In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, what does Miss Maudie mean when she says that "sometimes the Bible in the hands of one man is worse than a...

To understand what Miss Maudie means, let's look at the context of their conversation.

Scout and Jem are talking with her, a lady whom Scout describes as a trusted, intelligent adult:

"Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend."

The kids are trying to understand why Boo always...

To understand what Miss Maudie means, let's look at the context of their conversation.

Scout and Jem are talking with her, a lady whom Scout describes as a trusted, intelligent adult:

"Jem and I had considerable faith in Miss Maudie. She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend."

The kids are trying to understand why Boo always stays inside his house, and Miss Maudie is trying to explain. She starts by mentioning that Boo's father was "a foot-washing Baptist," meaning someone who's so religious that they take everything from the Bible as literally true, and they think anything fun at all is a sin--like planting flowers instead of sitting inside to read the Bible. They even think women are sinful just because they're women.

That's when Miss Maudie delivers the line about the Bible being something destructive when one person uses it--more destructive than alcohol when someone else drinks it.

What she means is that some people use the Bible not as a way to gain wisdom and understanding, but as a weapon to restrict people's lives and demand that they act a certain way. Miss Maudie seems to be hinting that Boo's father was that zealous about his religion, and as a result he was so demanding about the things Boo could and couldn't do, that Boo felt immobilized (frozen) and suffered some kind of mental damage that resulted in him staying inside his house all the time.

Miss Maudie was trying to be clear when she said that the Bible was worse when one man wields it compared to if Atticus were to drink alcohol--she was trying to explain that religion, improperly interpreted and forced on someone, can be worse than if someone just gets drunk and treats people terribly or violently. But the kids don't really understand the comparison; they get stuck on thinking about how their father doesn't actually drink.