“You are already well acquainted, Venerable Brethren, with other monsters of error, and the frauds with which the children of the present age strive bitterly to beset the Catholic religion and the Divine authority of the Church: to oppose its laws, and to trample on the rights of the sacred as well as of the civil power. To this point tend those guilty conspiracies against the Roman Chair of the blessed Peter, on which Christ laid the irremovable foundations of his Church. To this point tend the operations of those secret Societies, emerging from their native darkness for the ruin and devastation of the common weal, as well sacred as social, who have been again and again condemned with anathema by the Roman Pontiffs our predecessors, in their Apostolic Letters, which we, in the plentitude of our Apostolic power, confirm, and command to be most strictly observed. This also is the tendency and design of those insidious Bible Societies, which, renewing the crafts of the ancient heretics, cease not to obtrude upon all kinds of men, even the least instructed, gratuitously and at an immense expense, copies in vast numbers of the Books of the Sacred Scriptures, translated (against the holiest rules of the Church) into various vulgar tongues, and very often with the most perverse and erroneous interpretations; to the end that (Divine tradition, the doctrine of the Fathers, and the authority of the Catholic Church being rejected,) every man may interpret the revelations of the Almighty according to his own private judgement, and, perverting their sense, fall into the most dangerous errors. Which Societies, emulous of his predecessor, Gregory XVI., of blessed memory, (to whose place we have been permitted to succeed, without his merits,) reproved by his Apostolic Letter (16) and we desire equally to condemn.”—_Forty-third Report of the British and Foreign Bible Society_. {11a} “Awful Disclosure, being Extracts Translated from the Moral Theology of Alphonsus Liguori,” by Rev. R. P. Blakeney.