tells him the saint was a man who practiced penance and mortification.  Thus you have another reason why the true Church is very properly called Catholic; because its teaching suits all classes of persons.  The ignorant can know what it teaches as well as the learned; for if they cannot read they can listen to its priests, watch its ceremonies, and study its pictures, by all of which it teaches.  The Protestant religion, on the contrary, is not adapted to the needs of every class, for it teaches that all must find their doctrines in the Bible, and understand them according to their lights, giving their own interpretation to the passages of the sacred text; and thus we come to have a variety of Protestant denominations, all claiming the Bible for their guide, though following different paths.  If every Protestant has the right to take his own meaning out of the Holy Scripture, what right have Protestant ministers to preach the meaning they have found, and compel others to accept it?  The Bible alone is not sufficient.  It must be explained by the Church that teaches us also the traditions that have come down to us from the Apostles.  If the Bible alone were the rule of our faith, what would become of all those who could not read the Bible?  What would become of those who lived before the Apostles wrote the New Testament? for they did not write in the first years of their ministry, neither did they commit to writing all the truths they taught, because Our Lord did not command them to write, but to preach; and He Himself never wrote any of His doctrines.  Again Catholics are accused of superstition for keeping the relics of saints.  Yet when General Grant died and was buried in New York, many citizens of every denomination, anxious to have a relic of the great man they loved and admired, secured, even at a cost, small pieces of wood from his house, of cloth from his funeral car, a few leaves or a little sand from his tomb.  Now, if it was not superstition to keep these relics, why should it be superstition to keep the relics of the saints?

Even God Himself honored the relics of saints, for He has often performed or granted miracles through their use.  We read in the Bible (4 Kings 13:21)—­and it is the word of God—­that once some persons who were burying a dead man, seeing their enemies coming upon them, hastily cast the body into a tomb and fled.  It was the tomb of the holy prophet Eliseus, and when the dead body touched the bones of this great servant of God, the dead man came to life and stood erect.  Here is at least one miracle that God performed through the relics of a saint.

God does not forbid the mere making of images, but only the making of them as gods.  He gave the Commandments to Moses and afterwards told him to make images; namely, angels of gold for the temple. (Ex. 25:18).  Now, God does not change His mind or contradict Himself as men do.  Whatever He does is done forever.  Therefore if He commanded Moses by the First Commandment not to make any images, He