But, happily, the other alternative saves us from all these logical inconsistencies. The church meets every demand, removes every embarrassment, and affords us the precise authority we need for faith, for she is in every age and every land a living witness to the fact of revelation, and an ever-present judge competent to declare what God reveals, and to teach us what we have, and what we have not, the veracity of God for believing. She can assure us of the divine inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures, which without her tradition is not provable; for she has received them through the apostles from our Lord himself. She can enable us to read them aright, and can unfold to us by her teaching their real sense; for the Holy Ghost has deposited with her the whole revelation of God, whether written or unwritten. Outside of her, men, if they have the book called the Bible, can make little or nothing of it, can come to no agreement as to its sense, except so far as they inconsistently and surreptitiously avail themselves of her interpretation of it. They have no key to its sense. But she has the key to its meaning in her possession and knowledge of all that God reveals, or in the divine instruction she has received in the beginning. The whole word of God, and the word of God as a whole, is included in the depositum she has received, and therefore she is able at all times and in all places to give the true sense of the whole, and of the relation to the whole of each and every part. In her tradition the Bible is a book of divine instruction, of living truth, of inestimable value, and entitled to the profoundest reverence, which we know it is not in the hands of those who wrest it from her tradition, and have no clue to its meaning but grammar and lexicon. The notion that a man who knows nothing of the Christian faith, and is a stranger to the whole order of Christian thought and life, can take up the Bible, even when correctly translated into his mother-tongue, and from reading and studying it arrive at an adequate knowledge, or any real knowledge at all, of Christian truth or the revelation which God has made to man, is preposterous, and contradicted by every day's experience. Just in proportion as men depart from the tradition of faith preserved by the church, the Bible becomes an unintelligible book, ceases to be of any use to the mind, and, if reverenced at all, becomes, except in a few plain moral precepts, a source of error much more frequently than of truth. One of the most precious gifts of God to man becomes instead of a benefit a real injury to the individual and to society. Our school-boards may, then, easily understand why we Catholics object to the reading of the Bible in schools where the church cannot be present to enlighten the pupil's mind as to its real and true sense. It is the court that keeps the statute-books, and interprets and applies the law, whether the _lex scripta_ or the _lex non scripta_.