_Bibliolatry._--We Protestants charge upon the Ponteficii, as the more learned of our fathers always called the Roman Catholics, _Mariolatry_; they pay undue honors, say we, to the Virgin. They in return charge upon us, _Bibliolatry_, or a superstitious allegiance--an idolatrous homage--to the words, syllables, and punctuation of the Bible. They, according to _us_, deify a woman; and we, according to _them_, deify an arrangement of printer's types. As to _their_ error, we need not mind _that:_ let us attend to our own. And to this extent it is evident at a glance that Bibliolatrists _must_ be wrong, viz., because, as a pun vanishes on being translated into another language, even so would, and must melt away, like ice in a hot-house, a large majority of those conceits which every Christian nation is apt to ground upon the verbal text of the Scriptures in its own separate vernacular version. But once aware that much of their Bibliolatry depends upon ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, and often upon peculiarity of idiom or structures in their mother dialect, cautious people begin to suspect the whole. Here arises a very interesting, startling, and perplexing situation for all who venerate the Bible; one which must always have existed for prying, inquisitive people, but which has been incalculably sharpened for the apprehension of these days by the extraordinary advances made and making in Oriental and Greek philology. It is a situation of public scandal even to the deep reverencers of the Bible; but a situation of much more than scandal, of real grief, to the profound and sincere amongst religious people. On the one hand, viewing the Bible as the word of God, and not merely so in the sense of its containing most salutary counsels, but, in the highest sense, of its containing a revelation of the most awful secrets, they cannot for a moment listen to the pretence that the Bible has benefited by God's inspiration only as other good books may be said to have done. They are confident that, in a much higher sense, and in a sense incommunicable to other books, it is inspired. Yet, on the other hand, as they will not tell lies, or countenance lies, even in what seems the service of religion, they cannot hide from themselves that the materials of this imperishable book are perishable, frail, liable to crumble, and actually _have_ crumbled to some extent, in various instances. There is, therefore, lying broadly before us, something like what Kant called an antinomy--a case where two laws equally binding on the mind are, or seem to be, in collision. Such cases occur in morals--cases which are carried out of the general rule, and the jurisdiction of that rule, by peculiar deflexions; and from the word _case_ we derive the word _casuistry_, as a general science dealing with such anomalous cases. There is a casuistry, also, for the speculative understanding, as well as for the moral (which is the _practical_) understanding.