ention comes to us from an
unexpected quarter. I refer to the Preface prefixed by that ardent Roman
Catholic, M. Henri Lasserre, to his remarkable French translation of the
Four Gospels, the book which, December 4, 1886, received the cordial
benediction of Leo XIII., but within a twelvemonth, such is "the power
behind the Pope," was placed on the _Index Expurgatorius_. Probably such
passages as the following had much to do with this strange and sudden
self-reversal of the judgment of the Vatican.

"A timid school," after the crisis of the Reformation, which finds, of
course, little favour with M. Lasserre, and on which, very unjustly, he
lays much of the blame of the practical prohibition of the Bible within
"the Catholic Church," "a timid school tended thenceforth to strike from
the hands of believers the divine Book which makes the foundation of
our faith, and laboured to substitute for it by degrees a pious
literature, intended to furnish hearts and minds with a nourishment
suited to their weakness, a diet without danger. Some of these books, we
own without hesitation, are excellent in themselves, and have
contributed to the sanctification of many souls. However, this is the
exception. In the majority of these works, where, alas, the sugar of
devotion takes the place of the salt of wisdom, the eternal truths and
the genuine teachings of the Gospel were soon diluted, and, as it were,
lost in strange waters.... One and all, the better specimens and the
deplorable (_les lamentables_) alike, they are another thing altogether,
yes, absolutely another thing, than the Gospel, whose apostolic mission
they have noiselessly usurped by an invasion insensible, I had almost
called it clandestine.... The general ignorance of the Gospels has been
the one cause in France, these twenty years, of the success of the
scandalous romance which appeared under the title of _La Vie de Jesus_.
Among a people moderately familiar with the narratives of St Matthew,
St Mark, St Luke, and St John ... there would have been no need to
refute it. Every one would have seen, without assistance, its flagrant
falsifications, its gross sophisms, its absolute emptiness. This
deep-seated and complex evil, this enervation of the Christian spirit,
this _anaemia_ (_cette anemie_) of so many among us, are an object of
sorrowful anxiety (_preoccupation_) for the Catholic thinker" (pp. x,
xxv).

CURRENT NEGLECT OF SCRIPTURE.

For the Protestant thinker too, wi