it from Genesis to Revelation.
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Does not the conduct of the Reformers conclusively show the utter folly of
interpreting the Scriptures by private judgment? As soon as they rejected
the oracle of the Church, and set up their own private judgment as the
highest standard of authority, they could hardly a