subject, I could write on it forever, ray studies have been so close and numerous, but perhaps we have said enough of the fine old face of our dear departed Leo; may God in Heaven rest his immortal soul.

In this article I shall say but little of the encyclicals of Leo and still less of the great and holy ambitions of his life, the dreams that he cherished but failed to solve.

All that Leo has uttered, as Pope, whether ex-Cathedra or no, has met with ready response in my own mind and heart. In fact his teachings are the teachings which, as an earnest student of the Scriptures and for the Protestant ministry I have been familiar with and have rested in for more than forty years. I had intended in this article to name certain well known Protestant divines whose teachings and whose lives have been fine exemplifications of the same. Truth and piety are not all buried under the mosaic pavements of Rome. The world is wide, "In my Father's House are many Mansions." Many are his revelations, numberless are the subtle channels by which the Holy Spirit breathes His sunlight and mountain air into the souls of men. Leo was a good and true Christian in and out of office, even from the Protestant standpoint, and that is more than can be said of many of his predecessors in Rome. We may as well give up our gush of Rhetoric, my friends, and adhere to the great and everlasting truths of Christ and humanity.

As to the great ambitions, or rather the one great ambition of Leo's soul, it was to unify Christendom under the guidance and authority of Rome. He had other work and aims, but this was supreme. For this, as we have said, a greater and a freer Pope than Leo was and is needed. Pius X will hardly touch or dream of touching these great mountains of God, hewn without hands or masonic tools out of the souls of the human race. But it will be touched again and again till the true building of the great and world-wide temple of God rises into prominence, perhaps out of the ruins of much that we now hold sacred until all things, all nations and peoples and tongues are delivered up to Christ and again by Him delivered over to God the Father, that God Himself may be all and in all forevermore, that they all may be one in me as I am one with thee, O thou Eternal soul and centre of all life and all power and all law world without end, Amen.

William Henry Thorns. THE BIBLE AS A BOOK OF DEVOTION.

"From a child," says Saint Paul, writing to his favorite disciple. Saint Timothy, "thou hast known the Holy Scriptures which art able to make thee wise unto salvation." A most desirable wisdom, surely; the kind of which "the fear of the Lord" is the beginning, the end, "This is life eternal, that they might know the only true ''ad, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."

Such knowledge as Saint Paul commends in Saint Timothy was, I need hardly say, the common heritage of all Jewish children of that time, and is still of many, Protestants chiefly, and orthodox Hebrews. It was the common heritage of all the great Saints and doctors of the Catholic Church, as you may ascertain for yourselves if you will study their writings, or even Dr. Martland's admirable work, "The Dark Ages." Our children mostly know "The Convent Girl's Golden Manual," or some such well intentioned compilation of prayers and pious meditations; they listen, more or less attentively, to the Gospel in English, when read at Mass, and they learn "Bible History." And with such "knowledge of God's word" the majority of "traditional" Catholics—that is the only name for them—are content.

That it was otherwise with the Jews, in our Lord's time, surely needs no proof, but two instances may be given. "You search the Scriptures," He said to the Pharisees: why? "For in than you think you have eternal life, a very good incentive to such study, none better, that I can think of. So far, so good. But what reproof did He found upon this Bible study: "They are thfy which testify of Me." The Pharisees, you see, failed to find the external life they were professedly in search of, because they would not recognize its Giver when He came. "You will not come unto Me that you might have life." Could there be any condemnation more terrible?

The other instance occurred on that wonderful journey to Emmaus, when the two disciples, who had not heard of the Master's resurrection, were joined by one who, seemingly, was ignorant of the great tragedy recently enacted. Seemingly, though He knew more than they thought. "Oh foolsl" He exclaimed, "and slow of heart of heart to believe " what? "AU that the Prophets have spoken." He takes it for granted that triey know their Bibles, being devout Jews. Then, presently, we read: "Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures"—note that phrase carefully, "the things concerning Himself," (St. Luke, XXIV, v.v. I3_27)- Dear Lord: What a sermon that must have been; but the writer, so to say, only gave us the text. A wide one truly, "In all the Scriptures;" from Genesis to Malaehi.

Here the traditional Catholic interjects: The church, he says, possesses both text and sermon; we cannot understand either rightly without her help, even as the Chamberlain of Queen Candace mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, (Ch. VIII, v.v. 27-35) needed Philip's help in order to understand what he was reading. Most true; but the Chamberlain was reading his Bible, and Philip, we are told, "began at that Scripture," namely the fifty-third Chapter of Isaiah, when he "preached unto him Jesus." In both cases the explanation—even our Blessed Lord's— depended for its efficacy, if one may say so, on the hearer's familiarity with the sacred text. Our traditional friend "has reason," as the French say, but the Church's sermon will go home more surely, if she can count on our knowledge of "all the Scriptures."

So far as concerns Jews, or Jewish converts to Judaism; as to Protestants, I can speak from experience, as doubtless can many others. The Bible is our inheritance, as Catholics it is to us—humanely speaking—that they owe its preservation. But if use and love—aye, and profit, too, of a very real sort, are titles to possession, their claim is a strong one; stronger, I am sure, than most of us realize. Let us admit, if you wish, that it is for them, a very store-house of heretical doctrines. "In religion," says Shakespeare, "what damned error but some sober brow, will bless it and approve it with a text?" True, but the "sober brow" must, at least, have the necessary text—or texts— "on the tip of his tongue," in order to quote so aptly, as he thinks; maybe as St. Peter expresses it in his second Epistle, "wresting it" (depriving, putting to a wrong use) "to his own destruction" (Ch. Ill, 16). Even the devil—to return to Shakespeare—"can quote Scripture to his purpose," of which, indeed, the Temptation in the Wilderness gives ample proof. The enemy of souls knows his bible—if one may put it so. Would it not be just as well to be able to say, with knowledge, "// is ■written again;" to give him back Scripture for Scripture? We have good example for doing so; the best—our Master's

All this admitted, there remains this, as between devout Protestants and ourselves, that God's word is our common heritage, assailed by a common enemy; the "spirit of the age," a polite name, mostly for the devil. He, I imagine, will in the future, be more apt to quote from the "higher critics" than from "Jewish legends." That, however, as it may be. If Protestants need to learn from us—from the Church—the true meaning of the Scriptures, we as surely need to take lesson of their love of God's word, their diligent study of it. We shall find more points of agreement than of difference, believe me.

More, we shall remove a reproach which has fallen on us— not wholly without cause—that Catholics do not study the Bibk. To say that we do not need to do so, is worse than futile; it merely increases our shame, and tranfers some of it to our Holy Mother, the Church. That, men say, is the result of the Church's teaching; "She keeps the Bible from the people;" she does nothing of the kind, as we know; but to show ignorance of the Bible is hardly the way to correct the erroneous impression. Protestant scholars have come to admit that to the popularity of Catholic translations of Holy Scripture, Luther's version chiefly owes its success; but all Protestants are not scholars. The Saints and Doctors of the Church, as I said at the outset, were saturated—there is no other word—with knowledge of the Bible; it was the source of foundation of all their piety, of all their theology. Their ultimate argument was always: It ts written. Do we stand in less need of such familiarity with God's word than they?

Here once more, our traditional Catholic interjects. There are many things, he says, in Holy Scripture, not fit for children to study. Possibly, though Saint Paul says nothing about it, in his commendation of Saint Timothy, that he had known the old Testament—to which, doubtless, our interjecter chiefly alludes—' 'jrom a child." But then, Timothy had, to be sure, learned his Bible at his mother's knee, the best place possible; and Eunice, I take it, was careful of her boy's purity of mind. More: "to the pure all things are pure," and there is nothing so pure as the mind of a child—with a good mother, as some of us know. The moral, I think, is sufficiently obvious: Watch your children's reading. In the case of Holy Scripture, read it with them, as Eunice read it with Timothy. They will learn it best that way, as he did. There are books in favor among boys, moreover, among girls too, God help them! that will harm them more than anything they will find in the Bible—anything.

Let our traditional Catholic try the experiment, and go back to his manuals and Bible histories afterwards—if so disposed, which I greatly doubt. But let him try the Bible as a book of devotion first; last too, for that matter. That is, let him shut out all "higher critics," all commentators too, to begin with; and take Thomas a Kempis—The Imitation of Christ—as his only human guide. There is another, as he surely knows, who will surely "teach the hearts of his faithful people," and guide them "into all truth."

The Saints—we cannot have it too often repeated—were intimately familiar with the word of God; it was the source and nourishment of their spiritual life, the foundation of all their piety and devotion, the ground work of all their theology. In fact unless you possess, yourself, some measure of this familiarity, the lives and especially the writings of the Saints, will be utterly beyond your comprehension. "How shall two walk together, except they be agreed?" How shall we profit by the teachings and examples of the Saints, if they speak a language we do not understand, if the ruling motive, the constant law, of their lives, is hidden from us? The Bible is part of the heritage we have in common with them, and surely, by no means the least; the Church, the Sacraments, all that constitutes the essence of our Holy Religion, rests ultimately on the written word, in a very real sense. The Church, I know, is the guardian and interpreter of the Holy Scripture, but it is for us to know what it is that she guards, to study that which she is commissioned to interpret. To revert to the journey to Emmaus, on that first Easter evening: how much, think you, would those two have understood of our Lord's exposition of "the things concerning Himself" in "all the Scriptures" if they had never studied them?

And among the Saints—though, indeed, he has never been formally canonized—Thomas a Kempis knows his Bible—and his Breviary—as well as any. But, unless you do, you will miss nine-tenths of the beauty, and still more of the profit, of the Imitation. It opens as you know, with a text—the keynote of