The Roman Church does not permit her laymen to read a Bible that she has not published with annotations.  “Believing herself to be the divinely appointed custodian and interpreter of Holy Writ,” says a writer in the Catholic Encyclopedia (II, 545), “she cannot, without turning traitor to herself, approve the distribution of Scripture ’without note or comment.’” For this reason the Roman Church has cursed the Bible societies which early in the eighteenth century began to be formed in Protestant Churches, and aimed at supplying the poor with cheap Bibles.  In 1816, Pope Pius VII anathematized all Bible societies, declaring them “a pest of Christianity,” and renewed the prohibition which his predecessors had issued against translations of the Bible. (Kurtz, II, 2, 94.) Leo XII, on May 5, 1824, in the encyclical Ubi Primum, said:  “Ye are aware, venerable brethren, that a certain Bible society is impudently spreading throughout the world, which, despising the traditions of the holy Fathers and the decree of the Council of Trent, is endeavoring to translate, or rather to pervert, the Scriptures into the vernacular of all nations. . . .  It is to be feared that by false interpretation the Gospel of Christ will become the gospel of men, or, still worse, the gospel of the devil.”  Pius IX, on November 9, 1846, in the encyclical Qui Pluribus, said:  “These crafty Bible societies, which renew the ancient guile of heretics, cease not to thrust their Bible upon all men, even the unlearned—­their Bibles, which have been translated against the laws of the Church and after certain false explanations of the text.  Thus the divine traditions, the teaching of the fathers, and the authority of the Catholic Church are rejected, and every one in his own way interprets the words of the Lord, and distorts their meaning, thereby falling into miserable error.” (Cath.  Encycl.  II, 545.) The writer whom we have just quoted says:  “The fundamental fallacy of private interpretation of the Scriptures is presupposed by the Bible societies.”  These papal pronunciamentos arc directed chiefly against the Canstein Bibelgesellschaft and her later sisters, such as the Berliner Bibelgesellschaft, and against the British and American Bible Societies.

The face of the Roman Church is sternly set against the plain text of the Scriptures.  To defeat the meaning of the original text, she not only mutilates the text and adds glosses which twist the meaning of the text into an altogether different meaning, but she declares that the Bible is not the only source from which men must obtain revealed truth.  Alongside of the Bible she places an unwritten word of God, her so-called traditions.  These, she claims, are divine revelations which were handed down orally from generation to generation.  The early fathers and the councils of the Church referred to them in defining the true doctrine and prescribing the correct practise of the Church.  Nobody has collected these traditions, and nobody will.  But to what extent the Roman Church operates with them, is well known.