But the Church from the beginning literally _dispensed_ the Scriptures; she selected portions of the Gospels and Epistles for recitation in her eucharistic liturgy; she referred to them in her daily teaching. They were a treasury out of which she brought perpetually things old and new. The parables of our Lord became in her hands the structure of a living kingdom; she herself was the fulfilment of that great series of prophecies. In her the Sower went forth to sow His seed, and the field in which He sowed was the world, and the time of the sowing the last age—the time between the first and the second coming of the King. She herself was the net which gathered a multitude of fish, "which when it was filled they drew out, and sitting by the shore they chose out the good into vessels, but the bad they cast forth." She herself was "the grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which is indeed the least of all seeds, but when it is grown up it is greater than all herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and dwell in the branches thereof." And especially in all this process she was "the leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened," whether we regard those three measures as the corporeal, animal, and spiritual nature of the individual man, or as the family, the social, and the political life of the collective man.
And this continued to be the relation between the Church and the Scriptures which were committed to her charge, and which she dispensed to her people, not merely by reading them in her liturgies and the devotions of her clergy and her religious orders, but in the realising and acting them out in her own life during full fifteen centuries. During this vast period of time the Holy Scriptures were received throughout the whole extent of Christendom as the unquestioned Word of God, with an entire faith in their inspiration. The faithful mind was not prone to analyse the basis on which this belief rested, which was the Church's attestation. They had been copied out by the unwearied labours of innumerable hands in religious houses scattered throughout the world, to whose occupants it was the most pious of toils to multiply the sacred books. It was not the paid work of hirelings, indifferent to their contents, which, up to the invention of printing, wrought this multiplication. How many a monk spent his life in adorning a copy of the Gospels not with pen only but with pencil, so that the loving service of years was enshrined in the leaves he wrought! It followed of course, that down to the time in which printing became common, copies of the Sacred Scriptures were costly, and the reading of them never could have been popular. Thus it was physically impossible, if it had not been besides contrary to all Christian practice and principle, that they should be the immediate instrument of teaching. Only when the Church had been for long ages in possession of men's minds, and had built up one harmonious structure of doctrine and practice by the work of a uniform hierarchy in many lands, and when, besides, a new invention had multiplied with a great economy of manual labour copies of the Scriptures, so that they could be produced in thousands and sold as an ordinary book, a notion, until then unheard of, was set up. A man arose who maintained that the Church in her ministers was not the teacher to whom God had committed the propagation of His gospel, but that each Christian was to teach himself by personal study of the written Word. This notion rested upon the assertion that the Holy Spirit coalesces with the written Word in such a manner as to act immediately on the mind of the reader. To those who could embrace such a notion the written Word came to stand to the reader in exactly that relation to divine truth which up to that time the Church herself had occupied. There seems to have been a real confusion in the mind of the man who devised this notion, and in the minds of his followers, between the outward material Word, which they read and construed, and its true sense, or the inward Word. Thus they argued from the possession of the former to that of the latter, and supposed that unity of belief would follow from the individual's study of the same documents. They always refused to see the conclusion which all of the old belief set before them, that they were substituting their own private and subjective interpretation of the Bible for the Church's public and authorised one. They opposed instead what they called the Word of God, that is, the real sense of Holy Scripture, to the word of man, which they called the Church's interpretation of it.