Chapter VIII. The Church And The Bible. 95 show me?"148 admitting, by these modest words, that he did not pretend of himself to interpret the Scriptures. The Fathers of the Church, though many of them spent their whole lives in the study of the Scriptures, are unanimous in pronouncing the Bible a book full of knotty difficulties. And yet we find in our days pedants, with a mere smattering of Biblical knowledge, who see no obscurity at all in the Word of God, and who presume to expound it from Genesis to Revelation. "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Does not the conduct of the Reformers conclusively show the utter folly of interpreting the Scriptures by private judgment? As soon as they rejected the oracle of the Church, and set up their own private judgment as the highest standard of authority, they could hardly agree among themselves on the meaning of a single important text. The Bible became in their hands a complete Babel. The sons of Noe attempted in their pride to ascend to heaven by building the tower of B abel, and their scheme ended in [087] the confusion and multiplication of tongues. The children of the Reformation endeavored in their conceit to lead men to heaven by the private interpretation of the Bible, and their efforts led to the confusion and the multiplication of religions. Let me give you one example out of a thousand. These words of the Gospel, "This is My Body," were understood only in one sense before the Reformation. The new lights of the sixteenth century gave no fewer than eighty different meanings to these four simple words, and since their time the number of interpretations has increased to over a hundred. No one will deny that in our days there exists a vast multitude of sects, which are daily multiplying. No one will deny 149 that this multiplying of creeds is a crying scandal, and a great stumblingblock in the way of the conversion of heathen nations. No one 149 Except, perhaps, Rev. H. W. Beecher. who thinks that God is glorified by the variety of sects.