116 The Fundamentals other. The Reformed Churches have translated the whole Bible into 517 languages and dialects—all the great trunk languages spoken by three-fourths of the world’s inhabitants —and published 300,000,000 copies. The Roman Church keeps the Bible locked up in the Latin tongue. I t is true the Douay Bible was published, the New Testament in 1582 at Rheims, and the Old Testament at Douay in 1609. This is Rome’s English Bible. But the people are forbidden to read it. A distinguished French^Romanist, Henri Lasserre, struck with the fact that the children of the church knew “the Divine Book only in fragments, without logical or chronological or der,” brought out a translation of the four Gospels, for which he obtained the sanction of the Archbishop of Paris and of the Pope. The result was an immediate sale of 100,000 copies, so eager were the French Romanists for this novel work. But the Index shortly interfered. The Pope’s express sanction was withdrawn, the printing and the sale peremptorily stopped, under the pretext that some passages were translated inaccu rately. The fragments in Latin were preferred as safer than the whole in a language everyone could understand. Rome has made only two translations, and those not spon taneously, but because the inquirers insisted upon their pos session. These two are for Uganda and for Japan. The large number of Protestants compelled the Roman mission aries to accede to the demands of their own inquirers and con verts that they should possess the wonderful Book which their fellow-countrymen were reading. 2. Rome accepts the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. The Apocrypha came this way. The larger part of the Jews never returned from the Babylonian captivity, but were dis persed in many countries. They had the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. They also had other writings, produced after Malachi, but not of equal authority. About B. C. 280, Ptolomy, the King of Egypt, invited Hebrew rabbi to come to Egypt and translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. The
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