NEED OF THE GOSPEL IN SPAIN.
Does the “word of the Lord have free course” in Spain of to-day? A few facts taken from a multitude that might be cited will give us the answer to that question. The archbishop of the see of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, one of the most important dioceses of all Spain, on one occasion promised to give to a Protestant of that parish a Roman Catholic Bible in exchange for his Protestant Bible; but after spending a long time in looking for one, he had to confess that he could not find one in the episcopal palace—that he would “have to send for it to Barcelona,” all across the peninsula! In the city of Zaragoza, on one occasion, one of the canons of the cathedral of La Virgen del Pilar, now and for many years one of the most popular shrines in Spain, took upon himself the mission of winning back to the Church of Rome a class of bright young men, members of our Evangelical Church. All testified to his trained skill as a controversialist, and to his gentle ways and winning manners both in conversation and in debate. Once and again some of these young men—after he had met them in their own hall—accepted the invitation to visit him in his private apartments, where they still further discussed, among others, the questions of justification by faith, Christ as our only mediator, and prayer—our young men ever appealing to the Bibles that they carried in their pockets. This rather piqued our good canon, and it forced him, much against his will, to refer to his Bible, which they insisted he should do. And here was his weak point. He knew that he did not know even his own Roman Catholic Bible. Once he confusedly sought a familiar New Testament passage in the Old Testament, among the books of which he floundered painfully until the Protestant boys came to his rescue. That was the end of his mission. But not long after this episode he was elevated to a bishopric, and it was no secret that it was in reward for his active efforts to reclaim the Protestants that infest that district. If the bishops show such ignorance of the word of God, it is not to be wondered at that the parish or village priest should be found at a still lower level. A missionary was talking with one of these when the question of the worship of images came up. Allusion was made to the second commandment; and when he quoted the words, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, . . .” the12honest priest, instead of arguing, as an astuter man would have done, that Roman Catholics do not worship images, nor bow down to them, but only to the being or the spirit that they represent or that they suggest, he frankly admitted that they do worship them, and that their worship was permitted if not taught by the church; and he declared that he could not believe that the words quoted by my friend were to be found in the Bible, and much less in the Roman Catholic Bible. So a copy of the Bible sanctioned by his church was produced. He read and reread the fatal words, and could hardly believe his own eyes. At last, with hands clenched and teeth set, he turned on his heel, and with intensest feeling, exclaimed: “God made a mistake when he put that in the Bible!” Poor man! he could not believe that his church could be guilty of deliberately suppressing that part of the Decalogue from its liturgies and from its catechisms; he could more easily believe that God had blundered! “And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”—Missionary Review of the World.