A Comprehensive History Of the books of the holy catholic bible,
Written Expressly for this Edition By rev. Bernard O'Reilly, L D. (Laval.)
Copyright, 1884.
Introductory.
Most dear to the hearts of children in a family blessed with the best of parents and brought up to the practice of all that is most ennobling, is every monument of the dead or absent father's love.
Were it so to happen that such a father, whose whole life had been one of self-sacrifice and incomparable devotion to the interest of his dear ones, should bequeath them in dying, not only a share forever in his wealth and honor, but his last will and testament to be kept continually before :heir eyes in the home he had created for them — how would they not reverence this ever-present memorial of their worshipped parent's loving care? How would they not, in perusing every line and word of this last declaration of a father's tender forethought, find their own hearts moved by its undying eloquence — as if a hidden fire lived in each word to warn their own souls to gratitude, to generosity, and to all nobleness of life? This is precisely what we have in that Book of books, the Bible. What we know of God's dealings with man proves Him to be much more of the parent than of the lord and master. Indeed when the Son came down in person to redeem and to teach the world, He taught us to call the Infinite God, with whom He is eternally one in the unity of the Godhead, by the sweet and endearing name of Father.
This was only restoring the supernatural relation which existed between God and man from the beginning of the latter's creation. For it is a doctrine of the Catholic faith, that Adam was raised by his all-bountiful Creator to the divine rank of adopted child of God. This rank with its privileges and prospective glory Adam forfeited by his sin ; and this rank Christ, the Second Adam, restored to us, thus repairing the ruin caused by our first parent.
And because the Heavenly Father's purpose was, from the beginning, to raise us all up in Christ to the dignity from which we had fallen in Adam, therefore His wisdom provided means by which Adam and his descendants could still recover a claim to their lost rank and inheritance. A Saviour was promised them in Christ; and they were required to believe in that Saviour, to Hold fast to that promise, to profess that faith openly, and fulfil all the other conditions required by their Divine Benefactor as distinguishing those who were to have a share with the future Redeemer and Restorer.
This new covenant or testament, made by our merciful Father between Himself and Adam with his posterity, was preserved and cherished among the descendants of Seth, who were, in view of their living faith in the one true God and the promised Saviour, called ' the Sons of God " in the midst of a sinful world. It was this same living faith that saved Noe and his sons from the flood which swept their guilty brethren off the face of the earth. And when they came forth from the Ark, or ship, in which the hand of God had guarded them, their Preserver renewed His covenant with them, and once more enjoined, with increased solemnity, the duty of holding on invincibly to the Faith of Adam, of Abel, of Seth, and of Henoch.
When, in the course of time, the great bulk of mankind, now spread over the earth, forgot God and the faith in His most merciful Promise, Abraham was raised up as Noe had been to keep that faith alive in his family and descendants. To that family, become a people — God's own chosen people — the covenant was renewed more solemnly than ever before on Mount Sinai ; and Moses, the deliverer and guide of that people, was inspired to write, for the instruction of all future time, the story of the creation of the world, of man's origin, of his elevation and fall, and of the Promise thus successively committed, like God's will and testament, to Adam, to Seth, to Noe, to Abraham, and to Moses in behalf of our fallen and disinherited race.
To the five books (Pentateuch) left us by Moses others were added age after age, completing the story of God's dealings with mankind, till God's own Son at length came down on earth, uniting our human nature with His Godhead, and to all who receive him as their Redeemer He giveth "power to be made the Sons of God."
Of Him — the Saviour, the Promised One — the Old Testament is full as well as the New. What wonder, then, seeing that God's faithful servants under the law of nature, and God's chosen people under the Mosaic law, were alike, upon earth, the Family of the Almighty Father — what wonder, if in that family, men and women, generation after generation, loved to make of the Sacred Scriptures the subject of devout and most profitable meditation?
Before the coming of Christ, how believing and yearning souls were wont to weigh the words of the oft-repeated Promise, and to feed their hopes upon the study of the succession of events which, each as it happened, foreshadowed His redemption, and made the heart, sick with the spectacle of contemporary degeneracy, look forward to the establishment of the Kingdom of God, to His sweet sovereign sway over the spirits and lives of all men !
And since His coming and His return to Heaven, how earnestly do His followers the whole world over bathe their souls in the light of that everlasting glory into which He has entered to prepare us a place, and the ravishing perspectives of which lift man heavenward and enable him to bear every most bitter trial, to undertake the most arduous labor, and to fulfil the most painful sacrifices in view of the eternal reward and of the Infinite Love which bestows it !
In the immense Christian family, spread all over the earth, there is not a household in which " the words of eternal life " (St. John vi. 69) do not thus furnish sweetest food to the souls of young and old. For it is most sweet for enlightened and pious Christian parents to select from the Prophetical Books of the Old Testament the passages in which, so many centuries in advance, the Holy Spirit had prompted the inspired writers to describe the manner of Christ's coming, His sacred person, the labors, persecutions and death by which He was to redeem the world ; His miracles, His wisdom, and the immortal society He was* to found. It is still, as it ever has been, most sweet to contemplate in the mighty events recorded in the Historical Books, the types of the great realities to be accomplished in the life of Christ, or in that of His church. Even the personages whose characters and deeds are recorded therein, when viewed with the eye of faith, all seem to point to Christ, whom they resemble in many wondrous ways, while still preserving their own identity, their own littlenesses and weaknesses.
Nor is it less delightful and refreshing to the soul to take up any one of the merely didactic or moral Books. Job still teaches the world and stirs the soul of every reader from amid the ruins of his home and the utter wreck of all his greatness and prosperity. Solomon still instructs princes and peoples, the highest and the lowliest, in the pregnant works which reflect his wisdom, and contain the manifold lessons of his long experience, of his days of innocence and wide-spread earthly dominion, and of his maturer years obscured by ingratitude to God, by boundless sensuality, and that worship of self which so easily leads to the worst forms of heathenish idolatry.
The author of Ecclesiasticus, Jesus, the son of Sirach, sings a hymn in praise of all the virtues, private and public, most dear to the heart of God, and sets before us, in succession, the images of the godlike men, who, since Adam, have glorified the Creator of mankind as well as human nature itself.
But sweeter than all the other inspired writers of the Old Law is the King-Prophet, David, the ancestor of Mary and her Divine Son, "the sweet singer of Israel." The church, spread all over the earth, uses his Psalms of prayer and praise in her solemn offices ; and her children, in their private devotions, ever find in these heart-cries of the much-tried David the very sentiments and words most suited to their needs in good and ill fortune, in trial and in temptation.
And so has the word of God, coming to us through the inspired books of the Old Testament, borne to every household, and to every soul within it, both during our darkest and during our sunniest days, comfort and peace, light, and warmth, and unfailing strength from the all-loving heart of our Father in Heaven !
But, oh, what shall we say of the books of the New Testament? Of the Gospels, which set before us the simple and soul-stirring narrative of Christ's incarnation, birth, labors, miracles, sufferings and death? Of the Acts of the Apostles, relating the birth of Christ's Church, and the struggles, sufferings, labors and triumphs of His two chief apostles, Peter and Paul ? And finally, of the other divinely beautiful instructions left to the Christian world by these same Apostl~ c , its glorious parents under God, the fathers of the new " people of God," to be made up of all the tribes of earth gathered together and held in the bonds of a true brotherhood by the one faith in Christ and the all-pervading love of the Father ?
Do we not all remember, we children of Christian parents, how we hung in childhood and youth on the lips of father and mother as they read to us the sublime story of Christ's life and death? how we fancied ourselves to be kneeling with the Shepherds around His crib, or travelling with Him and His parents across the desert to Egypt and back again to Nazareth? How we loved to behold Him in imagination as He grew up in the carpenter's shop — the lovely child, the graceful and modest youth, the son lovingly obedient to Mary and Joseph during all these years of obscure toil and patient preparation for His great missionary work? And then how we followed the Mighty Teacher, during the three years of His public life, as He ran His giant race — preaching, healing, enlightening the whole land as with the steady, but brief splendors of a heaven-sent meteor, till the young life was quenched amid the dark and shameful scenes of Calvary?
Have we not, in our turn, read to our dear parents in their hour of darkness and trial — in poverty, or sickness, or when the shadow of death was over the home — some one sweet passage, more pregnant with heavenly light and consolation than the others, which made once more sunshine in their souls, which lifted up the fainting heart, which filled the spirit of our sorely-tried dear ones with renewed hopes and strength to do and to endure, which enabled them to bear the bitter pang of present losses in view of the eternal reward — or which made the passage from this life to the next bright, lightsome, joyous and exultant, like the blessed bridals of the children of God?
And see how wonderfully that all-wise Providence, which clearl) seeing things from end to end ordereth all things sweetly and surely, has taken means for preserving these sacred writings amid the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, amid the revolutions, the destruction and the decay, which lift one hitherto obscure or barbarous race into power and long rule, while other races, till then prosperous, irresistible and enlightened, disappear forever from history.
Here we have, at this very moment, the same Hebrew descendants of Abraham, to whom Moses committed, with the Tables of the Law delivered on Sinai, the Pentateuch or five volumes written by himself, subsisting in our midst, clinging to their ancient faith with heroic tenacity, and cherishing not only the five books of Moses, but what they conceive to be the original Hebrew Scriptures with a religious fervor that will tolerate no change in substance or in letter.
Have we often reflected on the miraculous co-existence, side by side, and in every part of the globe, of the children of the Synagogue and of those of the Church — the former bearing undying testimony to the divinity of the Old Testament Scriptures — the latter vouching for the authority of the New ? Only think of the singular phenomenon which the presence of Abrahamite Hebrews amid the peoples of Christendom offers to the historian and philosopher ! They remain distinct from all other peoples while living among them ; mingling with Europeans, Africans, Asiatics and Americans in every walk of life and field of industry, and yet preserving their own national characteristics and physical type as clearly and persistently as they preserve their ancient religious faith and time-honored customs. In the tents of the Mohammedan Bedaween they protest against the monstrous reveries of the Coran and the pretensions of the Arabian visionary; amid the crowded cities of China and India they uphold, as against idolatry, the doctrine of the one living God ; and in our midst, in the temple of Christian civilization, they bear witness unceasingly to the divinity of the Old Testament Scriptures and to the abiding faith of their ancestors and themselves in the promised Redeemer.
The conquering and widely dominating races of Babylon, Nineveh, Persia, and Egypt have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth. We can dig up from the Mesopotamian plains gigantic statues — the ornaments of palaces and temples contemporary with Heber and Abraham — and we discover far beneath the surface of the ruin-strewed earth whole chambers crowded with inscribed bricks and cylinders, the fragmentary annals of kingdoms grown old before Rome had been founded. But the wild nomadic tribes who aid the discoverer in his researches are not the descendants of the mighty races who ruled there upward of three thousand years ago. These have left upon earth no lineal heirs to the land, to its ruins, or to its glories.
So is it with Egypt. Modern curiosity and modern science have found their way into the very heart of the Pyramids, and rifled the tombs of the monarchs who built them ; we have penetrated the deepest cave-sepulchres of the Valley of Kings at Thebes the Magnificent and Incomparable. But the sordid Arab and ignorant Fellah, who serve as guides and workmen to the explorer, have no thought of claiming descent from or kinship with the ancient people who inhabited the Nile Valley in its days of surpassing glory.
The descendants of Joseph and Aaron do, indeed, still live and thrive amid the modern cities along the shores of the great river ; but of the warlike people who went forth under the Pharaohs to enslave the surrounding nations, no trace is left save in the tombs where the mummies of princes, priests, and warriors have slept for three thousand years beside the remains of the dumb animals they had, in life, worshiped in place of the living God !
Even so is it in the once imperial Rome. Not even the proudest of her living nobles, much less the lower and middle classes of her actual population, can establish any claim to direct descent from the families who dwelt there under the consuls or under the emperors.
Thus, in every civilized country beneath the sun, and every day on which that sun rises, we have these two immortal societies standing before us, side by side — the Jewish synagogue and the Catholic Church — and presenting to us the Old and the New Testaments as the Revealed Will of the one true and living God who is the Creator and the Judge of the whole race of man. For the divinity of the Old Testament Scriptures and the faith in the Promised Messiah the Jewish race has borne unfaltering and heroic witness for three thousand years ; to the divinity of the New Testament and the fulfillment of all these promises in the person of Christ Jesus the Catholic Church has borne her witness during eighteen centuries. And this twofold testimony fills all historic time with a light as self-evident as the radiance of the noonday sun. What a spectacle to the religious mind ! What a consolation to the Christian who sets more store on the promises of the eternal life and the glories of Christ's everlasting kingdom than on all the greatness and the glories, the possessions and the enjoyments of time !