It came to me when I was out on a bicycle ride just after I first posted this that Avro Manhattan was British and by “billion” he meant a million million, or 10 to the 12th power – what Americans call a trillion! A billion sure doesn’t sound like lot of money these days when the American military is spending over $600 billion dollars yearly! I read once that the Rothschild famiily is worth 300 trillion dollars ($300,000,000,000,000) and if they are also the bankers of the Vatican’s wealth, and the Vatican has had over a 1000 year head start on the Rothschilds for the accumulation of wealth, the title of Avro Manhattan’s book may well say, “The Vatican Quadrillions.”

Please note that all hyperlinked numbers in parenthesis [ex: (1) ]which indicate the reference all go to the same page. You will find the reference by looking at the section of the chapter you found the number.

Chapter 1 – The Historical Genesis of the Vatican’s Accumulation of Wealth

Historical genesis of the Vatican’s accumulation of wealth – The splitting of Christianity accelerated by its policy of temporal riches – Christianity expropriates all rival religions – How the Apostolic tradition of poverty was abandoned.

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Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was the poorest of the poor. Roman Catholicism, which claims to be His church, is the richest of the rich, the wealthiest institution on earth.

How come, that such an institution, ruling in the name of this same itinerant preacher, whose want was such that he had not even a pillow upon which to rest his head, is now so top-heavy with riches that she can rival – indeed, that she can put to shame – the combined might of the most redoubtable financial trusts, of the most potent industrial super-giants, and of the most prosperous global corporation of the world?

It is a question that has echoed along the somber corridors of history during almost 2,000 years; a question that has puzzled, bewildered and angered in turn untold multitudes from the first centuries to our days.

The startling contradiction of the tremendous riches of the Roman Catholic Church with the direct teaching of Christ concerning their unambiguous rejection, is too glaring to be by-passed, tolerated or ignored by even the most indifferent of believers. In the past, indeed, some of the most virulent fulminations against such mammonic accumulation came from individuals whose zeal and religious fervor were second to none.Their denunciations of the wealth, pomp, luxury and worldly habits of abbots, bishops, cardinals and popes can still be heard thundering with unabated clamor at the opening of almost any page of the chequered annals of western history.

But, while it was to their credit that such men had the honesty to denounce the very church to which they had dedicated their lives, it is also to the latter’s discredit that she took no heed of the voices of anguish and anger of those of her sons who had taken the teaching of the Gospel to the letter and therefore were eager that the Roman Catholic system, which claimed to be the true bride of Christ, be as poor as one she called master. When she did not silence them, she ignored them or, at the most, considered them utterances of religious innocents, to be tolerated as long as her revenue was not made to suffer.

Whenever that happened the Vatican did not hesitate to resort of the most prompt and drastic coercion to silence anyone capable of setting in motion forces, within or outside her, likely to divest her of her wealth.

The employment of suppressive measures went from the purely spiritual to physical ones; the ecclesiastical and lay machineries were used according to the degree and seriousness of the threat, and this to such an extent that in due course they became so integrated as to operate at all levels, wherever the two partners deemed themselves imperiled.

The result was that finally the religious exertion of Roman Church became so intermingled with her monetary interests as to identify the former with the latter, so that very often one could see a bishop or a pope fulminate excommunication and anathema against individuals, guilds, cities, princes and kings, seemingly to preserve and defend the spiritual prerogatives of the Church, when in reality they did so exclusively to preserve, defend or expand the territorial, financial or even commercial benefits of a Church determined to retain, and indeed to add to, the wealth it already enjoyed.

This policy was not confined only to come critical or peculiar period of Catholic history. It became a permanent characteristic throughout almost two millennia. This feature, besides causing immense sorrow to the most fervent of her adherents, became the spring of countless disputes, not only with the principalities of this world, whom she challenged with her incessant quest for yet more temporal tributes, but equally with vast sections of Christendom itself.

The splitting of this giant religious system into three distracted portions, Roman Catholicism in the West, the Orthodox church in the Near East, Protestantism in Northern Europe, to a very great extent became a reality very largely because of the economic interest which lay hidden behind the highsounding dissensions between the simmering rival theological disputations.

Thus, had the Church of Rome remained apostolically poor, it is doubtful whether the lay potentates would have aligned themselves to the support of the ecclesiastical rebels, since the greed of the former for the possible acquisition of the immense wealth controlled by the Church in Germany, England, and elsewhere would not have become the decisive trigger which made them side with the revolutionary new spiritual forces whose objectives were not solely confined to the curtailment of the spiritual and political might of Rome, but equally to depriving this religious system of the wealth which she had accumulated through centuries of uncontrolled monopoly.

It was the allurement of the immediate potential redistribution of the Vatican’s riches among the lay potentates which a successful religious secession would have rendered possible, that became the principal factor ultimately to persuade them to rally to the side of Luther and his imitators.

The dynastic issue of King Henry VIII of England was not as basic as the economic motivation which really led to the final breakaway from Roman authority. The landed gentry who supported his policy did so with their eyes well fixed upon the economic benefits to come. The variegated alignment of the German princes with Lutheranism was prompted chiefly by the same basic economic considerations. It was such concrete, although seemingly secondary, factors which in the long run made the Reformation possible.

Seen in this light, therefore, the Roman Catholic Church’s persistent ignoring of the fundamental command of Christ concerning the riches of this world caused irremediable harm to the spiritual interests of Christendom at large; and, even more than that, ignited revolts, provoked revolutions and promoted destructive wars which were to scar the western world for hundreds of years, up to our own days.

That was not always so. The true early Church acted upon, and indeed practiced, the tenets of Jesus Christ, thus putting the accumulation of the treasures of heaven before the accumulation of those of the earth.

But as the Roman Catholic system began to develop, the first tiny seeds of the temporal amassment of wealth were planted. These were eventually to grow into the monstrous giant mustard tree which was to obscure the light of Europe for over a thousand years.

The early Christians, following upon the example of the Apostles and the first and second generations of Christ’s disciples, upon conversion obeyed Christ’s commandment to the letter and disposed of their possessions. These they either sold or gave to the Christian community, the latter using them for communal benefit, so that all members would partake of them in equal portion. There was no personal attachment as yet to riches thus used, either on the part of the single Christian individual or for any autonomous Christian nucleus. The ownership, possession and enjoyment of any wealth was anonymous, impersonal and collective. There was also the help of the poor, of the slaves, of the sick and of the prisoners.

During the first and second centuries the early Christians, by acting in this manner, retained the innocence of the apostolic tradition; and even during the third, although the Church’s wealth had already become substantial, she managed to act in harmony with Christ’s injunction about poverty.

Christians, however, by now no longer sold their goods upon being baptized. They had come to harmonize the possession of worldly good with the teaching of Christ by conveniently quoting or ignoring sundry passages of the Gospels. Also, by following the example of the Church, which as a corporate body had begun to accumulate wealth. Its retention was justified by her help of the destitute, and also by the fact that the habit had started by which many, upon their death beds, left estates or money to her.

It was thus that the apostolic tradition of poverty was eventually abandoned. There was nothing contradictory, so the argument ran, in Christians retaining earthly riches so long as these were used in the “service of religion.” The argument seemed a sound one to the individuals, particularly since Christianity had “turned respectable.” The Roman Catholic Church thus gradually became the custodian of wealth passed on to her by her sons, acting as its distributor and administrator.

Until now there had been no indication of the shape of things to come. This was soon visible, however, with the historical event of the utmost importance. The emporer Constantine, following concrete political consideration, had decided to align the growing forces of Christianity on his side. A pious legend has it that he put upon the Roman standards a cross, with the words “In this sign conquer!” He won against the rear guard forces of the pagan world. Constantine recognized Christianity in A.D. 313.

Thence forward a new phase was initiated. The Church Triumphant began to vest herself with the raiment of the world. The state became the protector. With this came not only power, but also wealth. Accumulation of the latter was no longer regarded solely for the purpose of helping the poor. It became a visible testimony to her newly found status; a necessity which went with her prestige and mounting strength and power.

This was reflected in the multiplying erection of prestigious cathedrals, the opulence of the vestments of her prelates, the magnificence of her liturgy. Parallel with these grew unchecked worldly pride, also mounting greed for earthly riches. The two begot lack of charity, which turned soon into blatant intolerance.

Pagan temples were either closed, transformed into Christian shrines or demolished. Their properties were summarily added to the Church’s patrimony. The wealth of sundry religions was mercilessly expropriated, their clergy dismissed or persecuted, when not civilly or even physically obliterated. This transfer of political might made an easy transition into acquisitional power, the Roman Catholic Church set out in earnest to promote a policy of swift appropriation of real estate, of highly remunerative governmental posts, and even of speculative monetary and commercial enterprises.

Simultaneously with the accelerated growth of prestige, might and wealth, a new factor appeared on the scene amidst the ruins of the classic and the new emerging cultures: the monastic communities. These, the nuclei of which had come to the fore in original obscurity even when the Church was being persecuted, now transformed themselves into vast associations of pious individuals determined to ensure the spiritual riches of heaven by the abandonment of the riches of the earth.

But now, unlike their predecessors the anonymous hermits who sustained themselves solely upon locusts and spring water, their imitators found it increasingly difficult to follow such a strict mode of life. The legacies of the pious, the presents of parcels of expensive lands, estates and goods from newly converted highly placed pagan individuals, and the thanksgiving of repentant sinners, all contributed within a few centuries to make the monastic families in Europe the custodians of earthly riches and thus the administrators of earthly goods. This Church soon found herself not only on a par with the political and military potentates of this world, but equally a competitor with these amassers of wealth, from her high prelates, consorting with the high officials of the imperial court, to the monastic communities, springing up with ever more frequency in the semi-abandoned hamlets of former Roman colonies.

The early apostolic tradition of poverty became an abstraction; at most, a text for sermons or pious homilies. And, while single heroic individuals preached and observed it, the Church Triumphant, congregating with the principalities of the earth, not only ignored it; she shamelessly stultified its injunctions, until, having become embarrassed by it, she brazenly disregarded it, abandoning both its theory and, even more, its practice.

It was at this stage that another no less spectacular factor, predestined to have profound repercussions upon the development of Roman Catholicism during its first millennium, appeared on the scene.

The tradition was established of pilgrimages to places where the saints had lived, had been martyred and had been buried. Monasteries, nunneries, churches, all had their own. With the possession of the relics of the blessed, with promotion of their legends and accounts of their miracles went not only the spiritual devotions, but also the monetary offerings of the pilgrims. That spelled wealth for those localities where the pious voyagers gathered. The more popular a shrine or a saint, the more abundant the collection of silver and gold coins.

The most fabulous was undoubtedly that promoted by the cult of the Blessed Peter, the Turnkey of Heaven. The cult demanded a journey to Rome, where Peter’s tomb lay.

Peter had been crucified there, it was asserted with no more plausible data than a pious tradition, for the Bishops of Rome had no more evidence then than have the pontiffs of the twentieth century. The latter have attempted to substantiate it with doubtful archaeological finds. The process, begun by Pope Pius XII (1939-58), was completed by Pope Paul VI. In 1968 Paul declared officially that “a few fragments of human bones found under the Basilica of St. Peter are the authentic mortal remains of the Apostle”. (1)

How the “identification” had been carried out, on a site where hundreds of thousands of bodies had been buried during many centuries, was not plausibly explained, in view also of the fact that there has never been any definite historical evidence to prove that Peter was ever in Rome. The Roman Bishops, however, cultivated the myth with undiminished eagerness. This they did, not as mere upholders of a devout legend, but as the skillful promoters of a growing cult which had concrete and far-reaching objectives, since its magnification brought them immense authority, and with it money. For the belief that the tomb of Peter was in the Eternal City induced thousands of pilgrims, beginning with English and Scottish ones, to go to pray over the Apostle’s tomb; a source of tremendous revenue. Today we would call it by the more accurate and prosaic name of tourism.

The successors of Peter promoted pilgrimages to his “tomb” in Rome very early, although from the start they showed a special predilection for the richest and most powerful personages of the times – that is, for individuals who could give them costly presents, land and power.

To quote only one typical case, Pope Leo tells us how the Emperor Valentinian III and his family regularly performed their devotions at the tomb of St. Peter, “such practice yielding a useful respect for the Apostle’s successors” to whom they offered costly presents and the tenure of lands.

Pope Gregory, on the other hand (590-604), promised Queen Brunhilda remission of her sins. “The most blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles.. will cause thee to appear pure of all stain before the judge everlasting” (2) as long as she granted him, Gregory, what he asked of her, that, money, real estates, and investitures which yielded abundant revenues to the Church: a practice which became a tradition during the oncoming centuries.

Gregory went even further and sent the nobleman Dynamius a cross containing “fillings” from St. Peter’s chains, telling him to wear the cross at his throat “which is like as if he were wearing the chains of St. Peter himself.,” and adding “these chains, which have lain across and around the neck of the most Blessed Apostle Peter, shall unloose thee for ever from thy sins”. The gift, of course, was not a free one. It cost money and gold. (3)

Not content with this, Gregory began to send out “the keys of St. Peter, wherein are found the precious filings and which by the same token also remit sins” – provided the recipients paid in cash or with costly presents. (4)

Once it became known that the relics of St. Peter, when combined with the spiritual power of his successors, could remit sins, it was natural that most of the Christians throughout Christiandom longed to go to the tomb and thus partake of Peter’s and the pope’s spiritual treasures. The latter invariably involved earthly treasures of money, silver and gold, or deeds of real estate. And that is how the pilgrimage to Rome, called the Pardon of St. Peter, was initiated – curiously enough, mostly by Anglo- Saxons.

In addition to encouraging the belief that Peter’s tomb was in Rome and that his successors had “filings” from St. Peter’s chains, the popes encouraged the belief that by coming to the Eternal City the pilgrims could address the Blessed Peter in person. The Church, far from discouraging such dishonest humbuggery, gave her approval to it: witness for example the notable St. Gregory of Tours, who, in his De Gloria Martyrum, gave a detailed description of the ceremony that had to be performed in order to speak with the Prince of Apostles. (5)

The pilgrims had to kneel upon the tomb of St. Peter, the opening to which was covered by a trap door. Then, raising the door, he had to insert his head into the hole, after which, still remaining in that posture, he had to reveal in a loud voice the object of his visit to the saint. Offerings of money were thrown in. Then veneration and obeisance were to be offered to St. Peter’s successor, the pope.

The religious and even political results of this practice upon deeply ignorant nations like the Anglo- Saxons, and upon the Franks who imitated them, can be easily imagined. Secular rulers of the highest rank flocked to Rome. At the beginning of the seventh century, for instance, two Anglo-Saxon princes renounced their thrones and passed the remainder of their lives at the tomb of St. Peter. (6) King Canute himself could not resist Peter’s appeal. Once in Rome, having paid homage to the pope, he wrote a letter to the nobles of his kingdom, in which he said: “I inform you that I come to Rome to pray for the redemption of my sins.. I have done this because wise men have taught me that the Apostle St. Peter received of the Lord great power to bind and to loose, that he is the turnkey of the kingdom of heaven.. That is why I thought it most useful to obtain this special patronage before God.”

(7) The well-calculated policy of this cult, once widely established, yielded increasingly valuable results for the popes, who were quick to turn the prestige thus gained into a powerful instrument by which to obtain the submission of men of low or high rank, both in the spiritual and in the secular fields.

The accumulation of riches, which had not only begun to the a permanent feature of Roman Catholicism but had started to grow since the times of Constantine, when that Emperor had issued a law concerning the acquisition of land by the Church (A.D.321), by now had reached such a stage that it had become a kind of partrimonium, owned, controlled and administered by the Bishops of Rome.

The possession of property brought with it inevitable deterioration and indeed corruption of the clergy and therefore of the Church herself, since the former, seeing the latter’s eagerness for the things of this world, followed her example. The clergy, for instance, began to ask for money in exchange in exchange for their work or made money out of church goods.

Thus, under the pontificate of Gregory, clerics accepted valuables in exchange for burial places. Gregory forbade the practice, “never permitting that anyone should have to pay for money for a grave.” He issued sundry decrees which prohibited the charging of fees for the induction of clerics into office, for the investment of a bishop, for the drawing up of documents, and so on.

Upon learning of repeated cases in which the clergy were accused of selling church vessels, Gregory began a thorough investigation into the whole question of the Church’s wealth. After having been told of how a priest had sold two silver chalices and two candelabra to a Jew, he issued a series of ordinances which decreed that each Christian community should make a correct inventory of all its sacred vessels, land and property. For the first time the census have precise information of the wealth of the Church. It showed to a surprised Gregory how his Church owned landed property in Sicily, Gaul, Spain, the Balkan lands, the Near East and even many parts of Africa.

These properties included not only lands and farms, but also whole towns. St. Peter’s Patrimony, as it began to be called, owned Syracuse and Palermo, besides numerous rich estates all over Sicily, southern Italy, Apulia, Calabria and even Gallipoli, although in ruins. The estates in Campania and those of Naples and the Isle of Capri were all producing large revenues.

All in all, the Roman Church in Gregory’s time owned twenty-three estates, whose total area comprised 380 square miles, with an aggregate revenue of over one million dollars a year, a colossal sum at that period.

Gregory himself lived a life of austerity. He was a strong believer in the “ancient rule of the Fathers”‘ that is, in evangelical poverty. When confronted by all this wealth, he called himself “the poor man’s treasurer,” and tried to live up to the role. He was the first pope to call himself Servus Servorum Dei, Servant of the Servants of God.

Yet, while in agreement with the fathers of the early church, such as Origen, Tertullian and Cyprian, that material possessions were not a good thing, the fact remained that Gregory was ruling a religious system which owned vast properties, real estates and riches of all kinds. Gregory justified their retention on the ground that they should be used, as the early Christians had used them, to help the destitute. That he genuinely believed this was proved by the fact that once, having heard how a beggar had died of starvation in Rome, he became so distressed that he shut himself in a cell for three days and nights without food or drink, refusing even to say Mass. He tried to administer the riches with wisdom, by giving to the poor as much as he received.

But the tide of corruption and of the progressive amassment of worldly wealth continued unabated. Indeed, it gathered momentum, notwithstanding Gregory’s uncompromising efforts to stem it by every means at his disposal, such as his demands for precise details of how the money had been spent, the scrutiny of bookkeeping and his stern prohibition of “hidden balances of the Greek sort.”

It came to pass then that, only 300 years after Constantine, Roman Catholicism had already turned herself into one of the largest land owners of the West. The Patrimony of St. Peter had become, not a modest sum of liquid money to be “distributed to the destitute,” but the accumulated wealth of a rich religious system determined to become even richer in the years ahead.

While there were still individuals within the Church who believed in poverty, wealth continued to accumulate, and this to such an extent that at one stage she (or rather some of her leaders) had the audacity to make the Blessed Peter himself “write a letter from heaven.”

Before relating how the Blessed Peter wrote such a celestial missive, it might be useful to cast a glance at the events which preceded, and in fact prompted, the deed.

After Pope Gregory’s death, the process of adding more riches to the already vast accumulation went on unabated for another hundred years or so. Then, to the horror of the popes, the tide suddenly turned.

In the eighth century, when the papacy had so much that it did not even know how much, the semi- converted Slavs started to despoil St. Peter’s Patrimony. This had been bad enough. But then, even worse, robbers appeared on the horizon. They sprang from distant Arabia. And the Arabs, to make things worse, also started to despoil St. Peter’s Patrimony, claiming that they were doing it in the name of God. They called Him Allah. In addition, they had the bad habit of pinpricking the pope’s subjects with their scimitars, telling them, while taking away all their possessions (or rather the possessions of their papal master) that in addition to having changed landlords they had better change also their religion – which the vast majority promptly did.

In this manner, whole papal dominions were lost. These included Dalmatia, Istria, Spain, the South of France, and the whole of North Africa. To all this, Providence, or rather human greed, added insult to injury when the successors of Constantine, the most Christian emperor of Constantinople, followed suit and deprived Peter’s Patrimony of its vast estates in Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria and Corsica. Within a few decades, St. Peter had been robbed of such immense estates that his former boundless dominion was eventually reduced to central Italy, not far away, relatively speaking, from Rome.

Notwithstanding such a shrinking of their possessions, the worst devils of all, the Lombards of North Italy, set out to rob the Blessed Peter of this last estate as well. This they were about to do when the pope invoked the help of none other than the Prince of the Apostles, the Blessed Peter himself. He asked him to mobilize the most powerful potentate of the times, Pepin, King of the Franks. Pepin, said the pope, must preserve intact the Church’s earthly possessions. Indeed, it might even be of spiritual benefit to him to add some of his own to them.

The Blessed Peter complied! How? Simply by writing a letter. Direct from Heaven. To Pepin. The celestial letter, of course, was first sent to the pope, Stephen, who had plenty of Peter’s chains’ “fillings”. Stephen sent it to the king by special papal envoy.

The letter, on the finest vellum, was all written in pure gold. It read as follows:

Peter, elected Apostle by Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. I, Peter, summoned to the apostolate by Christ, Son of the Living God, has received from the Divine Might the mission of enlightening the whole world…

Pepin knelt reverently before the Papal Legate, who went on reading the Blessed Peter’s missive:

Wherefore, all those who, having heard my preaching, put it into practice, must believe absolutely that by God’s order their sins are cleansed in this world and they shall enter stainless into everlasting life

Come ye to the aid of the Roman people, which has been entrusted to me by God. And I, on the day of Judgment, shall prepare for you a splendid dwelling place in the Kingdom of God.

Signed, Peter, Prince of the Apostles. (8)

The Papal Envoy showed the letter to the whole court and solemnly vouched for the authenticity of Peter’s signature. Not only that. St. Peter had gone to the length of writing the letter with his very own hand. Something he had never done before.. Or since!

How had the letter ever reached the earth? asked Pepin. The Blessed Peter in person had come down from Heaven and given the letter to his successor, the pope of Rome, explained the Papal Envoy. Thereupon he showed the king how St. Peter had addressed the celestial letter:

Peter, elected Apostle by Jesus Christ, to our favorite Son, the King Pepin, to his whole army, to all the bishops, abbesses, monks, and to the whole people. (9)

Pepin, King of the Franks, had no alternative. How could he ever refuse the urgent request of the Prince of the Apostles? The turnkey of Heaven?

The devout Fleury, in his famous Historia Ecclesiastica, book 43, 17, cannot contain his indignation at the Blessed Peter’s celestial letter, which he bluntly declared to have been nothing else than “an unexampled artifice.” Artifice or not, whether written by Stephen himself or by some of his advisors, the fact remained that the letter of the Blessed Peter had the desired effect. In the year of our Lord 754, Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, defeated the rapacious Lombards. Since they had originally wished to rob the lands of Peter, Pepin, besides donating to Stephen what he had just preserved and recovered added to it the Duchy of Rome, the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. All of these added up to a considerable amount of territory encompassing thousands of villages, forts, cities, farms, and estates – henceforward to be owned by the representative of St. Peter on earth, the pope.

The success of the heavenly missive spurred its authors to new efforts. Soon afterwards, in fact, the Roman chancery produced the throne of the Blessed St. Peter as well – the very chair in which St. Peter sat when in Rome, it was asserted; a further inducement to Pepin and his successors to grant the popes their protection, and additional property, if need be. The inducement was a powerful one, since a king of the Franks, if crowned sitting on the Chair of the Turnkey of Heaven, would be invested with an authority surpassing that of any other temporal ruler, with the exception of the pope.

Pepin, it seems, never heard of Peter’s chair, or had not the time, or – what is most probable – died before the scheme was put into full working operation. The chair was never used for its original purpose in his lifetime. His son, the Emperor Charlemagne, when crowned Emperor in the year 800, did not sit in it either. The throne, however, eventually came into its own. And this so much so that by the following century – during the rule of Charles the Bald (A.D. 875) – it had become one of the most precious relics of Roman Catholicism. Since then it has been venerated as the true chair upon which Peter used to sit, the sacred relic of the Petrine cult for centuries. In 1656 it was put inside an ornate bronze case, on papal command, by the sculptor Bernini.

Some years ago, however, its authenticity was questioned by certain Catholic authorities. Having been put under intense study by a commission of scholars and scientists, following strict carbon 14 and other radiological tests, it was discovered that the chair belonged approximately to the time of Charles the Bald – i.e. around A.D. 875 – and not to the first century A.D.

Pope Paul VI was thus, in the winter of 1969-70, put into another serious quandary. What could he do with Peter’s throne after a thousand years of veneration? Put it back where it had been during a long millennium, in St Peter’s Basilica, or put it in the Vatican Museum? (10) But that was the personal problem of a pope of the twentieth century. Those of the eighth had been concerned only with magnifying the cult of the Blessed Peter, so as to enhance their power, no less than the earthly patrimony of the Church.

And so it came to pass that, thanks mostly to the cult of the Blessed Peter, Roman Catholicism, which had collected such vast amounts of temporal wealth prior to Pepin, now crowned her earthly possessions with additional territorial dominions. These, which had originally formed the first nucleus of the papal possessions, theoretically were given legal status by Pepin in A.D. 754. They became a concrete and accepted reality in 756. In 774 the Donation was confirmed by Pepin’s immediate successor, Charlemagne. The Papal States had truly come into existence. Here the popes reigned as absolute temporal rulers for more than a thousand years, until 1870, when the Italians, having seized Rome with all the adjacent papal territories, declared the Eternal City the capital of the newly formed united Kingdom of Italy.

The establishment of the Papal States provided the Roman Catholic Church with a territorial and juridical base of paramount importance. From then on it enables her to launch upon the promotion of an ever bolder policy directed at the accelerated acquisition of additional lands, additional gold, and the additional status, prestige and power that went with them.

The Emperor Charlemagne had not, in fact, turned his back on Rome after recognizing Pepin’s Donation, but Pope Hadrian I in A.D. 774 presented him with a copy of the Donation of Constantine. This was reputed to be the grant by Constantine of immense possessions and vast territories to the Church. It was another papal forgery. Whereas the letter from Peter had been a forgery by Pope Stephen, the Donation of Constantine was one by Pope Hadrian I.(1)

The Donation of Constantine had tremendous influence upon the territorial acquisition and claims of the papacy, and a cursory glance at its origins, contents, and meaning will help to elucidate its importance.

The Donation was preceded and followed by various papally forged documents on the level of the Blessed Peter’s missive. Like the latter, their specific objective was to give power, territory and wealth to the popes. Thus, soon after Pepin’s death, for instance, a document appeared on the scene which was a detailed narrative put into the mouth of the dead Pepin himself. In it Pepin related, in somewhat extravagant Latin, what had passed between himself and the pope, “the successor of the Turnkey of Heaven, the Blessed Peter”. His disclosure was meant as proof that he had donated to the pope, not only Rome and the Papal States already mentioned, but also Istria, Venetia and indeed the whole of Italy. (2)

Not content with the Papal States and the new regions acquired, the popes now wanted even more, thus proving the accuracy of the old saying that the appetite increases with the eating. They set themselves to expand even further their ownership of additional territories. They concluded that the newly born Papal States, although of such considerable size, were too small for the pope, the representatives of the Blessed Peter. These territories had to be extended to match Peter’s spiritual imperium. Something incontrovertible by which the popes would be unequivocally granted the ownership of whole kingdoms and empires had, therefore, become a necessity.

At this point this most spectacular of all forgeries makes its official appearance: the Donation of Constantine. Purporting to have been written by the Emperor Constantine himself, it emerged from nowhere. The document with one master stroke put the popes above kings, emperors and nations, made them the legal heirs to the territory of the Roman Empire, which it granted to them, lock stock, and barrel, and gave to St. Peter – or rather to St. Silvester and his successors – all lands to the West and beyond, indeed, all lands of the planet.

The document was a sum of the previous forgeries, but unlike past fabrications it was definite, precise and spoke in no uncertain terms of the spiritual and political supremacy which the popes had been granted as their inalienable right. The significance and consequences of its appearance were portentous for the whole western world. The social structure and political framework of the Middle Ages were molded and shaped by its contents. With it the papacy, having made its boldest attempt at world dominion, succeeded in placing itself above the civil authorities of Europe, claiming to be the real possessor of lands ruled by Western potentates, and the supreme arbiter of the political life of all Christendom.

In view of the profound repercussions of this famous forgery, the most spectacular in the annals of Christianity, it might be useful to glance at its main clauses:

1. Constantine desires to promote the Chair of Peter over the Empire and its seat on earth by bestowing on it imperial power and honor.
2. The Chair of Peter shall have supreme authority over all churches in the world.
3. It shall be judge in all that concerns the service of God and the Christian faith.
4. Instead of the diadem which the Emperor wished to place on the pope’s head, but which the pope refused, Constantine had given to him and to this successors the phrygium – that is, the tirara and the lorum which adorned the emperor’s neck, as well as the other gorgeous robes and insignia of the imperial dignity.
5. The Roman clergy shall enjoy the high privileges of the Imperial Senate, being eligible to the dignity of patrician and having the right to wear decorations worn by the nobles under the Empire.
6. The offices of cubicularii, ostiarii, and excubitae shall belong to the Roman Church
7. The Roman clergy shall ride on horses decked with white coverlets, and, like the Senate, wear white sandals.
8. If a member of the Senate shall wish to take orders, and the pope consents, no one shall hinder him.
9. Constantine gives up the remaining sovereignty over Rome, the provinces, cities and towns of the whole of Italy or of the Western Regions, to Pope Silvester and his successors. With the first clause the pope became legally the successor of Constantine: that is, the heir to the Roman Empire. With the second he was made the absolute head of al Christendom, East and West, and indeed of all the churches of the world. With the third he was made the only judge with regard to Christian beliefs. Thus anyone or any church disagreeing with him became heretic, with all the dire spiritual and temporal results of this. With the fourth the pope surrounded himself with the splendor and the insignia of the imperial office, as the external representation of his imperial status. With the fifth the whole Roman clergy was placed on the same level as the senators, patricians and nobles of the Empire. By virture of this clause, the Roman clergy became entitled to the highest title of honor which the emperors granted to certain preeminent members of the civil and military aristocracy, the ranks of patrician and consul being at that time the highest at which human ambition could aim.

The sixth and seventh clauses, seemingly irrelevant, were very important. For the popes, by claiming to be attended by gentlemen of the bedchamber, doorkeepers and bodyguards (cubiculari, ostiarli, etc.) emphasized their parity with the Emperors, as preciously only the latter had this right. The same applies to the claim that Roman clergy should have the privilege of decking their horses with white coverings, which in the eighth century was a privilege of extraordinary importance.

The eighth clause simply put the Senate at the mercy of the pope. Finally the ninth, the most important and the one with the greatest consequences in Western history, made the pope the territorial sovereign of Rome, Italy and the Western Regions; that is to say, of Constantine’s Empire, which comprised France, Spain, Britain and indeed the whole territory of Europe and beyond.

By virtue of the Donation of Constantine, therefore, the Roman Empire became a fief of the papacy, while the Emperors turned into vassals and the popes into suzerains. Their age old dream, the Roman dominion, became a reality, but a reality in which it was no longer the Vicars of Christ what were subject to the Emperors, but the Emperors who were subject to the Vicars of Christ.

The early concrete result of the Donation thus was to give a legal basis to the territorial acquisitions of the popes, granted them by Pepin and Charlemagne. Whereas Pepin and Charlemagne had established them sovereigns de facto, the Donation of Constantine made them sovereigns de jure – a very important distinction and of paramount importance in the claim for future possessions.

It is very significant that it was after the appearance of the Donation under Pope Hadrian (c774) that the papal chancery ceased to date documents and letters by the regnal years of the Emperors of Constantinople, substituting those of Hadrian’s pontificate.

Although there are no proofs that the document was fabricated by the pope himself, yet it is beyond dispute that the style of the Donation is that of the papal chancery in the middle of the eight century. The fact, moreover, that the document first appeared at the Abbey of St. Denis, where Pope Stephen spent the winter of 754, is additional proof that the pope was personally implicated in its fabrication. Indeed, although here again there is no direct evidence, it is supposed that the Donation was forged as early as 753 and was brought by Pope Stephen II to the Court of Pepin in 754, in order to persuade that monarch to endow the popes with their first territorial possessions. Once the Papal States came into being, the document was concealed until it was thought that it could be used with his son., Charlemange, who had succeeded his father. (3)

The first spectacular materialization of the Donation was seen not many years after its first appearance, when Charlemagne, the most potent monarch of the Middle Ages, granted additional territories to the Papal States and went to Rome to be solemnly crowned in St. Peter’s by Pope Leo, as the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in the year 800. The great papal dreams of (a) the recognition of the spiritual supremacy of the popes over emperors and (b) the resurrection of the Roman Empire, at long last had come true.

The subjugation of the Imperial Crown was not, however enough. If it was true that this put the source of all civil authority – that is to say, the emperor – under the pope, it was also true that the distant provinces could not or would not follow the imperial example. The best way to make them obey was by controlling the civil administration in the provinces, as had been done at its center with the emperor. As the pope had made a vassals of the civil authorities in the dioceses. By so doing the pope, with a blindly obedient, hierarchical machinery, would control at will the civil administration of the whole empire.

It was to put such a scheme into effect that yet another forgery, complementary to the Donation, appeared little more than half a century later, again from nowhere. In 850 the pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, better known as the as the “False Decretals,” made their first official appearance. They are a heterogeneous collection of the early decrees of the councils and popes. Their seeming purpose was to give a legal basis to the complaints of the clergy in the empire, appealing to Rome against the misdeeds of high prelates or of the civil authorities. Although some of the contents of the Decretals are genuine, a colossal proportion was garbled, forged, distorted or entirely fabricated. This was in order to achieve their real aim: to obtain additional power for the popes by giving to the abbots, bishops, and clergy in general authority over civil jurisdiction in all the provinces, thus establishing a legal basis for evading the orders of the provincial secular rulers.

The result was that the Roman Church obtained important privileges, among them immunity from the operation of the secular law, which put her out of reach of the jurisdiction of all secular tribunals. In this fashion the clergy acquired not only a peculiar sanctity which put them above the ordinary people, but a personal inviolability which gave them an enormous advantage in all their dealings or disputes with the civil power.

Thus, thanks to a series of fabrications, forgeries, and distortions, carried out through several centuries and of which the Donation of Constantine was the most spectacular, the popes not only obtained a vantage ground of incalculable value from which to extend their spiritual and temporal power, but rendered themselves practically independent of all secular authority. Even more, they saw to it that the statutes of emperors and kings, no less than the civil law of nations, be undermined, greatly weakened and indeed obliterated by their newly acquired omnipotence.

Once rooted in tradition and strengthened by the credulity of the times, the dubious seedling of the Donation grew into a mighty oak tree under the shadow of which papal authoritarianism thrived. From the birth of the Carolingian Empire in the year 800 onwards, the gifts of Pepin, the Donation of Constantine, and the False Decretals were assiduously used by the pontiffs to consolidate their power. This they did, until , with additional forgeries and the arbitrary exercise of spiritual and temporal might, these documents became the formidable foundation stone upon which they were eventually to erect their political and territorial claims, the rock upon which stood the whole papal structures of the Middle Ages.

The Donation was given increasingly varied meanings by the succeeding generations of theologians. Notwithstanding the disparity in their views, however, they all agreed upon one fundamental interpretation: the Donation gave the widest possible power and authority to the papacy. Thus, for instance, whereas Pope Hadrian I stated that Constantine had “given the dominion in these regions of the West” to the Church of Rome, Aeneas, Bishop of Paris, asserted about the year 868 that as Constantine had declared that two emperors, the one of the realm, the other of the Church, could not rule in one city, he had removed his residence to Constantinople, placing the Roman territory “and a vast number of various provinces” under the rule of the Apostolic See, after conferring regal power on the successors of St. Peter.

The Popes acted upon this, using the argument as a basis to increase their territorial sway, with the inevitable new accumulation of wealth which went with it. Gregory VII (1073) directed all his energies to that effect. He concentrated spiritual and political jurisdiction in himself, the better to administer the Western Empire as a fief of the papacy. That implied the extension of his temporal dominion over the kings and kingdoms of the earth and therefore over their temporal riches.

Indeed, Gregory had no qualms in openly asserting temporal supremacy over the whole of the Byzantine Empire, including Africa and Asia. He went even further by declaring that his ultimate goal was simply the establishment of the universal temporal domain of St. Peter. Hence his continual exertions to take possession of, in addition to Rome and Italy, all the crowns of Europe, many of which he succeeded in placing under his direct vassalage.

Although his vast scheme only partially materialized during his reign, his successors continued his work. Pope Urban II, following in his footsteps, decided to bring under subjection the churches of Jerusalem, of Antioch, of Alexandria and of Constantinople, with all the lands wherein they flourished. Under the pretext of liberating the tomb of Christ, he simply mobilized the entire western world into an irresistible army which, leaving the shores of Europe, plunged into Asia Minor like a tornado, creating the greatest military, political and economic commotion in both continents.

The capture of Jerusalem and the success of the First Crusade gave incalculable prestige to the pontiffs. While the nations of Europe attributed this vicotry to manifest supernatural power, the Roman Pontiffs were quick to transform the great martial movements of the Crusades into powerful instruments to be used to expand their spiritual and temporal dominion. This was done by employing them as military and political levers which never ceased to yield territorial and financial advantages throughout the Middle Ages.

Such policies went a step further when, basing papal claims on an even more daring interpretation of the Donation, it was stated that the secular rulers should be made to pay tribute to the papacy. A vehement advocate of this was Otto of Freisingen, who in his Chronicles composed in 1143-6, did not hesitate to declare that as Constantine, after conferring the imperial insignia on the pontiff, went to Byzantium to leave the empire to St. Peter, so other kings and emperors should pay tribute to the popes.

For this reason the Roman Church maintains that the Western kingdom have been given over to her possession by Constantine, and demands tribute from them to this day, with the exception of the two kingdoms of the Franks (i.e. the French and German).

Such advocacy was made possible because only a century earlier, in 1054, Pope Leo IX had declared to the Patriarch Michael Cerularius that the Donation of Constantine really meant the donation “of earthly and heavenly imperium to the royal priesthood of the Roman chair.”

From all this it followed that soon Lombardy, Italy, and Germany began to be reckoned, in the eyes of Rome, as “papal fiefs,” the popes declaring ever more boldly that the German kings had possessed the Roman Empire, as well as the Italian Kingdom, solely as a present from the pontiffs. Such claims, of course, did not go unchallenged, and they often caused the profoundest political commotion – for instance, the one that broke out in Germany in 1157, when a letter from Pope Hadrian to Frederick Barbarossa spoke of “beneficia” which he had granted to the Emperor, or could still grant, and expressly called the imperial crown itself such a beneficium – i.e. a feod, as it was understood at the imperial court. Hadrian said, on the strength of the fact that it was he who had placed the crown on the Emperor’s head, that the pope was the real owner of Germany.

It was not only the princes who rebelled against the papal pretensions. Men otherwise devoted to this religious system spoke in no uncertain words against papal infringement upon civil power. Provost Gerhoh of Reigersburg, for instance, commenting upon the custom (which, of course, rested for support on the Donation of Constantine) of the emperor were represented as vassals of the popes, concluded that this besides causing the embittered feelings of temporal rulers, went also against the divine order by allowing the popes to claim to be emperors and lords of emperors.

A few years later Gottfried, a German educated in Bamburg, chaplain and secretary to the three Hohenstaufen sovereigns, Conrad, Frederick, and Henry IV, building on what Aeneas, Bishop of Paris, had already said, went a step further than Pope Adrian and included France in the Donation. In his Pantheon, which he dedicated to Pope Urban III in 1186, he stated that in order to secure greater peace for the Church, Constantine, having withdrawn with all his pomp to Byzantium, besides granting to the popes regal privileges, had given dominion over Rome, Italy and Gaul, with all the riches therein.

With passing of the centuries, the popes, instead of abating their claims, continued to increase them by declaring that, by virtue of the Donation, emperors were emperors simply because they permitted them to be so the sole ruler in spiritual and temporal matters being, in reality, the pontiff himself.

Such pretensions were not left to wither in the theoretical field. They were directed to concrete territorial, political, and financial goals which the pontiffs pursued with indefatigable pertinacity. Pope Innocent II (1198-1216), the most energetic champion of papal supremacy, thundered incessantly to all Europe that he claimed temporal supremacy over all the crowns of Christendom: for, as the successor of St. Peter, he was simultaneously the supreme head of the true religion and the temporal sovereign of the universe. His tireless exertions saw to it that papal rulership was extended over sundry lands and kingdoms. By the end of his reign, in fact, the Vatican had become the temporal ruler of Naples, of the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, of almost all the States of the Iberian peninsula such as Castile, Leon, Navarre, Aragon and Portugal, of all the Scandinavian lands, of the Kingdom of Hungary, of the Slav State of Bohemia, of Servia, Bosnia, Bulgeria, and Poland. A proud list!

He became also the true de facto and de jure sovereign of England, after having compelled John to make complete submission. During the last years of that king’s reign and the first few of Henry III, Innocent governed the island effectively through his legates. That was not enough, however, for Innocent proclaimed himself the temporal ruler of the Christian states founded in Syria by the Crusaders. Indeed, he went even further. Taking advantage of the Franco-Venetian Crusade of 1202, he planned the annexation of the Byzantine Empire. A Latin Empire came into being in the East, and while the Byzantine became the temporal vassals of the pope, the Greek Orthodox Church was compelled to acknowledge Roman supremacy. Later on, such immense dominion was extended by his successors through the conversion to Roman Catholicism of the pagans of the Baltic.

At this time, as in the past, one country more than any other opposed the irresistible ecclesiastical absorption: the powerful German Empire. But the pope, in spite of many setbacks, never recognized Germany as being outside this formidable papal imperium, on the familiar ground that she was an integeral part of the patrimony of St. Peter.

Not content with the Donation of Constantine, Innocent IV asserted that when Constantine gave to the Church had not belonged to him at all, for Europe has always belonged to the Church. In an encyclical published shortly after the close of the Council of Lyons in 1245, Innocent expressly stated:

“It is wrong to show ignorance of the origin of things and to imagine that the Apostolic See’s rule over secular matters dates only from Constantine. Before him this power was already in the Holy See. Constantine merely resigned into the hands of the Church a power which he used without right when he was outside her pale. Once admitted into the Church, he obtained, by the concession of the vicar of Christ, authority which only then became legitimate. ”

After which, in the same encyclical, Innocent fondly dwelt upon the idea that the pope’s acceptance of the Constantine Donation was but a visible sign of his sovereign dominion over the whole word, and hence of all the wealth to be found on earth.

Belief in the Donation and in the wide extent of territory which Constantine included in it grew ever stronger. Gratian himself did not include it, but it was soon inserted a palea, and thus found an entry into all schools of canonical jurisprudence, so that from this time on the lawyers were the most influential publishers and defenders of the fiction. The language of the popes also was henceforward more confident.

“Omne regnum Occidentis ei (Silvestro) tradidit we dimisit,” said Innocent II (1198-1216)

Gregory IX (1227-41) followed this out to its consequences, in a way surpassing anything that had been done before when he represented to the Emperor Frederick II that Constantine the duchy and the imperium to the care of the popes forever. Whereupon the popes, without diminishing in any degree whatever the substance of their jurisdiction, established the tribunal of the empire, transferred it to the Germans, and were wont to concede the power of the sword to the emperors at their coronation. By now, this was as much as to say that this imperial authority had its sole origin in the popes, could be enlarged or narrowed at their good pleasure, and that the pope could call each emperor to account for the use of the power and the riches entrusted to him.

But the highest rung of the ladder was as yet not reached. It was first achieved by Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, when the synod of Lyons resulted in the deposition of Frederick, in which act this pope went beyond all his predecessors in the increase of his claim and the extent of the authority of Rome.

The Dominican, Tolomeo of Lucca, author of the two last books of the work De Regimine Principum, the first two books of which were by Thomas Aquinas, went even further and explained the Donation as a formal abdication of Constantine in favor of Sylvester. Connection with this other historical circumstances, which were either inventions or misconceptions, he thence drew the conclusion that the power and wealth of all temporal princes derived its strength and efficacy solely from the spiritual power of the popes. There was no halting half way, and immediately afterwards, in the contest of Boniface VIII with Philip of France, the Audutinian monk Aegidius Colonna of Rome, whom the pope had nominated to the archbishopric of Bourges, drew the natural conclusion without the slightest disguise in a work which he dedicated to his patron.

The other theologians of the papal court, Agostino Trionfo and Alvaro Pelayo, surpassed all previous claims and declared, that if an emperor like Constantine had given temporal possession to Sylvester, this was merely a restitution or what had been stolen in an unjust and tyrannical way. (1)

Emperors and kings were compelled very often, not only to acknowledge such claims as true, but to swear that they would defend them with their swords; to cite only one before his coronation. Pope Clement V made this monarch swear that he would protect and uphold all the rights which the emperors, beginning with Constantine, had granted to the Roman Church – without, however, stating what these rights were. (2)

The power given by the Donation to the Roman Church was further enhanced by that inherent in the papacy itself. As the direct successors of Peter, the popes were the only true inheritors of the might of the Church, and hence of whatever and whoever were under her authority. The theory ran as follows:

‘Christ is the Lord of the whole world. At his departure he left his dominion to his representatives, Peter and his successors. Therefore the fullness of all spiritual and temporal power and dominion, the union of all rights and privileges, lies in the hands of the pope. Every monarch, even the most powerful, possesses only so much power and territory as the pope has transferred to him or finds good to allow him.’

This theory was supported by most medieval theologians. (3) It became the firm belief of the popes themselves. In 1245, for instance, Pope Innocent IV expounded this doctrine to none other than the Emperor Frederick, saying that, as it was Christ who had entrusted to Peter and his successors both kingdoms, the heavenly and the earthly, belonged to him, the pope: by which he meant that the spiritual dominion of the papacy had to have its counterpart also in papal dominion over all the lands, territories and riches of the entire world.

Not even the most ambitious emperors of the Ancient Roman Empire had ever dared to claim as much.

Following claims with deeds, the popes set about implementing their new, astounding theory by word, diplomacy, cunning, threats, and ruthless action. While appealing for support, armed with all the mystic and spiritual authority of the Church, they went on stating, asserting, and declaring that their rights were based upon the utmost legality, by virtue of the Donation of Constantine.

It was, in fact, a clause in the fabulous Donation (or rather a couple of sentences as interpreted by them) which,. although seeming at first sight insignificant, had the most tragic and far-reaching consequences. The words, in the last clause of the Donation: “Constantine gives up the remaining sovereignty over Rome.. ” and ending: “.. or of the western regions to Pope Sylvester and is successors” became the foundation stones upon which the papacy demanded sovereignty, not only over practically the whole of Europe, but over all the islands of the oceans.

As in the case of their claims for Europe, those for the islands grew with the passing of the years and the increase of fashion and with a comparatively small matter. When the popes proclaimed their sovereignty over Naples they included the various small islands nearby, on the ground that they were possessions of the Church. Later on, as documented in the chronicles of the Church of St. Maria del Principio, the popes, after having declared that Constantine gave to St. Peter also all the lands in the sea, said that the papal sovereignty covered the island of Sicily as well.

The use of the forged Donation initiated a new and more definite phase, however, when Pope Urban II claimed possession of Corsica in 1091, deducing Constantine’s right to give away the island from the strange principle that all islands were legally juris publici, and therefore State domain. When the popes, after having abstained for one hundred and eighty nine years from ruling Corsica directly, became strong political potentates themselves, they had no hesitation in asking for “their island” back. In 1077 Pope Gregory VII simply declared that the Corsicans were “ready to return under the supremacy of the Papacy.”

On this notion that it was the islands especially that Constantine had given to the popes they proceeded to build, although nothing had been said in the original document; and with a bold leap the Donation of Constantine was transferred from Corsica to the far west, that is, to Ireland, with the result that soon the papal chair claimed possession of an island which the Romans themselves had never possessed.

From then onwards, by virtue of the Donation of Constantine, the popes loudly claimed to be the feudal lords of all the islands of the ocean, and started to dispose of them according to their will. Laboring to obtain papal supremacy, they used these rights as a powerful political bargaining power by which to further their political dominion over Europe: (a) by compelling kings to acknowledge them as their masters, (b) by granting to such kings dominion over lands of which the papacy claimed ownership, and (c) by making the spiritual and political dominion of the Church supreme in the lands thus “let” to friendly nations.

The most famous example of such a bargain in transfer is undoubtedly Ireland. Ireland had been for some time the prey of internecine wars which were steadily but surely bringing it to total state of quandary. By 1170, in fact, she had already had sixty-one kings. It so happened that the popes, having decided to bring the Irish, among whom were “many pagan, ungodly and rebellious rulers,” under the stern hand of Mother Church, planned a grand strategy thanks to which they would not only impose the discipline of their religious system, but also tie to the papacy more firmly than ever the English kingdom by conferring upon the English monarch the sole right to conquer that island and subjugate its people. In this way the popes would achieve several goals simultaneously: they would reimpose their authority on Ireland, strengthen their power over the English kingdom, and thus also reinforce their hold upon France and indirectly upon the whole of Europe.

It so happened that the English kings had entertained similar designs, and also that at the time there was sitting in the papal chair a man by the name of Nicholas Breakspeare, known as Hadrian IV, an Englishman (1154-9), who made possible the English subjugation of Ireland by his “Anglicana affectione,” as an Irish chieftain declared in 1316 in a letter to Pope John XXII.

King and pope began to negotiate. The pope was ready to confer the dominion of Ireland on the English king, upon the condition that the king accepted the doctrine of papal sovereignty, which implied that, as King of England, he was a vassal of the pope. The king, on the other hand, was ready to accept this upon the condition that the papacy would support him in his military and political conquest of he Irish by using the powerful machinery of the Church.

Fortune seemed to favor the project, for Diarmait, an Irish potentate years before Henry became King of England, had brought him a long-desired opportunity by proposing the conquest of Ireland. Once the pope and the king were in agreement, Hadrian IV granted to the England king the hereditary lordship of Ireland, sending a letter with a ring as a symbol of investiture, thus conferring on him dominion over the island of Ireland, which “like all Christian islands, undoubtedly belonged of right to St. Peter and the Roman Church”.

The papal grant, made in 1155, was kept a secret until after Henry landed in Ireland in 1172. Thus the English received dominion over Ireland on the grounds that the pontiffs were feudal lords of all islands of the ocean, thanks to the Donation of Constantine.

The Irish conquest, ordered by Pope Hadrian IV, is authenticated by a document popularly called the “Bull Laudabiliter,” found only in the Roman Bullarium (1739) and in the Annals of Baronius, but its authenticity has been accepted by Roman Catholic and Protestant historians alike.

The “Bull Laudabiliter” is inserted in the Expugnatio Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis, published in or about 188, (1)wherein he asserts it to be the document brought from Rome by John of Salisbury in 155. He also gives with it a confirmation by Alexander II, obtained, he states, by Henry II after his visit to Ireland. John of Salisbury, the intimate friend and confidant of Pope Hadrian, quotes also the Donation of Constantine, on the grounds of this right of St. Peter over all islands. In addition to these two documents, there are three letters from Alexander III, which are similarly known to us only at second hand, being transcribed in what is known as the Black Book of the Exchequer. (2) In them, the pope expresses his warm approval of Henry’s conquest of Ireland, calling his expedition as missionary enterprise, praising him as a champion of the Church and particularly of St. Peter and of his rights, which rights St. Peter passed on to the popes. Especially significant is the fact that the rights claimed by the popes under the Donation of Constantine, over all islands, are here asserted, not so much as justifying the grant of Ireland to Henry, but as entitling the papal see to claim those rights for itself.

Such rights were still claimed by the Vatican in an official document as recently as 1645. When in that year Pope Innocent X dispatched Rinuccini as Papal Nuncio to Ireland, he gave him formal instructions in which were included a brief outline of past events. In it we find this definite and most striking passage:

For a long period the true faith maintained itself, till the country, invaded by Danes, and idolatrous people, fell for the most part into impious superstition. This state of darkness lasted till the reigns of Adrian IV and of Henry II. King of England.

Henry, desiring to strengthen his empire and to secure the provinces which he possessed belong the era in France, wished to subdue the island of Ireland; and to compass this design had to recourse to Adrian, who. himself an Englishman, with a liberal hand granted all he coveted.

The Zeal manifested by Henry to convert all Ireland to the faith moved the soul of Pope Adrian to invest him with the sovereignty of that island. Three important conditions were annexed to the gift:

1. That the King should do all in his power to propagate the Catholic religion throughout Ireland.
2. That each of his subjects should pay an annual tribute of one penny to the Holy See, commonly called Peter’s Pence.
3. That all the privileges and immunities of the Church be held inviolate. (3) These “conditions” were obtained through papal authority and the king’s sword. When the King Henry seemed to have firmly established himself on Irish soil, the pope strengthened him by mobilizing the Irish Church in his support. Christian O’Conarchy, Bishop of Lismore and Papal Legate, president at the Synod, attended by the Archbishops of Dublin, Cashel and Tuam, their suffragan abbots and other dignitaries. Henry’s sovereignty was acknowledged and constitutions made which drew Ireland closer to Rome than ever. Thus it was one of the ironies of history that Catholic Ireland was sold by the popes themselves to a country destined to become the champion of Protestantism.

But the grant of Ireland had another great repercussion. It provided a precedent to the popes, not only to claim and give away islands and people, but also to give away a new world. For the language of the grant of Hadrian IV and some of his successors developed principles as yet unheard of in Christendom, since Hadrian had declared that Ireland and all the islands belonged to the special jurisdiction of St. Peter. (4)

This was not a rhetorical expression. It became a solid reality when daring sailors began to discover lands in the until-then-uncharted oceans. When in 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Americas, his finding not only stimulated a keener competition between the two adventurous Iberian seafaring nations, but opened up to both Spain and Portugal tremendous vistas of territorial, economic and political expansion.

As soon as the race for the conquest of he western hemisphere began, the pope came to the forefront, as a master and arbiter of the continents to be conquered . For, if all islands belonged by right to St. Peter, than all the newly-discovered and yet-to-be-discovered lands with all riches, treasures and wealth in any form belonged to the popes, his successors. The New World thus had become the possession of the papacy. It was as simple as that.

This was left neither to the realm of theoretical claims nor to that of speculative rights. It was promptly acted upon, with full authority. Pope Alexander VI, then the reigning pontiff, in fact, one year only after the discovery of America – that is, in 1493 – issued a document which is one of the most astounding papal writs of all times. In it Pope Alexander VI, acting as the sole legal owner of all islands of the oceans, granted all the lands yet to e discovered to the King of Spain.

Here are the relevant words of this celebrated decree:

“We are credibly informed that whereas of late you were determined to seek and find certain islands and firm lands, far remote and unknown .. you have appointed our well-beloved son Christopher Columbus.. to seek (by sea, where hitherto no man hath sailed) such firm land and islands far remote and hitherto unknown..

“.. We of our own motion, and by the fullness of Apostolical power, do give grant and assign to you, our heirs and successors, all power, do give grant and assign to you, your heirs and successors, all the firm lands and islands founds or to be found, discovered or to be discovered.” (5)

But then, since the rivalry between Spain and Portugal threatened to imperil the situation, in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas moved the papal line of demarcation to the meridian 370 leagues west of the Azores. This brought Brazil into existence.

Pope Leo, long after feudalism had passed away, upheld as intransigently as ever the conception of earth-ownership. As world suzerain, he granted to the King of Portugal permission to possess all kingdoms and islands of the Far East, which he had wrested from the infidel, and all that he would in future thus acquire, even though up to that time unknown and undiscovered.(6) The pope’s will was soon to be infringed by rebellious nations such Protestant England, Holland, and even Catholic countries like France. Yet it was strong enough to transform two-thirds of the New World into the spiritual domain of Rome.

The Donation of Constantine, therefore, was fraught with incalculable consequences, not only for Italy, France, Germany, England, Ireland and practically the whole of Europe, but also for the Americas and for Near and Middle East. Indeed, in its full extent found admittance even in Russia, for it exists in the Kormezaia Kniga, the Corpus juris Canonici of the Graeco-Slavonic Church, which was translated from the Greek by a Serbian or Bulgarian in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

Many were those who rebelled against it. Wetzeld, in a letter to the Emperor Frederick, dated 1152, centuries before the English precursor of Protestantism, Wycliff, had no hesitation in declaring:

“That lie and heretical fable of Constantine’s having conceded the imperial rights in the city to Pope Sylvester, was now so thoroughly exposed that, even day laborers and women were able to confute the most learned on the point, and the pope and his cardinals would not venture to show themselves for shame.” (7)

The exposure of the falsity of the Donation proceeded until the middle of the fifteenth century, when three men succeeded, more than any others had done, in exploding the myth on historical grounds, proving without doubt that the fact of the Donation, no less than the document, was a fraudulent invention. They were Reginal Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, Cardinal Cusa, and, above all Lorenzo Valla, who proved that the popes had no right whatever over any land in Europe and had not even the right to possess the States of the Church in Italy or in Rome itself.

One of the most stubborn opponents of the Donation, a certain Aeneas Sylvius Picolomini, Secretary to the Emperor Frederick III, in 1443, went so far as to recommend that Emperor to summon a council at which the question of the Donation of Constantine, “which causes perplexity to many souls,” should be finally decided, on the ground of the Donation’s “utter unauthenticity.”

Indeed, Piccolomini went further and proposed that after the council had solemnly proclaimed the unauthenticity of the Donation, Frederick should take possession of most of the territories included in it and openly reject all papal claims of supremacy over rulers and nations. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was afterwards Pope Pius II. A century before him, Dante, who had not hesitated to consign many popes to the hellish flames, uttered his famous lamentation on the Donation: “Ah, Constantine! Of how much ill was mother, Not, thy conversion, but that marriage dower which the first wealthy Father took from thee.”

But, as if the ownership of immense territorial domains and, indeed, the ownership of practically the whole of the western world were not sufficient, the Roman Catholic Church, prior to, during and after her acquisitions, set out with no less success to despoil of their riches the faithful who lived in them. This she did, via the greed of rapacious priests with their misuse of religion, their abuse of the credulity of multitudes, their exercise of fear and their unscrupulous use of promises designed to extract from these people land and valuables for which they had developed the most insatiable appetite since the times of Constantine.

Thus, while the Church’s possessions, identified in the gradual accumulation of lands, buildings and sundry good, multiplied with the erection of new monasteries, nunneries, abbeys and the like, her treasures in the shape of money, gold and jewels increased as new monastic and ecclesiastical centers arose. These, besides becoming the traditional repositories of the communal wealth became also the collectors, and therefore the users, of the tithes and all other legal, semi-legal and at times forced contributions which believers were compelled to “donate”.

When to these were added the voluntary contributions of believers either as a penance for their sins or as a thanksgiving for celestial favors received or on their death-beds, then the total wealth accumulated in the course of the centuries became equal to that of any baron or prince. Indeed, a time arrived when it surpassed the wealth of kings.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, after the time of the Emperor Charlemagne, her riches, already magnitudinous, became even more so by the accidental and planned combination of popular superstitions, genuine misrepresentations of the Scriptures, and the cunning promotion of a credence which in due course was accepted as the fearful reality of the steadily identified with belief in the end of all things. How such a prediction came to the fore and was so widely adopted by the Roman Catholic Institution and, above all, by the European populace, has yet to be assessed. Contributory factors of varied character seem to have given solidity to the belief that the world would come to an end with the closing of the first millennium of Christianity.

The Gospels, which spoke of the “present generations” before the coming of the Son of Man, became the main support of this belief – at least as interpreted by an ignorant or cunning clergy; for it must remembered that at this period the masses could neither read nor write. Books or any other form of literature did not exist. The only sections of western society (beside the true Christian believers hiding in the mountains, with copies of Bible manuscripts) which had access to the Scriptures were the monks and certain pockets of the clergy. They were the only sources for the reading, interpreting and explaining of the prophecies, particularly those concerned with the approaching end of the world.

That the credence was a gross by-product of popular ignorance, superstition and fear there is no doubt. That it was fostered, promoted and magnified by certain sections of their religious system is a fact. That what motivated them to do so was the collection of more riches is a certainty. Proof of this was to be found in her behavior before, during, and after the closing of the year 1000.

For, far from minimizing or discrediting the “millennium” prophecy the Roman Church fostered it even if in a negative fashion, by doing nothing! She let the legend grow, helped by many of her clergy and the monastic orders who genuinely believed in its concrete fulfillment. Thus her policy assumed a most sinister character when finally the credence which for a long time had remained somewhat vague, unreal, and distant, began to appear as a fast-approaching reality to the vast Christian multitudes, as the predicted date came nearer and nearer.

When at last panic seized the faithful and when practically the whole of Christendom, particularly its most ignorant and barbaric portion, that of Northern and Central Europe, prepared for the end of the world, the Roman Church, instead of preaching that this was all nonsense or at least preparing herself to meet the Lord, made herself ready to accommodate the terrorized believers who deemed it prudent to get rid of their earthly possessions prior to the Day of Judgment. For, had not Christ said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God?

Many Roman Catholics, in fact, who until then had ignored Christ’s teaching about temporal wealth, now took it in deadly earnest. As the year 1000 drew nearer, they got rid of their possessions with increasing speed. How? By donating them to what they were told was Christ’s bride on earth, the Roman Church. And so it came to pass that monasteries, nunneries, abbeys, bishops’ palaces and the like bustled with activity. Believers came and went, not only to confess their sins, to repent and to prepare for the end of the world in purity and poverty, but also to donate and give to the Roman Catholic Institution all they had. They gave her their money, their valuables, their houses, their lands. Many of them became total paupers, since what would it avail them to die as the owners of anything when the world was destroyed? Whereas, by giving away everything they were gaining merit in the eyes of the Great Judge!

The Church, via her monastic orders and clergy, accepted the mounting offers of earthly riches. This she did by duly recording them with legal documents, witnesses and the like. Why such mundane precautions? To prove to the Lord on Judgment Day that Smith in England, Schmidt in Germany, Amundsen in Scandinavia, MacLaren in Scotland and O’Donovan in Ireland had truly got rid of their earthly possessions? Not at all! To prove with matter-of-fact concreteness that the possessions of all those who had given were, form then on, the possessions of the papacy.

For that is precisely what happened.

When, following the long night of terror of the last of December 999, the first dawn of the year 1000 lit the Eastern sky without anything happening, many Roman Catholics, whether they believed that the Lord had postponed the Day in response to prayers or that they had made a mistake, gave an audible sigh of relief throughout Christendom. Those who had given away their property made for the ecclesiastical centers which had accepted their “offerings,” only to be told that their money, houses, lands, were no longer theirs. It had been the most spectacular give-away in history.

Since the Church returned nothing, she embarked upon the second millennium with more wealth than ever, the result being that the monasteries, abbeys and bishoprics, with their inmates and incumbents, became richer, fatter and more corrupt than before.

To believe, however, that the accumulation of wealth ended with the grand coup of the millennium prophecy would be a mistake. The faithful, although spared the collective confrontation of Judgment Day in the year 1000, were still dying singly as individuals. That meant that to gain merit in heaven they had to give away solid goods down on earth. The tradition was never abandoned. It survived the shock of the year 1000, the wealth of the Roman Catholic system today in Europe and in wealth of the Roman Catholic system today in Europe and in the U.S. being the best witness to the veracity of this assertion.

Believers continued to give; and since believers have died generation after generation, their gifts have continued to increase in the bosom of a religious system which never died, which indeed continued to expand and to prepare for new temporal contributions, not only from generations as yet unborn, but equally from territories as yet un-Christianized.

The consequences of this uninterrupted process of wealth gathering became so blatant after the first two or three centuries of the second millennium that an increasing number of the most austere sons of Romanism revolted against it. And so it was, that Christianity witnessed the phenomenon of Francis Assisi, whose initial steps to sainthood were the renouncing of even the very clothes he wore, which he returned to his own father; after which, having thus openly signified his total renunciation of worldly goods, he dedicated himself to a life of total poverty by asking the protection of the bishop, stark naked. The episode was a rebuff to be the Church of his time, since St. Francis, following this symbolic gesture with practical concreteness, founded a new monastic order, that of the Franciscans, and saw to it that the most striking feature of such order was the total renunciation of the riches of this world.

St. Francis, however, was not the only figure reacting against the papacy’s barefaced and brazen concern with wealth. Other individuals came to the fore in sundry lands. Bernard of Clairvaux appeared to the north, in France. Like Francis, Bernard had renounced all earthly riches as an individual. He enjoined such repudiation upon his new monastic order as well. He not only gave new life to a corrupt and rich western monasticism, he enforced his rule of total poverty outside the monasteries’ walls whenever he could. To do so he did not spare ecclesiastics of low or high rank, thundering against the wealth and opulence of the Church Militant.

He fulminated again and again against a religious system with a voracious appetite for earthly goods, accusing her of worshiping Mammon instead of God. He spared neither priests, bishops nor even popes. In his Apologia he attacked “excessively rich prelates.” In his treatise On Customs and Duties of Bishops, he thundered against bishops who “grew fat on the revenues from bishoprics.” He did not hesitate to castigate the Papal Legates themselves. “Those rapacious men” who “would sacrifice he health of the people for the gold of Spain”, going so far as to declare that the Curia in Rome was nothing but “a den of thieves.” He even compared any pope who took pride in his office and riches to a monkey “perched high on a tree top”, this although the pope of that period had formerly been one of his monks and lived, like him, a most austere life.

If St. Bernard did not spare the Church, he was also a ruthless denouncer of heretics. Many he had arrested and imprisoned. Hundreds were pitilessly burned at the stake in public squares. He became the terror of any dissenter. The Roman Church turned him into another tool to strengthen herself in matters of this world: that is, in wealth, for she saw in the denunciation of heretics another important source of revenue.

St. Bernard had not been the first; he was one of many in a series of extirpators. But he gave a renewed impetus to the practice, since, with the increase of varied heresies and the even more varied measures to suppress them, the very profitable method of expropriating their property and levying crushing fines came increasingly to the fore. Thus the burning of heretics soon brought with two visible benefits – the elimination of dangerous, devil-inspired people, and the addition of ever-increasing wealth to the Church.

From sporadic denunciations of the early periods and the relatively mild punishments that followed, a time came when the charge of heresy transformed the ecclesiastical structures into a ponderous and terrifying machinery at the service of fanatical or corrupted monks and prelates. No one was safe from its tentacles. It could crush the humblest dwellers in the poorest burgh or the mightiest head of any clan, be he in their wilderness of Scotland or a Prince of Sicily, Portugal or Germany, with equally arrogant ease.

Bishops and cardinals themselves were not immune. This became so because the desire to preserve the Faith in all its purity, the concern of monks, ultimately became so intertwined with greed for wealth in anonymous denunciators that in the long run the two became inseparable. So it came to pass that the fulminations of the popes, for instance, launching anathemas, interdicts or excommunications, in addition to arrest, torture and the death penalty, led also to the expropriation of all the goods, money and property of those who had been denounced.

This became a source of untold wealth for prelates, bishops and popes who practiced or pretended orthodoxy, so that very often no one knew with certainly whether the accused had been arrested because of their deviation from the Faith or because of greed for their wealth on the part of their anonymous denunciators. The authorities, lay or ecclesiastical, were compelled under pain of excommunication “to seize all the heretic’s property, good, lands and chattels, to arrest him and throw him into prison.”(1)

Pope Innocent III issued specific instructions concerning this. The Corpus Juris, the official law book of the Papacy, gave details: “The possessions of heretics are to be confiscated. In the Church’s territories they are to go to the Church’s treasury”. (2)

This papal injunction was carried out everywhere the Roman Catholic Institution ruled. Thus, for instance following the edict to the authorities of Nimes and Narbonne, in 1228, Blache of Castille ordered that any person who had been excommunicated “shall be forced to seek absolution by the seizure of all his property.” (3)

This order became so general that, in a collection of laws known as the Etablissement, it is commanded that royal officers, whenever summoned by the bishops, shall seize both the accused and his property.

(4) Sundry French kings eventually enacted similar decrees – Philip III and Louis X for instance. Church councils did the same. Popes strengthened them. To mention one example the pontiff in 1363 ordered that any heretic “should be arrested, imprisoned, and all his property seized.”

When Pope Honorius crowned Emperor Frederic II in 1220, he hurled a solemn excommunication against anyone “infringing the privileges of the Church.” He declared that, among others, “Bishops could excommunicate any Prince or Secular Ruler who refused to persecute heretics..” They were to be reported to the pope himself, who would then “deprive them in their ranks, power, civil liberties, followed by the seizure of all their temporal possessions.” (5) Thanks to such decrees the Church could obtain vast estates and substantial wealth merely by accusing a rich man of heresy.

This practice was not, however, confined to wealthy individuals. As it became more common it degenerated to such an extent that it was turned into the most blatant pretext for collecting money, often in connivance with secular rulers. To cite only one case: witness the Regent, Blache of Castille, who in 1228, besides, as already mentioned, decreeing the seizure of any heretic’s property, ordered that “to quicken the process a fine of ten livres would be exacted on all those excommunicated who had not entered the church within forty days.”

The clergy, high and low, then began to practice another money-extracting device. They forced the faithful when these were beyond reproach and could not be accused of heresy, to purchase escape from excommunication. This yielded tremendous sums to the clergy throughout Christendom. Prelates, cardinals and popes used their position to make money, not only for the Church, but also for themselves. Bishops became Cyfeiliawg, for instance. The bishop excommunicated his king. when the latter asked for the excommunication to be lifted, the bishop agreed – but at a price. This price? A plate of pure gold the size of the bishop’s face. (6)

Besides such trivia for extracting money, more serious abuses became common practice. Thus, for example, if during a quarrel one single drop of blood was shed in a cemetery, an interdict was automatically proclaimed. The latter was not lifted unless the people collected the sum of money demanded by the clergy. Refusal to pay meant that the corpses for which the necessary fine had not been paid were dug up and thrown off consecrated ground.

If a priest was killed, a whole district would be put under an interdict until the crime had been paid for with money or the equivalent in goods.

Greed for money went even further. The clergy began to excommunicate the neighborhood of the man who had been originally excommunicated; this with the specific objective of seizing the properties concerned.

The anathemas, interdicts, and excommunications employed by popes, cardinals, bishops, and minor clergy, for motives of the basest avarice became so frequent, so wide-spread and so scandalous that many genuinely religious individuals, no less than lay authorities, began openly to revolt against the abuse.

The scandal was not confined to any limited period or country. It became universal, and it lasted for centuries. Indeed, with the passing of time the greed for worldly riches ultimately permeated the whole system to such an extent that the cry of the Diet of Nuremberg, uttered in 1522, expressed the anguish of countless individuals throughout Christendom: “Multitudes of Christians are driven to desperation whenever their properties are confiscated, thus causing the utter destruction of their bodies no less than their souls.” The Verdict of the Diet of Nuremberg was not a gross exaggeration. It was a most accurate assessment of the Roman Church’s insatiable thirst for the riches of this world.

At the close of the first millennium A.D. the accumulation of the wealth by the Roman Church had been carried out in a somewhat haphazard fashion, since , apart from the extensive territorial gifts which she had eight, and ninth centuries, her wealth had grown mostly to the piety of her members

From that tenth and eleven centuries, however, the accretion of her riches gathered momentum. That is, it became systematized. Indeed, it became a fixed feature of her administration. Whereas in the past the money had come from the humble and the poor who donated because of religious motives, from out on words such “donations” became compulsory. It was no longer the humble folk or the Princess who gave her “favors received.” Hence forward they were all made for “favors received.” That is, they had to give to the Church by mere fact that they were members, the principle being that the children who were cared for by the mother should give her part of their richness as a compensation for her love. The ternet was not new. Its novelty was that now it became systematized, an integral part and parcel of the Vatican’s vast machinery.

The popes were anything but slow to incorporate the practice in the expanding structures of ecclesiasticism. They promoted well-planned money-collecting operations through-out Christendom, directing them from the top. The most notorious of these pontiffs, and one of the first creators on Caesaro-Papism, as it was rightly labeled, was Pope Gregory VII , who in 1081 gave orders to his legates in France that every house inhabited by baptized persons in that country should pay an annual tribute of one denarius to the Blessed Peter.

How did the pope justify such a monetary injunction or, to be more precise, taxation ? Once more, by virtue of that most rewarding of all letters, the missive which the Blessed Peter wrote with his own golden pen to Pepin . For, said Gregory, a yearly donation to the Blessed Peter (that is, to the pope) was an ancient custom first imposed by the son of Pepin the Short, whom we have already encountered, that is, whom we have already encountered, that is, by the Emperor Charlemagne, who, having overcome the ferocious Saxons, had offered his territories to St. Peter and hence to his successors. Anyone inhabiting the territories thus donated, therefore, was duty bound to give such contributions, because, explained Paul Gregory VII, using the appropriate feudal juridical terms of the times, he, Gregory, considered France and Saxony as belonging to the Blessed Peter. As a result, the denarius which every one of the inhabitants gave was nothing less than a fealty contribution to the Roman See – an argument which was eventually to be confirmed and practice by subsequent popes, such as Gregory IX, Innocent III and others; Pope Martin IV, for instance.

Martin interdicted King Pedro of Aragon, after that king claimed his hereditary right to Sicily following Sicily’s rising in 1282 against King Charles. Martin , using the papacy’s immense spiritual pressure, deprived King Pedro of his Kingdom. Thereupon, what did the pope do? He presented the whole kingdom to somebody else, namely, to Charles of Valois, but on one important condition : Charles had to pay yearly tribute to the coffers of the Blessed Peter – that is, of the papacy.

Pope Clement IV, in 1265, had done even better. He had, in fact, sold millions of South Italians to Charles of Anjou, for a yearly tribute of 800 ounces of gold – again, to the Blessed Peter’s holy coffers; neglect of payment carrying with it, of course, excommunication and interdict, with all that they implied.

Pope Sixtus IV very often caused a notice to be nailed to the door of a church. When the clergy and the faithful went to see what the papal message was, they discovered that unless as certain sum was forthcoming at once that church would be under an “interdict” and furthermore, that its clergy would be under an “interdict” and furthermore, that its clergy would be suspended. This financial expedient proved abundantly productive with other popes and hierarchs for long periods. (1)

Such measures, although frequent, were not, of course, sufficiently methodical to yield a regular and steady income. Hence the creation of regulations, the enforcement of which resulted in a steady flow of riches into St. Peter’s coffers. Some of the most common were the “oblations” or offerings at mass or during certain feast days. These oblations were at first voluntary. With the passing of time, however, they became a kind of unwritten contribution of the clergy, until, in the thirteenth century, they were insisted upon as a right.

The canonical tenets which the clergy invoked for their justification were those implying that if an ancient customer is honorable and praiseworthy it acquires the binding force of law. And what habit could be more praiseworthy than that the faithful should offer the Lord some of their money for his Apostle, his Vicar on earth.

This custom eventually became so widespread that the clergy treated the collection of oblations, not only as a duty on the part of their parishioners, but as a right of the clergy, to such an extent that ultimately the oblations were exported from the utmost disregard, indeed, with such cynicism that many Councils attempted to check the Hierarchy’s rapacity. This came about when it was discovered that many priests were putting pressure to bear even in the confessional. In fact, round about 1210, church councils were compelled to inflict penalties on some of their clergy who had gone so far as to refuse to administer the Sacrament to those who had not given their oblation or who were in arrears with their Easter offerings

The result was not only growing resentment but also of avoidance of payment. Many, so as not to pay the oblations, began to stay from mass. The clergy retorted by making it to punishable for them to do so. Indeed, they find their own parishioners if the latter frequented churches in other parishes. Fines were enforced on those who omitted confession or communion , at Christmas and Easter, for instance; upon those who neglected church fasts. The higher clergy also imposed fines, both lay folk and the lower clergy, every act of immorality, as system which became the cause of frequent extortion by unscrupulous high prelates, the immorality of clergymen having thus been turned into a regular and constant source of revenue for those above.

The most efficient and steady method that of extracting money, as well as the most widespread, was certainly that of the tithes, which were a direct and indirect tax on the faithful. The latter had to give to the church one tenth of all they produced. This applied not only to cottages and farmers, but equally to merchants, shopkeepers and even to the poorest artisans. The laws, both ecclesiastical and temporal which, of course, had been interlinked in such a manner as to make the custom compulsory – were considered to include even the down of his wife’s geese, pot herbs in the gardens of laborers, and grass cut by the roadside.

Farmers were compelled to cart their timing sheaves to the very houses of the priests. They had to bring also the milk which they owed, not as milk but in the form of cheese, since cheese was more durable. This last injunction so incensed many farmers that they resorted to some most un-Christian habits to spite both the ecclesiastic recipients and the Church! Since the priest said that all their offerings were to God, they took such words literally, “So that,” wrote English bishop, Bishop Quivil, at the end of the thirteenth century, many farmers in the Exeter diocese, instead of following “the ancient and approved custom in our archdiocese, namely that men should bring their tithes of milk in the form of cheese.. some than maliciously bring the milk to church in its natural state, and,” adds the good bishop with genuine horror, “what is even more iniquitous, finding none there to receive it.. pour it out before the altar.. in scorn to God and His Church.”

The spirit which prompted the Exeter farmers to act thus was, of course, widespread , particularly in times of scarcity , so that it was common for farmers, laborers and others to think of all kinds of subterfuges to avoid paying. Many of these subterfuges, complained another hierarch Archbishop Stratford, addressing the Synod of London in 1342, “were of excessive of malice … to the manifest prejudice of ecclesiastical rights.”

In addition to giving tithes while they were still alive, the faithful had to give more while they were still alive, the faithful had to give more while they were dying and after they were dead. Thus a man who had his will written was bound to give tithes in his legacy. “A legatee is bound to give tithes in his legacy, even though it have been already tithed by the testator,” as a fourteenth-century manual for parish priests, the Pupilla Oculi, asserted, and since it was realized by the Church that even the most devout of her members might fail at times to give her dues, she made of such an omission nothing less than a mortal sin; after which her clergy invented a yet more profitable device: that of the mortuary

The mortuary fell with the weight of a millstone upon the estate of every dead Roman Catholic. The claim consisted of taking over the second best animal from the stock of anyone who had died possessed of not less than three , a claim which was not only regulated but also legalized. It was imposed by Archbishop Winchelsey about 1305 and confirmed by Langham in 1367. As a result the mortuary became a kind of tax, amounting to succession duty of thirty-three percent on the personal property of the defunct Roman Catholic. It was soon turned into a set custom, acknowledged by both spiritual and temporal authorities in practically every country of Christendom. In this manner the Church began to appropriate one-third of the dead man’s personal estate.

Many people, like the Exeter farmers, tried to avoid payment. A typical case is that found among the many pleas to the English Parliament in year 1330. One Thomas le Forter had paid what he claimed to be a just mortuary on the estate of William le Forter; this in his capacity the executor. The deceased’s parson, however, the Abbot of Wenlock, sued him in the episcopal court, claiming a full third of the deceased’s property, saying that this was the usual mortuary. Thomas appealed to the king, who decreed that “exactions of this kind.. manifestly redound to the oppression of the realm.” He therefore forbade the bishop to side with the abbot. Parliament intervened and set up a kind of commission, presided over by three abbots, These, invoking a statute of Edward I to the effect that no prohibition could avail to stop proceedings in the episcopal court on a question of tithers or mortuary, compelled their heir to pay in full.

The rapacity of the Church and her clergy reached unprecedented lengths. Suffice it to state that, following Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicus, theologians came to learned conclusions that the Church had the right to collect tithes even from lepers and beggars, who were under an obligation to pay one tenth of their collections. What of prostitutes? Following a modest hesitation and few clerical blushes, the battalion of theological bachelors decided that Holy Mother Church must refuse the prostitutes’ contributions to her chaste coffers. But, they added (and here is the theological gem) so long as they were unrepentant, lest she, the Church, would give the impression that she shared in their sins. Should, however, the prostitutes repent of their sins, or should their sins remain secret to the average burgh or burghers, although the Church knew about them, then, yes, “the tithes may be taken.” (2) In addition to the oblations, tithes, and mortuaries, there were other means by which to replenish the Church’s treasuries with individual sizeable amounts – from the heretics.

The Inquisition was very precise about it. Listen to Diana. In his 43rd Resolution he put the question: “Are the possessions of heretics turned over to the Inquisitors? – “I speak not, ” answers Diana, “for other countries, but the Spanish custom is to confiscate to the royal treasury (fisco regio) all the possession of heretics (omnia bona haereticorum) because our King, who is a pillar of orthodoxy (columna fidel), generously supplies the Inquisitors and their agents with whatever the Holy Office requires.” (Inquistitoribus et eorum ministris abunde suppeditat quidquid necessarium est ad conservationem sanctae Inquisionis.)

Thanks to this principle, the Church could obtain vast estates or substantial wealth when prosperous individuals were, as happened often, accused of heresy and condemned – sometimes in collusion with the temporal authorities. Witness, for instance, the case of Philip II (1556-98). Two-thirds of the income of the Inquisition went to him, the rest of the Roman Catholic institution.

Further to the Inquisition were the weapons of interdiction and excommunication. These were used with increasing frequency to compel the faithful to pay under practically any pretext. Thus, for example, church and temporal powers would often used the Inquisition. Witness Regent Blache of Castille, who in 1228 issued an edict addressed to the authorities of Nimes and Narbonne, directing thad the excommunicated who remained for a whole year should be forced to seek absolution by the seizure of their property. To quicken the process, a fine of ten livres was exacted on all those excommunicated who had not entered the church within forty days.

To make money, the clergy – as already mentioned – forced the faithful to purchase escapes from excommunication. Their threats often related to the most trivial matters . For instance, at vintage time the tithers time the tithers forbade, under pain of excommunication, the gathering of gathering of grapes until they could choose the best, so that very often the peasants, owing to frequent delays, saw the ruin of their crops.

Some popes, besides thundering on behalf of the Church as a whole, did so in their own personal interests. Pope John VIII, for example, who reigned from 872 to 882, left on record at least 382 epistles, no less than 150 of which referred to excommunication. And, it is interesting to relate, almost all dealt with temporal possessions of the Church – some with worthwhile substantial solid affairs like the transfer or promise of a whole kingdom, but some with the most ridiculous and petty concerns. To mention one: excommunication hurled by good Pope John against those miscreants who stole.. what? Nothing other than the papal horse on which the pope was traveling through France. Or that other papal bolt against the “knaves” who had pilfered his plate while he was staying at the Abbey of Avigny. And, said the Pope, to add insult to injury , “probably with the connivance of the Abbeys monks”. (3)

But one of the grossest abuses of excommunication was that perpetrated by bishops and even by hierarchs who began to excommunicate the neighbors of the originally excommunicated person, the result being that when finally the family of the latter was exiled in his whole property confiscated, dozens of others, his neighbors, were placed under the same ban and hence the same penalties that is their properties could be, and as a rule were, in new , and as our role in new and NC same penalties; that is, their properties could be, and as a rule were, confiscated.

The excommunications employed by the popes down to the lowest priests , the motives of the basest avarice, became so frequent and scandalous that many individuals and temporal authorities, including numerous genuinely devout persons, complained bitterly about them. Owing to such abuses, multitudes were driven to desperation, as the Diet of Nuremberg stated in 1522.

The immense wealth thus collected finally reached such proportions that her economic stranglehold upon all and sundry was no less massive than her spiritual dominion, and almost paralyzed whole countries. During the reign of Francis I (1515-47), for instance, a mere six hundred abbots, bishops and archbishops controlled so much land throughout France that the income they derived from it equalled that of the French state itself. (4)

France was not an exception. Practically every other country in Western Europe was in the same situation. The economic dominion of Holy Mother Church had become a collective stranglehold that was slowly but inexorably paralyzing the most vital structures of the land tenancies, commerce and finance of Christendom. She had become such a dead weight that the revolt which her practices provoked, after simmering below the surface for hundreds of years, in due course exploded with the violence of an earthquake. It came, disguised in theological garb, when the hammer of a rebel monk, nailing some theses upon a church door, made Rome totter on her foundations for decades, indeed, for centuries to come.

It all happened in the year 1300 of the Incarnation of our Lord, when the most Blessed Peter’s Vicar on earth, Pope Boniface VIII, proclaimed that from the previous Christmas to the next and on every hundreds year following, Roman Catholics visiting the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome would have the fullest pardon for all their sins. What believer could resist such unheard-of and immense spiritual bounty?

And so it was that Burgher Mackirken from Scotland, Manfredo Domino from Sicily , Count Stanislav from Poland, the Knight von Arnhem from Saxony, Senior Olivero from Spain, Olla Olafson from Scandinavia, Sgr Maerigo Bernini from Florence, Charles Montfroid from Paris and thousands of others suddenly departed, all in the same direction and towards the same goal. Rome, the Holy City.

What had prompted Pope Boniface to create such a precedent so unexpectedly? What arcane revelation had induced him to fling wide open the gates to the treasures of heaven? The answer is but one: the allure of the treasures of the earth.

For, truly, devotion to the Blessed Peter, which in the early golden days had made the naive Saxons flock to his tongue in Rome to ask his pardon, had greatly diminished. Coin offerings had dwindled to next to nothing . The sad fact was that, whereas the local hierarchies in many parts of Christendom were becoming fat and rich, the Holy Father in the heart of Rome was becoming increasingly poor. St. Peter’s coffer, he was being repeatedly told by his treasurers, were very low; indeed, they were well- nigh empty. Something had better be done to replenish them.

And thus it came to pass that one day Providence provided Pope Boniface with a truly “providential” inspiration. This he had, after our man reputed to have reached the ripe old age of 107, had kissed his feet, saying that in the year 1200 his father had come to Rome to offer a coin to St.Peter in order to receive an indulgence for the remission of sins. Hearing this, Boniface needed no further providential prompting. He thanked God that he had been told about it just at the beginning of the year 1300. Better late than never. Being a man of action, he speedily proclaimed the Jubilee on 22nd February, 1300, to the amazement, surprise and the delight of many, particularly in Rome.

The good children of the Church, most of whom did not believe that they could emulate the vigorous old man of 107, but realizing that so wholesome a remission of sins was truly the chance of a lifetime, did not hesitate. They left their villages, cities and countries by the thousands. Europe saw a mass movement the like of which had never before been experienced, and all compressed within a single calendar year. A contemporary, Villani, declared that there were at least 200,000 pilgrims daily in Rome G. Ventura, another contemporary eye-witness , said that crowds were so great that he saw men and women trampled underfoot. The poet Dante could find no better comparison for the multitudes of the damned in his Inferno than the crowds which congregated in Rome during this Jubilee.

But if the pilgrims went to Rome to gain the total remission of their sins, they had to show their gratitude to the Blessed Peter and Paul, not only with prayers, but also with a more tangible token of their reverence, that is, with money; and this they did. Cardinal Gaietano, nephew of the pope, admitted that his uncle Boniface received more than 30,000 gold florins, offered by pilgrims at the altar of St.Peter alone, and 20,000 at that of St.Paul. He was in that position to know.

In addition we have the description of an eye-witness who took part in the same Jubilee pilgrimage, the historian Ventura. Ventura has assured us that the tribute received by Pope Boniface on this occasion was “incomputable”. Then, to prove that his occasion was not exaggerated, he gives a glorious description. At the altar of St. Paul, he says, where he went to pray himself, there stood, by day and by night, two clerks and “raking in infinite money” – his very words! (1)Pope Boneface’s Jubilee had proved a tremendous success. The Blessed Peter’s coffers were replenished, and Rome prospered once more for a while.

Boniface’s successors, however, brooded. Some of them could never hope to see the beginning of the next century, since the lives of the popes in those days were very often shortened not only by age but also by dagger, poison or greedy nephews. And so, one bright day in January in the year 1343, Pope Clement VI issued a bull declaring that, in view of the shortness of human life, he had reduced the Jubilee’s span from one hundred to fifty years. (2) Then, to make sure that the pilgrims would come in multitudes as on the first occasion, he offered them a further spiritual inducement. In June 1346 he issued another bull in which he asserted that he had complete control and, indeed, power over the future life. And, proceeding to exact details, he told the prospective pilgrims that he could order the angels of heaven to liberate from purgatory the souls of any of them who might die on the road to Rome.

Pope Clement’s additional spiritual inducements proved a tremendous success, for it must be remembered that traveling in those days was the most hazardous occupation anyone could undertake. Traveling was mainly on foot ; horse-riding was only for a few. There were no hotels, hardly any real roads, no food provisions or banks or police; but, on the contrary, robbers all along the way, starvation, sleeping in the open, disease. About the time of this second Jubilee there also appeared the Black Death, which truly decimated the population of Europe. To realize how hazardous an enterprise it was, suffice it to remember that during the first and second Jubilees, only one out of ten pilgrims returned home alive.

Yet, in spite of all this, during the Easter of the Jubilee it was estimated that there were more than a million pilgrims in Rome. Many people were trampled to death at the tombs of the Apostles, Once again, the concrete gratitude of the pilgrims replenished St.Peter’s coffers beyond Clement’s wildest dreams.

Many others throughout Christendom, however, could not or would not come. Either the Black Death had killed their families or had ruined them or the survivors had to attend to important business or were too feeble to undertake such a risky journey. But their piety and their longing for remission of their sins, with the added privilege of liberating a soul from the flames of purgatory, were no less sincere than were these feelings in the fortunate ones who had gone to Rome in person. The pope listened, agreed, in his paternal consideration for the spiritual welfare of those far-away children, he decreed that they, too should partake of the privileges of the indulgences on the Jubilee

He began with Hugh, King of Cyprus; Edward III and Henry, Duke of Lancaster in England; Queen Isabella of France; Queen Philippa of England and Queen Elizabeth of Hungary. These all responded with regal oblations: that is, with generous, solid payments of gold.

But if kings and queens had been thus favored, why not lesser folk, as good as Roman Catholics as their majesties? The pope agreed, and he promptly instructed his representatives outside Rome to the exempt the would-be pilgrims from undertaking the journey – provided, of course, that they did not forget to show their gratitude to the Blessed Peter with a little offering. The Papal Nuncio in Sicily was one of the first to carry out the instructions. He exempted thirty persons from undertaking the pilgrimage, provided they paid what the pilgrimage would have cost them had they actually gone to Rome. And so the practice of collecting from penitents at home sums equivalent to the cost of the pilgrimage was born.

The advantages for both sides were too obvious to miss, and so hierarchs in other countries decided to imitate the pope. In 1420 the Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed a Jubilee with the same “pardons” as those of Rome. This precedent, however, was too dangerous. Supposing it spread to other countries? Martin V, the reigning pope, called it “audacious sacrilege”, threatened excommunication, and the enterprising archbishop had to be content with local revenues.

The Jubilee of 1450 was again an immense success. The amount of gold collected from the pilgrims was so huge that Pope Nicholas V struck a coin known “the Jubilee”. This coin was of such unusual size going on was of such unusual size a equaled three of the ordinary cold peace and issued at that time by the royal mints of Europe.

One of Pope Nicholas’ successors, Pope Paul II, in 1470 reduced the interval of the Jubilee to twenty- five years, and, to prompt the pilgrims to come to Rome instead of benefiting from the Jubilee’s privileges at home, he suspended all other indulgences. Notwithstanding such measures, however, the Jubilee of 1475 was not a great success.

Nevertheless, even on this location the Church as a whole benefited in so far as the payment of specific sums continued increasing . The sums thus paid, of course, varied according to the status, wealth and dignity of the “exempted pilgrims.” From archbishops, bishops and nobles down to counts, four gold florins had to be paid; abbots and barons paid three gold florin. (3)

During the Jubilee of 1500, Pope Alexander VI, whose love of money was notorious, decided to add something new, and initiated the first ceremony of the Opening of the Holy Door. What the Holy Door should have been, or was, was never clearly understood – except that it was a device to entice the pilgrims to Rome. However, pope and architects looked in vain for such a Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica. The door could not be found; so one was prepared in haste, so as not to disappoint the oncoming penitents.

To make even more money, Pope Alexander VI charged his representatives, most of whom were called penitentiaries, with authority to reduce the days to be spent on the pilgrimage on payment of one- fourth of the expense thus saved. In addition to this they were also authorized to compound for irregularities, with authority to reduce the days to be spent on the pilgrimage on payment of one-fourth of the expense thus saved. In addition to this they were also authorized to compound for “irregularity” – for instance, on a charge of simony – on payment of one-third of the sums acquired by it. In this manner that the Basilica of St.Peter was soon transformed into a veritable market-place where pardons, indulgences, merits, dispensations and suchlike religious privileges were sold, exchanged, resold and marketed over the papal money chests.

Not content with that, Alexander in 1501 began to collect additional money throughout the rest of Europe by dispatching his legates everywhere, selling the indulgences at a discount: that is, for one- fifth of what a pilgrimage to Rome would have cost the potential pilgrim buyers. More than one Catholic king, no less business-minded and no less in need of money than the pope, considered the idea an excellent one – to mention the most notorious of them, Henry VIII of England, who came to a cordial understanding with the Papal Legate as to the royal share of the proceeds.

This was the last Jubilee before the Reformation. Indeed, it was the Jubilee which, unnoticed almost by all, had planted the seeds which were eventually to blossom into the portentous trees that were ultimately to make the monolithic structure crack into two mighty halves and bring about the emergence of Protestantism.

Since the ecclesiastical practice of commercializing miracles could be turned into a most gratifying source of money, it soon appeared that the more spectacular the miracle the more spectacular the profits to its promoters. Miracles thus became a kind of religious investment yielding a steady, if uneven flow of revenue. Their profitability depended, not only upon the spectacular nature or uniqueness of the portents, but also upon the advantages gained by those who believed in them, the combination of these ingredients being the cement with which both Church and its faithful could identify themselves in partaking of the visible results of God’s generosity.

If the selling of indulgences was a most lucrative method of amassing wealth, the exploitation of the individual and collective gullibility of Roman Catholic people was no less profitable. God’s generosity could be dispensed, distributed manifested on numberless occasions by the most diverse means and in the most contrasting and inappropriate situations and circumstances.

During the Middle Ages and later, miracles, portents, wonders, and God’s interventions were of a variety never seen or experienced before or since. They reflected in no uncertain terms the nature, credulity and mentality of those influenced by them – not to mention the spirit of the religious system, through which as a rule they were made to work. We shall content ourselves with reporting some of the most characteristic; this will indicate not only their nature but also how they were tuned into events by which the papacy profited through the collection of yet more revenues.

One day the people of Aspe in France carried out a sudden raid upon their neighbors of Saint-Savin. To prevent them from succeeding, the Abbot of Saint-Savin climbed a tree, said the appropriate prayers, and so paralyzed them that they were all slaughtered without resistance. The pope, informed of the massacre, cast an interdict upon Saint-Savin, with the result that for seven years it was cursed with sterility in its women, cattle and fields. To gain absolution, Saint-Savin agreed to pay an annual tribute of thirty sous. (1)In 1120 the Bishop of Laon excommunicated the caterpillars which were ravaging the diocese. This he did with the same as employed the the previous year by the Council of Rheims in cursing a priest who insisted on marrying. The Bishop of Laon was given money and offerings by the grateful peasants. (2)

Similarly St. Bernard when preaching at Foigny, was interrupted by a swarm of most un-Christian flies. Losing his saintly patience, he excommunicated them. Next morning the flies were all found dead.He received offerings, which he gave to the nearest monastery. (3)

In 1451 William Saluces, Bishop of Lausanne, ordered the trial of multitudes of leeches which threatened the fish of Geneva. The leeches were ordered, under pain of excommunication, together in the given spot. The people concerned made abundant offerings to the Church.

The ecclesiastical court of Autun in 1480 excommunicated an army of caterpillars and ordered the priests of the region to repeat the anathema from the pulpit until the caterpillars had been exterminated. The following year, 1481, and again in 1487, a most irreligious multitude of snails at Macon were duly excommunicated. In 1516 the clergy excommunicated the too numerous grasshoppers at Milliere, in Normandy. In 1587, at Valence, a formal trial was terminated with a sentence of banishment against another multitude of caterpillars. (4)

Bartholomew Chassanee, who wrote a large volume recording such trials, declared that besides being lawful they were also useful in so far that the Church, whenever successful in such actions, was rewarded with flourins and more abundant tithes than would have been the case had the vermin never arrived. When such miracles, excommunications, trials and the like the multiplied by the thousand, the florins multiplied with even greater rapidity than swarms of mayflies.

This manner of collecting money, however, although rewarding, did not yet yield as much as when authentic saints were brought into action. Thus, at the command of St.Stanislaw, one Peter, who was dead, rose from his tomb and went into a law court to certify the sale of an estate – after which, of course, the local church was amply rewarded by receiving a portion of such estate.

In the thirteenth century St.Anthony was told when in Italy that his father, in Lisbon, had been accused of murder. An angel transported him from Italy to Lisbon. Once there, Anthony asked the murdered man: “Is it true that my father is guilty of thy death?” “Certainly not,” replied the corpse, and Anthony’s father was acquitted . Thereupon Anthony was taken back by the same angel. A basilica was built over Anthony’s body. Pilgrimages have been going on ever since, to this very day, with stupendous money offerings, mostly from North and Latin America.

St.Vincent Ferrier (1357-1419)did even better. For when, frequently in the midst of his preaching, he grew wings and flew into the air, he went to various places to console some dying individual. Once when in Pampeluna he told a dying woman that if she consented to confess her sins he would give an absolution from heaven. The woman having assented, St.Vincent wrote a letter as follows: “Brother Vincent beseeches the Holy Trinity to grant to the woman sinner here present absolution of her sins.” The letter flew instantly to heaven, and after a few minutes flew back. Upon it was written: “We, the Saint Trinity, requested by our Vincent, grant to the woman sinner of whom he has told us the forgiveness of her sins, and if she confesses she will be in heaven within the next few years, Holy Trinity.” (5)

To satisfy the cynicism of the incredulous, the event was attested to by none other than the pope’s chamberlain, who gave copious evidence of this “fact “, as he called it, in addition to giving the names of fourteen highly placed prelates who vouched for it.”

The precedent created an epidemic of heavenly letters. They fetched tremendous prices. Curiously, heaven always sent them to the clergy. The number of miracles worked by St.Vincent was truly miraculous. During an inquest held in Avignon, Toulose, Nantes and Nancy, it was revealed that the official list totaled eight hundred. “If we reckon only the small number of eight miracles per day during his twenty-five years,” says Msgr. Guerin, his biographer, “we have 58,400 miracles.” And he adds, with understandable prudence: “Here we deal, of course, with public miracles only.

The beneficiaries of such portents, or course, showed their gratitude with solid, matter-of-fact coins. Vincent worked so many miracles that, as was officially related, “it was a miracle which he worked so when he did not work miracles, and the greatest miracles, and the greatest miracle which he worked was then he did not work any.” (7)

In Salamanca there was a miracle bell, which rang to warn the people of an oncoming miracle.(8) This happened mostly when the collection and the cathedral had not been too good. And since we are dealing with bells, we might as well recall the case of Pope Alexander IV. When he removed the ban of excommunication, all the bells of the church of Avignonet began to ring of their own accord; not only so, but they went on pealing all night and all day, although they had not been heard for the previous forty years. This “fact ,” was attested to by the declaration of the inhabitants of Avignonet in the year 1923. The “fact” was furthermore included as such in an Acte Notaire, dated January 29, 1676. On what authority? Not only on that of the inhabitants of Avignonet, but indeed on that of the Pope Paul III mentioned the “fact” in a Bull of 1537. (9)

All these manifestations, when they “occurred,” were taken for solid, concrete events. They happened thanks to the power which the Church vested in those who were in true communion with her – namely, the saints. The result, of a most practical nature, was that shrines were built over their bones; and since the saints went on multiplying with the passing of generations, their shrines did likewise. A shrine is a place of devotion, hence a sure magnet for pilgrimages; a kind of local regional or even international Jubilee. Shrines like that of St.James of Compostella in Spain, for instance, became almost as the tomb of the Blessed Peter in Rome. Pilgrims congregated there from all parts of Europe, and they included princess and kings, who never went empty handed. The poorest folk always left money at the altar. Magnificent gifts of solid gold , silver, precious stones and the like still adorn the place.

Now it must be remembered that the whole of Europe was dotted with shrines, and that pilgrimages were the order of the day for centuries. This brought a continuous flow of revenue as we have already seen in a previous chapter, with the result that the accumulation of riches continued unabated, ranging from money to land and real estate.

The devotion to saints, therefore, ultimately became an immense, steady source of continuous wealth for the Roman Church as a whole, and for clergy in particular.

Miracles, portents and wonders, although they produced a remarkable volume of income, could not be relied upon with confidence by a clerical administration which, like its modern counterpart, was burdened by the ever-mounting flow of a concrete and steady expenditure. The income derived from them was too haphazard and unpredictable, and hence too unreliable. Something of a more consistently dependable nature, therefore had to be denied for the collection of revenues. This was near at hand; the Pope’s power to bind to loose.

Such power was, in the eyes of all Roman Catholics, capable indefinite and indeed of infinite application. When made to work it brought forth, amidst other things, the practice of buying and selling indulgences. Indulgences, like so many other privileges, were eventually much abused; so much so in fact, that they became one of Christiandom’s numbs most regrettable scandals.

Originally an indulgence was far the most innocuous instruments and the spiritual armory of the papacy. Initially it was designed to help the penitent, since there was nothing else than the remission of the penance imposed on confessed sins. The peril of leaving such power in the hands of a notoriously rapacious clergy was too obvious. So the pope reserved the granting of indulgences to himself.

Like many other church institutions the practice of granting indulgences did not come to the face all at once. At the beginning it was granted with the utmost parsimony, and even then, only during exceptional circumstances. The “real” indulgence began to appear during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in a very unobtrusive manner, and at this period was truly a tremendous event if a pope granted an indulgence was still a rare event.

It was the Crusade which eventually pushed indulgences to the forefront. To induce people to enroll under the banner of the Cross, the popes began to grant indulgences with generosity. As the ardor for the Crusades diminished, so the issue of indulgences increased proportionately.

From the liberation of the Tomb of Christ, the indulgences turned to the exterminations on the Church’s enemies in Europe. Later, they degenerated into “crusades” of all kinds, mostly of a religious- political character. Pope Urban VI, for instance, ordered England to fight against France had taken the side of Pope Urban’s rival, Pope Clement VII. To encourage volunteers, Urban promised indulgences to anyone who would thus take up arms. Pope John XXIII did the same when he announced a crusade against Naples-again , because Naples happened to support John’s rival, the Anti-Pope Gregory. From this to an increasing number of sundry causes the steps quickened. Indulgences were granted with ever increasing facility to places, to people, to saints, to monastic orders, and so on, ad infinitum.

This process occurred not only because individuals, orders and places wanted such privileges to enhance to enhance their spiritual status, but above all because the privilege in most cases resulted in substantial and steady monetary gains. The fiscal possibilities were seeing from the earliest period. By the later Middle Ages the practice of selling indulgences for money became general, until it was abused.

The sale of indulgences took sundry shapes and forms. If that privilege of granting indulgences was accorded to the shrine of some saint, it resulted in the increase of pilgrims, and since, after each visit, numerous coins were invariably left behind, the indulgence became ipso facto a money-spinner of considerable importance. This reached such absurd proportions that at one time no less than 800 indulgences-plenaries, accompanied by appropriate offerings, were attached to St. Peter’s in Rome.

The small Church of the Portiuncula, where Francis of Assissi had a vision, was enriched with a novel form of indulgence called the toties quoties, which meant that anyone visiting it in August during a special holy day gained one plenary indulgence each time he entered the little church. The novel indulgence was too good to be restricted to Portiuncula, and in no time Franciscans everywhere wanted a similar privilege, with the result that soon every Franciscan church in every country had its Portiuncula Day. Other monastic orders, of course, could not resist so good an opportunity, and the Dominicans, the Carmelities and countless others followed suit in due course.

Then there was the privileged altar. The pope promised that if a mass was said at a given altar, the soul on behalf of whom the mass had been said would be released instantly from purgatory. Every church was ultimately endowed with such an altar.

If the Crusades opened the flood gates to endulgences, the money-making nature of the multiplying indulgences, of course, brought a veritable flood of indulgences, of course, brought a veritable flood of indulgences as means of accumulating riches, particularly when they were applicable to the dead, thus tempting, as it were, members of families to pay for the release of the souls of their beloved from the flames of purgatory. The absurdity to which this went can be gathered by the fact that no less than 9,000 years, plus 9,000 quarantines for every step of the Scala Santa in Rome, were transferable to souls of the dead.

This was granted by the authority of Pope Pius VII and even of Pope Pius IX. Why such incredible indulgences? Because the Scala Santa is supposed to be the stairway to Pilate’s house, which Christ ascended at His trial. The Stations of the Via Crucis, also in Rome, were so rich in indulgences that, according to an eminent authority on the subject, (1)a Roman Catholic could, within one single year, gain forty-nine plenaries and more than one and a half million years of partials.

An English account appeared round the year 1370 enumerated the widespread indulgences offered by the churches of Rome, the following being but a typical sample:

We learn, for instance, that at St.Peter’s, from Holy Thursday to Lammas (August 1st), there was a daily indulgence of 14,000 years, and whenever the Vernicle (Sacro Volto) exhibited, there one of 3,000 years for citizens, 9,000 for Italians, and 12,000 for pilgrims from beyond the sea. At San Anastasio there was one of 7,000 years every day, and at San Tommaso one of 14,000 years, with one- third remission of sins for all comers. (2)

The indulgences grew in number and power with the passing of time, until finally they became so unlimited that even the most pious began to have doubts about their efficacy. Gerson suggested that they were thus exaggerated owing to “the avarice” of the pardoners, “that is, the people who were selling them” and declared, incidentally, that as so many dealt with thousands of years they could not have the authority of the popes, since purgatory would end with the end of the world. (3)

On the other hand, another no less devout authority, Lavorio, declared that the indulgences of 15,000 or 20,000 years were proof of the extent of purgatorial suffering which hardened sinners might expect, while Polacchi argued that such indulgences should not seem absurd or incredible when we reflect that a single day in purgatory corresponds to many years of the fiercest bodily anguish during life. (4)

The extravagance of the indulgences continued. In 1513, for instance, Pope Leo X granted to the Servite Chapel of St.Annunciata at Florence that all visiting it on Saturdays should obtain a thousand years and as many quarantines, and double that amount on the feasts of Virgin, Christmas and Friday and Saturday of Holy Week. (5)

Even after the council of Trent had enjoined moderation in dispensing a treasure, Pius IV in 1565 granted to the members of the confraternity of the Hospital of St. Lazarus, besides several plenaries and the indulgences of Santo Spirito in Saxia and the Stations of Rome, the jubilee and the Holy Land, a year and a quarantine for every day , 2,000 years on each of the feasts of the Apostles, 100,000 years on Epiphany and each day of the octave, 3,000 years and as many quarantines with remission of one- third of sins on every Sunday, 2,000 years and 800 quarantines of Christmas, Resurrection and Ascension and each day of their octaves, 8,000 years and 8,000 quarantines of Pentecost and each day of the octave, 2,000 years and one-seventh remission of sins on Corpus Christi and each day of the octave, 2,000 years and one-seventh remission of sins on Corpus Christi and each day of the octave, 30,000 years and 3,000 quarantines on All Saints and each day up to St. Leonard’s (November 1st to 6th). (6)

The immensity of the riches which brought to the papacy during the centuries is incalculable. Their use, abuse and misuse should not make us lightly condemn them, as unimportant, nor their absurdity induce us to underestimate the tremendous power they had – or rather, the tremendous power of the cumulative effect of their employment by both the Church and the popes.

For, more often than not, they served their purpose in the mobilizations, control and use of the vast masses of men, armies and nations, none of which might otherwise have been mobilized with such ease and fluidity by successive popes. In the struggles of the papacy with the temporal powers, for instance, which was the dominating fact of medieval history, they played a paramount role. This they did, not not only by creating renewed zeal, but by putting men, riches and armies at will into the hands of the popes.

It was, thanks to the weapon of indulgences, for example, that Pope Innocent III was able to crush for good the menacing heresy of the Cathari, a heresy which at one time at one time seemed about to engulf half Europe; and for that matter, that Pope Clement IV was able to humiliate the German emperors and reduce them to quasi-impotence politically, an event which profoundly affected the subsequent course of European history. For by the mere fact that the popes could proclaim a crusade at will with all the indulgences invariably involved, princes, kings and emperors were made to think twice before opposing the papal path in territorial disputes of political or dynastic matters.

Explorations, conversions and domination of known and unknown lands and races were greatly accelerated by the power and use of indulgences. We quote only one typical case, that of the Teutonic Knights, who were spurred chiefly by indulgences in conquering and thus Christianizing North-East Germany and most of Hungary and finally in erecting an impregnable barrier against the invading Islamic armies of the Turks.

Indulgences, therefore, played a paramount part in the shaping in creation of capital events the history of Europe. Yet, if they were positive factors in certain spheres of the Church’s activity, they also contributed mightily to her mounting corruption and decadence. Their trading for money became such a scandal that it turned, as already hinted, into a universal, well-organised abuse, which operated all levels, is chief exponent and proponent being the papacy itself. Papal dynastic and personal greed was at the bottom of such gross profiteering. The corruption of the clergy, ever ready to make money by selling their offices, was a contributory factor.

Christians everywhere, who for decades had frowned upon the practice, finally came boldly to the fore in open protest . The chief exponent was a troubled monk, Dr. Martin Luther. Following many tergiversations, on the 31st October, 1517 he nailed his famous ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. It was a fateful day for the whole of Roman Catholicism: for on that day the German monk, acting as the spokesman of untold millions of believers, defiantly challenged the practice of selling documents and offering money payments for penance, that is, rejecting indulgences.

Like many others, he had seen the degradation and abuse of such commerce. He had openly shuddered at the theory that by buying a papal indulgence Roman Catholics could shorten and indeed cut out altogether their time in purgatory. He considered the belief that the souls of the deceased could be released from the flames by the purchase of indulgences on their behalf a theological monstrosity.

The brazen buying and selling of indulgences to make money had become so open as to disgust the most tolerant of Christians. This was being done not only by the pope, who traded them throughout Europe, ostensibly for religious purposes, but equally by lesser dignitaries. To mention only one among many, the Pope Leo X in 1517 gave permission to the Archbishop of Mainz, to sell indulgences on a grand scale in order to pay his debts, which he had contracted in buying the dignity of archbishop. In Germany this type of trade in indulgences was promoted by the pope’s delegate himself, Dominican

J. Tetzel, who operated near Wittenberg. The reaction and counter-reaction of Luther’s indignation in due course provoked what finally became a historical inevitability the Reformation.

Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), Servant of the Servants of God, as incumbent of the throne of the Blessed Peter, was the heir, not only to the accumulated authority of all his papal predecessors, but also to their decrees, tenets and beliefs, dominated by the portentous Donation of Constantine – the foundation stone upon which the papacy, and thus the Catholic Church, had erected all its claims to territorial sovereignty. To Pope Alexander VI, like all the popes before him, the spirit and the letter of the Donation had to be observed, maintained and practiced by all and sundry, starting with its chief custodian, the Roman Pontiff.

Pope after pope throughout the centuries, from the appearance of the Donation, had always unhesitatingly and firmly done so. The precedents, illustrious and well-known, which Alexander could invoke were many. These rested upon the principles enunciated with such clarity by the most significant words of the Donation, which we have quoted elsewhere, to be found in its last clause, namely: “Constantine gives up the remaining sovereignty over Rome… ” and ending: “and of the Western Regions, to Pope Sylvester and his successors.” It was on the strength of such tenets that Pope Hadrian IV in 1155, as we have already seen, gave Ireland to the English king, as “like all Christian islands, it undoubtedly belonged of right to St.Peter and the Roman Church.”

Pope Boniface VIII declared that “temporal authority is subject to the spiritual,” (1)whereas Pope Gregory asserted that “the pope stands to the Emperor as the sun to the moon.” This prompted sundry theological pillars of the Church to state that “the Supreme Pontiff, by divine right, has the fullest powers over the whole world.” (2)

Pope Gregory IX invoked Constantine himself to support such claim. “It is notorious that Constantine thought that he whom God had confided the care of heavenly things, should rule earthly things,” he declared. (3) To clarify this he elucidated the matter. “Constantine, to whom belonged universal monarchy,” he said, “wished that the Vicar of Christ and Prince of Apostles.. should also possess the government of corporeal things in the whole world,” (4) that is, territorial possessions, with all their riches and wealth.

In virtue of this, Pope Hadrian compelled King John to pay a yearly tribute to him – that is, a tax – in token of the subjection of England and Ireland.

The successors of the Blessed Peter eventually claimed as their property all islands and lands as yet undiscovered.

Relying on this, they demanded nothing more nor less than “sovereignty” over the newly discovered lands of the Americas. In modern parlance, they claimed that the Americas, with all they contained, were their absolute property.

Were these decretals put forward and maintained only centuries before Columbus actually set foot on the Americas? Not at all. They remained the full-blooded claims of the popes when America was actually found, so much so that when the reigning pontiff heard about the discoveries, he apportioned the New World, on the basis that he, the pope, had the legal right to do, since it was his property and no one else’s.

This celebrated document was written only one year after the discovery of the new New World; that is, in 1493, by Pope Alexander VI, not so much to re-assert in the plainest possible terms the papal right to its ownership, since that was taken for granted, but to prevent Spain and Portugal from taking over the new lands without these having first been apportioned to them by their owner, or, rather, their landlord, Peter’s successor.

The pope in this case was acting not only as a pope but also as a Spanish pope. He wanted his Spain to have all the Americas. To that effect he decreed that the Vatican’s new property – that is, the Americas

– would be let to Spain. No one else, therefore, could get hold of any portion of it without the permission of the Americas’ legal landlord, the pope. To leave the position in no doubt whatsoever, the Pontiff decreed that all lands and islands, discovered and to be discovered, would be leased to Spain. Not only that; but he told King Ferdinand where the new boundaries would and would be drawn, namely, “towards the West and South, drawing a line from the Pole Antarctic, from the North to the South “. The original papal document, besides its extraordinary intrinsic importance, is a fascinating study which deserves to be better known. The English version is from the original (english ed and published by R. Eden in 1577) to be found in Hakluytus Posthumus, printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, London, in England, and 1625:

Of the pope’s Bull made to Castille, touching the New World. Alexander Bishop, the Servants of God, to our most dear beloved Son in Christ, King Ferdinando, and to our dear beloved Daughter in Christ, Elizabeth, Queen of Castille, Legion, Aragon, Sicily and Granada, most Noble Princes, greeting and Apostolical Benediction..

We are credibly informed that whereas of late you were determined to seek and find certain Islands and firm lands, far remote and unknown (and not heretofore found by any other), to the intent to bring the inhabitants.. to profess Catholic Faith..

This last phrase, “to the intent to bring the inhabitants.. to profess the Catholic Faith,” throws the clearest light upon the basic motivation of the whole enterprise. All other factors, no matter how important, were subsidiary to this.

The pope’s assumption, which he takes for granted and which he regards as the sole primary driving force for the daring sea voyage, must not be regarded as papal self-deception or wishful thinking or a mere ancillary rhetorical formula. It must be taken in its literal sense, since that is precisely how the true inspirer and launcher of Columbus’s adventure, the queen, saw it.

It must be remembered that the queen was not only a very devout person; she was what by modern standards would be called bigoted. She believed implicitly and absolutely in the dogmas and mission of the Roman Catholic Church. She was under the thumb of her confessor, a man responsible, no doubt, for many of her decisions, like the one which dismissed Columbus’s first to petition, or that which unleashed the horrifying hunting down of heretics, with the resulting burning and torturing, by the Holy Inquisition.

To say that her sponsoring of Columbus was motivated only by her zeal to serve the Roman Church would be an inaccurate. The prospect of finding new territories, gold and riches to replenish her empty coffers was no less important. Yet it was in favor of financing his expedition. Here again, therefore, that “intangible” religious factor to which we have already referred played a paramount, even if an imponderable, role in the preliminary exertions which were to lead to the discovery of America.

In any case, supposition or fact, the reality of the matter was that this was taken for granted by the pope himself, who talked and acted on that assumption. Following his preliminary introduction, Alexander continued thus:

You have, not without great Labor, Perils and Charges, appointed our well-beloved Son Christopher Columbus (a man certes well commanded as most worthy and apt for so great a Matter) well furnished with Men and Ships and other Necessaries, to seek (by the Sea, where hitherto no man hath sailed) such firm Lands and Islands far remote, and hitherto unknown, who (by God’s help) making diligent search in the Ocean Sea, have found certain remote Islands and firm Lands, which were not heretofore found by any other: in the which (as is said) many Nations inhabit, living peaceably, and going naked, not accustomed to eat Flesh..

We are further advertised that the fore-named Christopher hath now builded and erected a Fortress, with good Munition., in one of the foresaid principal Islands..

After which the Pope, speaking as a master, lord and owner of what the explorers had already explored and would explore the future, came to the point. Here are his memorable words:

We greatly commending this your godly and laudable purpose.. We of our own motion, and not either at your request or at the instant petition of any other person, but of our own mere liberality and certain science, and by the fullness of Apostolical power, do give grant and assign to you, your heirs and successors, all the firm Lands and Islands found or to be found, discovered or to be discovered, towards the West and South, drawing a Line from the Pole Antarctic (that is) from the North to the South: Containing in this Donation whatsoever firm Lands or Islands are found, or to be found, towards India, or towards India, or towards any other part whatsoever it be, being distant from, or without the foresaid Line, drawn a hundred Leagues towards the West, and South, from any of the Islands which are commonly called DE LOS AZORES AND CAPO VERDE. All the Islands therefore and firm Lands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered, from the said Line towards the West and South, such as have not actually been heretofore possessed by any other Christian King or Prince, until the day of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ last past, from the which beginneth this present year, being the year of our Lord a thousand four hundred ninety three, whensoever any such shall be found by your Messengers and Captains..

Thereupon His Holiness once more reasserted his authority, indicating the source of such authority, in order to justify the grant he was making to the King of Spain in virtue of and as a derivation of the same.

We (continued the pope) by the Authority of Almighty God, granted unto us in Saint Peter , and by the Vicarship of Jesus Christ which we bear on the Earth, do for ever, by the tenor of these presents, give, grant, assign unto you, your heirs and successors (the Kings of Castile and Legion) all those Lands and Islands, with their Dominions, Territories, Cities, Castles, Towers, Places, and Villages, with all the Rights and Jurisdictions thereunto pertaining; constituting, assigning, and deputing you, your heirs and successors, the Lords thereof, with full and free Power, Authority and Jurisdiction: Decreeing nevertheless by this our Donation, Grant and Assignation, that from no Christian Prince, which actually hath possessed the foresaid Islands and firm Lands, unto the day of the Nativity of our Lord beforesaid, their Right obtained, to be understood hereby to be taken away, or that it ought to be taken away..

Having duly decreed, donated, granted and assigned all the above, Pope Alexander hurled a potential excommunication against anyone who might dare to disregard his decision:

We furthermore straightly inhibit all manner of persons, of what state, degree, order or condition soever they be, although of Imperial and Regal Dignity, under the pain of the Sentence of Excommunication which they shall incur, if they do to the contrary, that they in no case presume, without special License of you, your heirs and successors, to travail for Merchandises or for any other cause, to the said Lands or Islands, the West and South, drawing a Line from the Pole Arctic to and to be found, be situate towards India, or towards any other part.

Alexander then indicated the actual demarcation of the explorations and possessions mentioned earlier in this same document, and said:

Being distant from the Line drawn a hundred Leagues towards the West, from any of the Islands commonly called DE LOS AZORES and CAPO VERDE: Notwithstanding Constitutions, Decrees and Apostolical Ordinances whatsoever they are to the contrary.

In Him from whom Empires, Dominions, and all good things do proceed: Trusting that Almighty God, directing your Enterprising..

Finally, he concluded his deed of gift by threatening anybody who might dare “to infringe” his will:

Let no man therefore whatsoever infringe or dare rashly to contrary this Letter of our Commendation, Exhortation, Request, Donation, Grant, Assignation, Constitution, Deputation, Decree, Commandment, Inhibition, and Determination. And if any shall presume to attempt the same, let him know that he shall thereby incur the Indignation of Almighty God, and His Holy Apostles, Peter and Paul.

Given at Rome at Saint Peter’s, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1493. The fourth day of the Nones of May, the first year of our Popedom.

After Catholic Spain there came rival Portugal. As a result, the following year – that is, in 1494 – the Treaty of Tordesillas moved and the papal lines of demarcation to the meridian 370 leagues with of Azores. This caused yet another visible effect of the papal decision upon the New World: the existence of Brazil. For, by pushing the line so far west, a great portion of the soon-to-be-discovered Brazilian bulge was included in the Portuguese dominion.

Meanwhile, sundry daring navigators, spurred by the Colombian epic and the allure of immense riches, began to explore the unknown oceans with renewed vigor. Vasco da Gama took the eastern route, the original inspirational concept of by-passing Constantinople by rounding Africa, and in 1498 he reached India, only six years after Columbus discovered America. In 1500 Alvarez Gabral discovered what later was known as Brazil. The following year, 1501, Corte Real sailed north and landed on Greenland. Joao Martins in 1541 set foot on Alaska.

The devout sons of the Church, Spaniards and Portuguese, having caught the fever for incessant exploration, continued to criss-cross the oceans. They became the original pioneers who landed in

China, the Moluccas, Japan and even Australia while, as early as 1520, Magellan was the first man ever to sail around the globe. When the Isthmus of Panama was crossed and the Pacific Ocean discovered, a priest, a member of the expedition, rushed into the waves holding a crucifix and shouting: “I take possession of this ocean in the name of Jesus Christ!” – and hence in the name of His Vicar on Earth, the Roman Pontiff. The New World had become indeed, by divine and legal right, the absolute property of the popes, from the north to the south, from the eastern to the western coasts. A New World was added to the old one, already under the triple crown.

Chapter 2

1. The Times, London, June 26, 1968
2. St. Gregory, Letter 65
3. Willibald, Vita Bonifacii, 14; also Liber Pontificalis
4. St. Gregory, Letters 12-17
5. De Gloria Martyrum, 1.28
6. Bede, 5.20
7. M.151.1181. See also Historia Ecclesiastica
8. Migne M. 89, 1004
9 Ibid.
10. See The Times, London, November 29, 1969

Chapter 3

1. A canon of the Church of St. John de Latran, named Lorenzo Valla, proved that the Donation of Constantine had been a clever deceit by the enterprising Hadrian.
2. See Dollinger’s Fables and Prophecies of the Middle Ages
3. G.H. Bohmer, art. “Konstantinische Schenking,” Herzog, Hauck, Realencyclopadie

Chapter 4

1. Summa de Ecclesia, 94.1
2. Clementia, 9 de jur. ej.
3. Agostino Trionfo and Alvaro Pelayo, theologians of the Papal Court.

Chapter 5

1. Rolls Series, Edition v.318
2. Ed. Hearne, 1774, i,42,48
3. Hutton, Cardinal Rinuccini’s Embassy to Ireland, pp. xxvii-xxix
4. Milman, Lat. Christ. viii,c.vii
5. Of the Papal Bull made to Castille, touching the New World. Given at St. Peter’s Rome, in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord 1493. The fourth day of the Nones of May, the first years of our Popedom, Englished and published by R. Eden in 1577, to be found in Hakluytus Posthumus, printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, London, 1625. For further details see also chapter 11 of the present work.
6. For more details, see Avro Manhattan, 2000 Years of World History, chapter “The Popes and the Discovery of America.”
7. Ap. Martene, ampl. coll. ii, 556 more to come!

Chapter 6

1. Fundationis Eccles., M. Magdal. 1422, Ludewig I.xi, pp. 457-69
2. Ibid. c. 10.
3. Ordun. Ann. 1228.
4. Establissement, Liv. i. chapt. 123.
5. Jur. Prov. Alaman., cap. 351, Ed Schilter, cap. 308.
6. Haddan and Stubbs: Councils of Great Britain, 1.207.8

Chapter 7

1. See also Infessurae Diar. Urb, Roman. Ann. 1484 – Eccard. Corp. Hist. II. 1940.
2. Aquinas, Summa, 2a, 2ae, q. 87. Pupilla Oculi, pt IX, c. 18 sec. am. Summa Angelica, s.v. Decima para. 7, Lyndwood, ed. Oxon, p. 195b.
3. Johann P.P. VIII. Epist. 127
4. Pastor IV, par. 1-589.

Chapter 8

1. Chron. Astens. cap.26, Muratori S.R.I.V. 191
2. P. de Herenthale Vit. Clement VI, ap. Muratori S.R.I.III, ii, 584-7
3. Raynald, loc. cit; Van Ranst, Opusc. de Indulg, p.75; Ricci, Dei Giubulei Universali pp.613

Chapter 9

1. This tribute was faithfully paid until 1789, the year of the French Revolution. This was explicitly set forth in formal legal documents of 1348 and 1592. La Greze, Hist. du Droit dans les Pyreneers, Paris, 1867, p.339
2. Desmaze, Penalties Anciennes, Paris, 1866, pp.31-2
3. See Guillelmi S. Theod. Vit. S. Beri
4. “All destructive vermin – the emissaries of Satan. It is the duty of the Church to defeat the devil in all his manifestations.” See D. Martini de Arles, Tract. de Sperstit, ed. Francof., ad. M. 1581.
5. Magr. Guerin, Vies des Saints.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. The Bull is still preserved in the parish church of Avignonet. It was also related that the church doors, which had been locked, barrel, bolted and nailed up for forty years, opened of their own accord.

Chapter 10

1. Ferraris.
2. H.C. Lea, A History of Auricular Confessions and Indulgences in the Latin Church (London, 1896), vol III.
3. Jo. Gersonia, Opusc. de Indulg. Decima Consid.
4. Lavorii, de Jubilaeo et Indulg. P. ii, cap.c, N. 28; {Po;acchi, Comment in Bull. Urabani VIII, p. 116
5. A mort de Indulgent, I. 163.
6. P. ii. PP. IV. Bull. Inter assiduas, paras 143-5. Pius V, on his accession, confirmed these privileges, but in 1567 he greatly reduced the portentous indulgences. Bull Sicuti bonus, para. 62 (ibid., p. 226)

Chapter 11

1. Bull Unam Sanctam.
2. Cardinal Bellarmine, Opera, Tom I: De RomanoPontefice.
3. In Clement Pastoralia, March 1314
4. Pope Gregory IX to the Emperor Frederick II, October 1236

“Romanism is the dominant power in the Capitol of the United States. Lincoln, Grant, and Arthur withstood it, and suffered the consequences. The power is unseen. It is shadowy. It inhabits the air and infects it. Romanism is the malaria of the spiritual world. It stupefies the brain, deadens the heart, and sears the conscience as with a hot iron. It comes, as did the tempter, with gifts in its hands, of rule, of power, and of wealth, to all who will fall down and worship it. They who yield have peace and praise. They who refuse must fight a terrible foe.” – 19th century author, Justin D. Fulton

“Washington in the Lap of Rome” is a book authored by Justin D. Fulton copyrighted in 1888. Because any copyrights prior to 1923 have expired and are now in the public domain, I took the liberty to convert a PDF file of this book to HTML format to make it easier to read and more visible on the Internet. I used ALL CAPS for the titles because the original text uses them.

If you are familiar with the Illuminati / New World Order conspiracy for one-world government but do not know about the Vatican / Jesuit connection, please do yourself a favor and hear what people in the 19th century had to say about it! True history is suppressed! You won’t read this in school history books. There have been many people in history who have confirmed Justin D. Fulton’s research. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, is one of them. When you understand the Vatican / Jesuit connection to the Illuminati, you won’t need people like Alex Jones to interpret the news for you! You’ll be able to better read between the lines and see what is happening and why it’s happening.

“WASHINGTON in the Lap of Rome” has been written to call the attention of the American people to the great trust which has been betrayed, and to the great work which devolves upon them. It uncovers facts which will bring the blush of shame to the cheek of the real Republican and fill his soul with indignation. Fifteen thousand department clerks are under the surveillance of Rome. If it be not true, as is charged, that a private wire runs from the White House, in Washington, to the Cardinal’s Palace, in Baltimore, and that every important question touching the interests of Romanism in America is placed before his eye, before it becomes a public act, it is true that the Cardinal is a factor in politics. Romanism is the dominant power in the Capitol of the United States. Lincoln, Grant, and Arthur withstood it, and suffered the consequences. The power is unseen. It is shadowy. It inhabits the air and infects it. Romanism is the malaria of the spiritual world. It stupefies the brain, deadens the heart, and sears the conscience as with a hot iron. It comes, as did the tempter, with gifts in its hands, of rule, of power, and of wealth, to all who will fall down and worship it. They who yield have peace and praise. They who refuse must fight a terrible foe. The cry has been for peace. The lips of some of the ministers and members of the Church of Christ have been padlocked. Politicians, in the grasp of this power, are unable or unwilling to move. They clank their chains with delight, and glory in being allied with an organism so potential and so astute. Others see the peril, and withstand its open and determined advance. No longer now is the clash of arms heard. The city is not, to human sight, a camp of armed men, as in the days of civil war; but if eyes could be opened as were those of the prophet’s servant, when horses and chariots were circling in the air, proofs of a conflict might now be discerned, more desperate than was ever fought by flesh and blood on the earth. To-day the ” City of Magnificent Distances ” resembles the child in the presence of the snake. It is being charmed by the viper. Duty demands that the truth be told which shall break the back of the monster. “Why Priests Should Wed ” uncovered the pollutions of Romanism in the hope of saving the women and girls of the Roman Catholic Church, now held in the grasp of superstition.” Washington in the Lap of Rome ” appeals to mankind. The surrender to Rome of the Capital of the Great Republic means death to liberty. The people of all lands and climes are interested in the conflict. The facts given will ripen the indignation of pure-minded men and women against the Jesuitical foe, who no longer creeps under cover or hides in the shadow of some wall, but stalks boldly forth on his errand of wickedness. It is believed that it will cause lovers of liberty to shake themselves from their lethargy, and not only take Washington out of the lap of Rome, but throttle the monster threatening the future of the Republic, and lift the nation to its rightful place as the educator of mankind, the leader of the best thought, and the personification of God’s great purpose, in placing within the area of an ocean-washed Republic a free Church in a free State.

May God help the truth, is the prayer of

JUSTIN D. FULTON.

ROMANISM is beginning to uncover its hand in America. It begins to be fearless, now that it is becoming natural. It is attempting to do here what it has achieved in Europe, to awe the state, control the people, and banish liberty.

Slowly, stealthily, with the look of a saint for the outward seeming, with the heart of a Jesuit for the inward reality, Romanism has accomplished in fact, if not in name, what in name as well as in fact she achieved in so many of the kingdoms of Europe, a union of Church and State. This few will admit, but all may know that fact was to have been revealed on the 24th of May, 1888 ; that it was not, was not Rome s fault, but God s decree. Preparations had been going on for months to lay on that day, in the presence of the distinguished representatives of the nation, the corner-stone of the Catholic University of America, that the light of virtue and science might be preserved in the State," in accordance with the decrees and behests of Rome. The Cardinal, the Prince of the Roman Catholic church who was to officiate as President of the Board of Trustees, is, by virtue of his high office, the most conspicuous figure in the Catholic church in this country. Born of Irish parents, July 23rd, 1834, in Baltimore, and accompanying his father to Ireland as a child, where he received his early education, he returned to the United States and graduated from St. Charles College, Howard Co., Md., in 1857. He then studied theology in St. Mary s Seminary, Baltimore, and was ordained a priest June 30th, 1861. Seven years later he was consecrated bishop of North Carolina. Afterwards he took up his abode in Richmond, Va., and in 1877 became coadjutor of Archbishop Bayley, of Baltimore, and upon his death became his successor. After the death of Cardinal McCloskey he was appointed to his present exalted position, and carried to it great versatility of talent, an unconquerable energy, and much learning

Gen. W. S. Rosecrans, Grand Marshal, was born in Ohio in 1819, graduated from West Point in 1842, and in the Civil War rose from the position of colonel to corps commander. In 1867 he resigned from the army, went to California, was elected to Congress, and at the expiration of his term was appointed Register of the Treasury. His brother was a bishop of the Roman Catholic church, and he has been noted for his devotion to his church, whether as soldier, congressman, or citizen. The orator of the day, Rev. J. L. Spalding, was born in Lebanon, Ky., in 1840. Educated in Emmetsburg, Ind. , St. Mary s, Cincinnatti, and in Louvain, Belgium, on May 1st, 1877, he was consecrated bishop of Peoria. He is a scholarly man, and it has been his dream for years to have a great Catholic University built in the United States. It was through him that Miss Mary Gwendolen Caldwell made known her gift of $300,000 to the prelates of the Baltimore Council. The mother of Miss Caldwell was a member of the Breckenridge family. The father amassed a large fortune in New Orleans, and in 1863 was compelled to come North. Residing in New York, the daughter was educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Manhattanville, New York, after which she travelled extensively in Europe. The father, at his death, left an estate of four million dollars, to be divided between his two daughters. The Rev. John J. Keane, the Rector of the University, was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, Ireland, Sept. 12th, 1839. He studied classics at St. Charles College, Baltimore, and subsequently pursued a full course in St. Mary s Seminary, and was ordained in 1866. For many years he served as assistant of St. Patrick’s church, Washington, and in 1878 he was appointed to the See of Richmond. Bishop Keane’s zeal, scholarship, eloquence and organizing ability led to his election as a rector of the University. He has raised $800,000 to endow it.

In 1882 Bishop Spalding visited Rome, and obtained the Papal approval. The proposition was discussed by the Archbishops, called to Rome in 1883, and in 1884 the sanction and benediction of the Pope was promulgated to the Plenary Council in Baltimore. It was expected that the Cardinal, dressed in the red robes of his office, arm-in-arm with the President of the United States, was to strike the blow which would inaugurate the commencement of an enterprise that would exert a felt influence upon the institutions of this fast-growing Republic. Soldiers, belonging to an army seven hundred thousand strong, now enlisted and drilled, and being led by the scarred veterans of the Confederate and Union armies, were to be there, under the command of Mayor General Rosecrans, Grand Marshal, who, with prancing steed and nodding plume, was to place before the eyes of gathered thousands the proof that Church and State were united, and that a willing soldiery were getting ready to enforce the decrees of Rome. Bands of music accompanied the delegations, and filled the air with martial strains, as on Wednesday evening they marched along the streets of Washington.

Archbishops, bishops and priests, monks and nuns and Christian brothers, crowded the homes of expect ant Romanists. Everything was apparently for Rome. The President of the United States left the Presbyterian Assembly in Philadelphia to grace with his presence this occasion. Every member of the cabinet and distinguished statesmen were expected to keep him company. Seats were prepared on the platform for two thousand guests.

That night, in a great hall in Washington, gathered a company of praying people. They saw the peril ; they declared it, and pleaded with God to bring confusion upon the enemies of the faith ; though ministers in Washington as a rule, and the churches almost without exception, recognize the Roman Catholic church as a part of the Christian world, and are opposed to saying anything, or having anything said, that shall provoke discussion, or awaken enmity. Many there are who believe that Romanism is the foe of Christianity, and is yet to be cast down.

Thursday morning came. The day darkened as it climbed towards noon ; the rain came first as a protest. It increased in quantity, and finally fell in sheets. The streets looked like rivers. The procession was abandoned ; the town was held in the grip of the storm. The crowd that gathered about the great stand was roofed with umbrellas. The cardinal and clergy, who expected to pass around the building to bless the foundations, were unwilling to face the storm. At three P.M., a Change of Programme was announced, in these words: "3 P.M. The procession has been abandoned ; but the rest of the ceremony will go on." It did not go on ! The foundations remained unblest ! As Burns said:

" Full many a plan of mice and men Gang oft a-glee."

It is not the first time that Jehovah, by storm and rain, has disconcerted and broken up the plans of Rome. Twice this was done in the days of Napoleon ; when, but for them, he would have been master of the world. But it came and piled his ships on the lee shore, and buried sailor and soldier in a watery grave.

Once this same terrible result was reached when Philip II. of Spain sent his Armada of ships to crush out the power of Elizabeth, England’s noble queen. In our own land, a storm helped us, when hope had almost died out of the heart. In the Old South church, Boston, there stood up the man of God to pray. Liberty was imperilled. A fleet was on its way from the Old World to the New, bearing soldiers, determined to make an end of the attempt to kindle on the shores of this Western World the light of a new-born hope. The wind, that gently lifted a lock of his white hair from his brow, was but the touch of that tempest that engulphed the fleet in ruin and saved the country from peril. That Being who permitted the persecution of the children of Israel until Pharaoh was beside himself with wrath and egotism, and, as if to defy God, followed the people in their march to Canaan, until the floods environed him, when God withdrew the unseen walls which held back the sea and permitted the waters to break forth, smiting horse, men, and riders with the wrath of God, until chariot-wheel crushed into chariot- wheel, and Pharaoh s host, with all their pride and pomp, sank into the bottom of the sea "as a stone," still lives, and Rome, that in spite of warnings and remonstrances had attempted to dominate our intellectual forces, was compelled to halt, and learned again that the " Lady of the Tiber" was to suffer mortification and chagrin, as her beautiful garments were dispoiled by the rain the good rain, that made the meadows glorious, and opened flowers for the coming sun, and that did for Romanism in the United States what the storm did for the Armada in the Channel. The Cardinal that could make the son of a Presbyterian minister bow to Rome that could touch a spring and send seven millions of people in America to obey the behests of Leo XIII., could not control God. "Sing unto the Lord a new song, for he hath triumphed gloriously ; " and, in answer to prayer, thwarted the scheme to make an impression by a pageant we do not need, and will not always brook.

It was understood that the corner-stone of the building would be laid, no matter what sort of weather prevailed, so members of the Catholic societies and others went bravely on in the rain, attending to the duties assigned them. The bishops assembled at Father Chapelle s residence at two o clock, where they took carriages with the cardinal and his attendants, and they were driven to the Middleton estate, next to the Soldiers Home, which they had purchased for $27,000. It has a picturesque and commanding location. An old-fashioned driveway, between rows of trees, leading to the old house, starts from the intersection of Lincoln avenue with the Bunker Hill road. The grounds extend to the Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the railroad station of Brooks is located there. The distance from the city is two and a-half miles. So out they went, hoping against hope, that the rain would cease.

The ecclesiastical ceremony at the site of the University was planned as follows : The procession was to form at three o clock along the Bunker Hill road. The various divisions were to gather in fields on both sides of the railroad, in such manner that the first division, when it files out, will pass before all the divisions, and each division in turn will march out upon the road, so that the whole long procession will pass in review before the last division, composed of the bishops and clergy. Following an ecclesiastical custom, each division is arranged with the junior organization first. Thus the youngest parish is placed at the head of the division, composed of representatives of parishes, and the oldest last. In the division composed of the clergy, the different bodies are arranged according to their ecclesiastical rank, the Christian Brothers coming first, followed in order by the priests, the bishops, the archbishops, and last by the Cardinal, the highest dignitary. In the programme it was arranged to sing Haydn’s anthem, "The Heavens are Telling," the choir to be accompanied by the full Marine Band. The heavens told, without the song, that America has no need of a Papal university, built to perpetuate the dominion of Romanism and to unify the many elements of which the Roman Catholic church in America is composed. One feature of the institution is the establishment of " University Burses." The "Burse" is a fund out of which the poor students are cared for. Every person is at liberty to contribute to it whatever sum he or she may desire. The object is to aid any bright-minded man whose appetite for scholarly attainment in the scientific, or the historical, or the mathematical fields of knowledge are known, but not brought out because of the lack of means to develop them. The reason for locating the university at Washington was ostensibly, as urged by Father Chapelle, because the Capital is growing rapidly as a social, as well as a political centre ; that its literary circle is a growing and a liberal one ; that a great general library, a superb law library, scientific works and collections, the National Museum, the Observatory, and other public institutions, offered facilities for study that could not be secured else where. In fact, it is the dream of Romanists to make Washington the Rome of America. The Capitol is to be the Vatican ; the great Department- buildings, the homes of her oligarchy, when the Tiber there, as in the Seven-hilled City of Italy, shall give name to the mistress of the Republic which hopes to be mistress of the world ; and when this result is achieved, it would be in keeping to have the Catholic University of America located at that centre of Mary s Land.

It was Thursday evening, May 24th, 1888. A company of lovers of American institutions were gathered in one of the corridors of a great hotel. In came the man who had led the meeting for prayer, and whose face looked as though victory was in the air. He had been all day with the Jesuits. He had seen their discomfiture, and witnessed their mortification, wrath and desperation.

" What is the outlook?"

"All right."

How goes the fight ? " " Never better. Rome has met her Waterloo, and has received a blow she will not soon forget. Cardinal Gibbons finds that he cannot manage God. He is beaten. The archbishop, bishop, and priests realize it. The president, cabinet, and congressmen who have bent the supple hinges of the knee, that thrift might follow fawning, now see it. Whiskey flows as free to-night as water fell today. It is appalling to hear the profanity. Between yesterday and today what a change ! Then all was hope ; now all is gloom ! A leading priest, who invited the speaker to come and witness the ceremony, is despondent enough. The minister reminded him of the prophecy, read to him from Revelation 18:16, and, changing it, said : Alas, alas, that great company, clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, in one hour have been brought to see their helplessness when contending with the Almighty. May it not be a type of the disasters to attend the enterprise? A bad start is a prophecy of what, at least, is possible. The charter – the organism, – all will be opposed. The Lord also shall roar out of Zion, and the heavens and the earth shall shake ; but the Lord shall be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel. So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God, dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain. All recognized how the mighty angel may cast Rome down as a stone is thrown into the sea when the truth gets before the people, and the machinations of this foe of liberty are understood."

Tongues were loosened. Rome, though mighty, was not almighty. The truculency of politicians had been of no avail. The president and cabinet went home chagrined ; better, if not wiser, men.

The Great University looked well on paper ; but looked very diminutive to those standing in the mud and rain. So will it be when God shall take Rome in hand. "How much she hath glorified herself and lived deliciously ; for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, mourning, and famine ; and she shall be utterly burned with fire : for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her."

Thus spoke the minister to his friend, the priest. The words shook him up. They loosened the foundation on which superstition had been building. The New was coming. The battle was on. Never did a fiercer conflict rage in Washington. The forts were dismantled after the war. Soldiers in blue and gray had gone far away ; yet the city was full of combatants. Months before in a Roman Catholic institution, concerning which a war of words seems to go on from year to year, the minister met the priest. They sat at a table with distinguished Romanists, priests and laymen. Eleven nuns waited on them. After dinner, this priest, distinguished for his courage, cultured, talented, eloquent, made a speech, which presents the doings of the church as seen by Romanists. He praised Rome for what she is, and for what she has achieved. He spoke of the proofs of her greatness, seen in her magnificent cathedrals and churches in all the large cities, the great monasteries, convents, and asylums, crowning the hilltops that look down upon many of our large cities, of the Golden Cross that greets the eye as the traveller passes through the Golden Gate on the California Coast ; while in New York, the gateway of the Western World, Rome, in churches, in schools, in convents, in monasteries, in protectories, and what not, leads all other churches in enterprises and in far- reaching plans.

He claimed that there was more money and more brain under the control of the church in New York than in Rome itself, and that now, while the school system was being shattered and the parochial school had become a fact, Rome was to get control of the youth of America, and could hold her own against all comers. He then spoke with pride of the gift of the descendant of the great opponent of Romanism, the gifted Dr. Breckenridge, whose $300,000 was but the seedling the germ out of which was to come an University that would surprise and astound the world." He sat down, roundly applauded. The chairman then asked the minister if he would like to speak. Consenting, he arose, and said: "The speech of the distinguished priest gladdens you. Make the most of it, while you have it ; it is but for a short time." " What do you mean ? Simply this: There is nothing God Almighty hates as he does Romanism. In 1870 you proclaimed your Pope an infallible God. That act proved him to be the man of sin, the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped ; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." Thus was the " wicked revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming."

“Is that your idea?” shouted the priest.

"That is the word of God. By it men and nations are to be judged. You remember that your Pope had hardly been made the church, when the beast Louis Napoleon, on which he rode into power, was destroyed. Then Babylon fell, because of a power which came down from heaven, and which lightened the earth with its glory. Because of this, the cry is going forth as never before : Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues ! Clouds, dark with the wrath of God, are gathering in the sky of Rome ; for her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities’

"Gentlemen, you may not know it, but it is true, that God keeps in his ear the cry and shriek of every Waldensian thrown over the Alpine cliff and torn by the jagged rocks ; every body wrenched in twain by the rack of the Inquisition ; every woman whose feet were burned over the brasier of coals ; every martyr who ascended to heaven in his chariot of fire ; all are remembered ; and God says : Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her work in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double.

"Then, again, gentlemen, there is a prophecy linked to a fact, to which I have never seen attention called. You have a perfect passion to place all your institutions on elevations. You seek to exalt yourselves in the eye of the people. The Pope exalteth himself above all that is called God, or is worshipped ; and you manifest the same spirit in the location of your public buildings. Our Lord said : Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased. Every hilltop crowned with your great structures, proclaims the abasement of the Roman Catholic Church, and even now Christ may have said, Because you have tried to exalt yourselves at the expense of humanity and of brotherly kindness, thou shalt be brought down to hell. He that hurnbleth himself shall be exalted. This is the outlook for Rome. The present condition is not what you paint it. They tell me, if the mortgages were foreclosed on the property Rome claims to own in New York City, she would not have one foot of land, a convent, or a church. What you own would not pay what you owe. Rome is to be uncovered, and then she will be hated. In the battle to be fought, our hope is in God, and you must look out for great defeats."

With that conversation in mind, there was meaning in the results of the day. The priest felt it. He spoke of his disappointment.

"It is hard to contend against an Almighty must," replied the minister; " the hour approaches when Rome shall be fought by Romanists. What means this unrest of the Pope, this feeling that he must get out of Italy and find a refuge somewhere else? Does he not know, does not the world recognize the fact, that Romanism is nothing without Rome ? Let the Pope come to the United States and he would be compelled to walk down Broadway with a stove pipe hat, as Romanists are compelled to wear citizens clothes in Mexico. The current of free thought in America will take care of Romanism. The time is coming when men will be ashamed of the name in which they pandered to Rome." A minister of distinction declines to attack the Roman Catholic Church in Washington, lest offence be given to the representatives of foreign governments, who crowd St. Matthew s on the Sabbath, and the places of pleasure during the week, for Washington is in the lap of Rome. A Cunarder put out from New England for New York. It was well equipped ; but in putting up a stove in the pilot box, a nail was driven too near the compass. You know how that nail would affect the compass. The ship s officer, deceived by that distracted compass, put the ship two hundred miles off her right course, and suddenly the man on the look out cried: "Land ho! "and the ship was halted within a few yards of her demolition on Nantucket shoals. A sixpenny nail did that ; because it was not known that it was misplaced. It shall be the fault of those who will not heed a warning if this Jesuit University shall derange the American compass and send the Ship of State upon the rocks which threaten her.

Shall it be encouraged? It is but a part of a movement to take control of educational interests in the United States. There are 6,800 Roman Catholic churches in the United States, and there are more than 4,000 parochial schools. A movement has begun, to take possession of our public school buildings. Rome withdraws her children from the public school, leaving the seats unoccupied. Then she rents the empty building, and fills it with her children, through the assistance of men elected to do her bidding ; as is done in Pittsburg, Pa., and Maiden, Mass. As has been said, Rome sees clearly the peril which confronts her from secular teaching, and from this day she will spare "no effort to keep her children within sound of her own bell and within the limits of her own instruction. There will be no compromise ; there is no evasion ; open, determined and persistent antagonism to our common-school system is henceforth the attitude and policy of the Roman hierarchy. He who hopes to escape this struggle, or out maneuver this foe is already beaten ; he does not know the antagonist with whom he is fighting.

The universal diffusion of Catholic education means something more than the opening of schools in every parish ; it means a steady and unrelenting attack on our common schools; not on that abstract thing called the common-school system, but on every school in every locality where the Catholic voting population has any strength. This result was inevitable ; Catholics have the same indisposition to pay taxes which characterizes the great majority of men of all faiths. They are compelled to support their own church schools ; they are not disposed to support the common schools in addition ; wherever the way is open they will, as a matter of course, use their power to control or cripple the common schools. The great struggle between our schools and this vigilant and uncompromising foe will not be fought out in Congress or in Legislatures, in newspapers or pulpits ; it will be fought in every school district in the country. There will be no great and decisive battle ; there will be a long series of skirmishes. Every school meeting will be contested, and on the result of these minor contests the struggle itself will turn. Henceforth eternal vigilance will be the price we shall pay for our common schools ; henceforth, no man who cares for his community or his country can afford to shirk a duty which has been more honored in the breach than in the observance.

In many communities these foes of the common school will not lack for allies, who will, consciously or unconsciously, work with and for them ; men who will fail to see that they are being used as tools by a power which has never yet failed of the highest sagacity in using those who are too shortsighted or too selfish to comprehend the real issues involved. The only reply which must be made to the establishment of the parochial school must be the increased efficiency of the common schools.

The actual Ruler of this nation lives not in the White House at Washington, but in the palace of Baltimore. No important editorial affecting the Romish Church is printed until it has been submitted to the Cardinal for his criticism, We wonder at the power exercised. No member of Congress enters Washington but he is weighed in the Romish balances. If he comes down with the shekels for the church and with votes for her policy, all is well. If not, there is a reckoning-time sure to come, and an influence is exerted at once that touches the springs of power in his far away home. As a political machine, Rome is a transcendent success : and the Jesuit was more than half right when he said, " The representative of the Pope in the Vatican is the Ruler of the United States of America."

Romanism, as a religion, is a deception and a fraud. Jesuitism is the power that propels and controls it. These two facts, made plain to the people, will destroy the reverence felt for Romanism as a part of the religious world, and will take away the sentiment that it has a right to live and act in accordance with its genius and spirit. Then they will be prepared to weigh the proofs which show it to be an enemy, attempting to subvert the foundations of Republican liberty, destroy quietly the public school system, and make the United States of America a Romish Reservation. The claim is, that the Roman Catholic Church is the mother of all churches, that she is the only true church ; and, being such, is the Catholic, or Universal Christian Church. That, by Divine appointment, the Apostle Peter was the head and foundation of the church, its Pope and Christ’s vicar, or visible representative, on the earth. That he, Peter, lived in Rome for the last twenty-five years of his life, during which time, as the possessor of the “keys” committed to him by the Saviour, he bound or loosed, opened or shut, in heaven, earth, hell, and purgatory, as seemed right in his sight. That each Pope since then is the true successor of St. Peter, invested with equal authority and power ; and that to be subject to him and in full and hearty connection with the church he personally, or through the authority he delegates to others, rules, is necessary in the highest degree to salvation. Opposed to this claim, are a few facts :

1. Rome’s pretension to being the mother-church is a deception, because it never was in existence until A. D. 606. The Acts of the Apostles, as well as all ecclesiastical history, teaches, that the church in Jerusalem, in its origin, in its constitution, takes first rank. John addressed “the seven churches which are in Asia.” These churches are each are represented by a golden candlestick, or lamp, separate and distinct one from the other, and not as one lamp ; which would have been the case had there existed any just ground for the claim of Rome.

2. For the supremacy of Peter there is no Scriptural warrant. Peter was in no way the leader of the church. The power and authority conveyed by the appointment of the Apostles was conferred upon all of them. They were all chosen the same way, equally empowered to preach and baptize, all equally entrusted with the power of binding and loosing, all invested with the same mission and equally furnished with the same gifts of the Holy Ghost. Rome contends, not only for a primacy of order, but of power. Fortunately for his own reputation, Peter never did this. When the Mother of Zebedee’s children wished it, Christ said, “The Kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But ye shall not be so ; but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your servant.” Nothing would have so injured Peter with Christ and his brethren, and degraded and disgraced him, as to have done what Rome claims he did do, viz. : claim a pre-eminence among the Apostles. Peter’s name is not always mentioned first. James, Paul, and Apollos are placed before his, very frequently. Was any one prominent for being dear to Christ? John bore the name of “the beloved disciple.” Peter called himself a ” fellow-laborer,” and expressly forbids the governors of the church to lord it over God’s heritage, and bears the rebuke of Paul, because he was to be blamed ; without a thought of asserting his superiority or authority. Rome claims that in the words, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” our Lord declared Peter’s contemplated supremacy. It has sometimes seemed strange that Rome should utterly ignore the other address made to Peter in the same chapter, when Peter assumed supremacy, and Christ said to him: “Get thee behind me, Satan ; thou art an offense unto me ; for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.” Matt. 16:23. These words apply to Peter, and apply to those who have tried to exalt him above his brethren. The former do not apply to him as being the one upon whom Christ should build his church ; for Christ referred to the faith which saw in Him the Son of God. This view was held by Jerome, Chrysostom, Origen, Cyril, Hilary, Augustine, and many more ; and Paul, in 1 Cor. 3:11, points to Christ, in the words : “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Christ Jesus.” Eph. 2:20 : “And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.” Then, as to the power of binding or loosing, the position of Rome is confuted by the uniform action of all the apostles on such matters. They declared the conditions of salvation to be repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and they would receive the remission of their sins. This precludes the idea that the Romish priesthood have power to absolve from sin.

3. Romanism is a deception, because it rests its claim upon the false supposition that Peter lived in Rome. The Scriptures declare that Peter went East, rather than West ; lived and wrought in Asia Minor ; preached to the churches in ancient Babylon, from which place he wrote his epistle. Romanists want it written at Rome, and insist that Peter went to Rome in A.D. 42 ; that he was crucified head-downwards in A.D. 67 ; that he suffered imprisonment in the Marmentine prison, over which towers St. Peter’s ; that he was buried in the Vatican, where the Pope now lives ; while there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the pretension that Peter ever was in Rome. Tradition takes the place of history, and clings to the deception as if it had a basis of even possible fact.

According to the Bible, Peter preached in Jerusalem, and instead of giving orders to the other apostles, as the head of the church, he was sent as a simple missionary to preach with John in Samaria. Acts 8:14. He proclaimed the Gospel in Cesarea, in Antioch, and Babylon, but did not come into the West.

When Paul in A.D. 60 wrote his epistle to the Romans he saluted many, but he did not salute Peter, a sufficient proof that he was not in Rome.

In 61 Paul arrived in Rome and the brethren went out to meet him. on the Appian way, Acts 28:15, but Peter was not among them. From the year 61 to 63 Paul wrote from Rome his epistles to the Philippians, Colossians, and to Timothy. In these letters he speaks of many persons, even unknown ones, and no mention is made of Peter. In his second Epistle, 2 Tim. 4:6, he says : “At my first answer no one stood with me, but all men forsook me.” If Peter had been in Rome and free, would he have abandoned Paul? If in prison, would not Paul have referred to him ? All this proves that he was not in Rome. The Apostle of the Circumcision never was in Rome. He lived and died in the East. So speaks history. Romanism becomes a fraud when it thus unblushingly lifts a lie into the place of the truth, and demands of those who belong to it unflinching submission and unswerving obedience, from beginning to end.

4. Romanism is a deception, because it predicates salvation, not through the atoning blood of Christ, but upon saying : ” I believe that there is here upon earth an organized body that is more than human, because it has a divine commission, and that organized body can teach me the truth, and that in so receiving it I cannot possibly be led into error. I believe that this organism is none other than the Catholic church, directed by the Pope, as the successor of St. Peter, and the moment a man says that, he is a Catholic.” The essence of Romanism is summed up in this : “Subjection of the intellect to divine authority in matters connected with religion.”

Notice, it does not refer to a belief in Jesus Christ, as “the way, the truth, and the life ” ; nor to receiving him into the heart, that power may be obtained to become a child of God. It makes the church authority the author of life and hope. The millions of Romanists are ruled by a Pope, claimed to be infallible, exalted above all that is called God, and worshipped as was the Druid of our ancestors, or the Pontifex Maximus of ancient Rome, and claiming to stand at the top of the system. All the persons in the Godhead, Popery denies. It denies God the Father, by installing the Pope as the Divine vicegerent, by whose authority the Second Commandment, forbidding the worship of images, is trampled upon ; and installs the Pope as Divine vicegerent of the world and the infallible ruler of the conscience. It presents him high and lifted up, clothed with power to annul laws, abrogate treaties, plant and pluck up nations, and do away with the precepts of the moral law. Popery writes on the Papal chair : “This is the seat of God, the throne of the Infallible and Holy One ; he who sits here can pardon or retain men’s sins, save or destroy souls.”

Popery ignores Jesus Christ the Saviour, and worships Mary instead. It robs Christ of his priestly office, by offering the Mass the priests sacrifice, not Christ, to save the sinner. It destroys the prophetical office, by presenting itself as the infallible teacher of the word of God and the only authorized expositor of the true sense of Scripture. It robs Christ of his kingly office, by exalting the Pope to his seat of absolute power and head of the church. In his vesture and on his thigh the Pope has written : ” I am King of kings and Lord of lords.”

For the Holy Spirit, popery substitutes the sacraments, through which divine blessings are communicated to the soul. It is this impious suggestion which crowds the church with votaries at the various masses, for the deluded believe there is no help for them apart from the priesthood, the only channel of communication between God and man. It is be cause of this murderers, no matter how heinous their crime, find it not difficult to espouse Romanism and put the eternal interests of their souls into the keeping of this error. ” They believe a lie that they may be damned.” Here then is what professes to be a complete church, and yet is an out-and-out counterfeit. Every element of strength and every principle of evil that were found in the ancient idolatries, live over again in the papacy. That same paganism whose cradle was rocked in Chaldea, whose youth was passed amid the olive groves and matchless temples of Greece, and whose manhood was reached amid the martial sounds and iron organizations of Rome, has returned anew in this papacy, bringing with it the old rites, the old festivals, the flowers, the incensings, the lustral water, the vestments, the very gods but with new names ; every thing, in short, so that were an old pagan to rise from the dead, he would find himself among his old environments ; and, without a moment’s doubt, would conclude that Zeus, the ancient Jove, the father of Clio, whose mother is Mercury, answering to Christ and Mary, was still reigning, and was being worshipped by the same rites that were practised in his honor three thousand years ago.

5. Romanism is a fraud, because it substitutes a Pantheon of idols for the Christian church, extinguishing the light of revelation, and placing the world back amid the ideas, the deities, and the rites of early idolatrous ages. It rejects the New Birth and change of heart, and inducts the child into the church in a state of unconsciousness, and holds him there by education, by training, and by fear. The church assumes control of the individual conscience. It claims to hold the keys of heaven and hell. A Romanist is afraid of the truth even of God’s word, and millions dare not read or take into their hands the Bible, lest it may sever their hold upon the church, and so whelm the soul in perdition.

The import of such teaching is to place in the hands of conscienceless men the consciences of millions of men. It is the marvel of the age, that at a period when men boast of their aspirations after progress, such numbers should thus fall as dupes into the slough of the most hopeless stagnation, into a total resignation of the freedom of their wills, of the independent action of their souls, into the amplest acceptance of dogmas, creeds and fables which it is a disgrace even to the darkest ages to have been capable of embracing. None of these things which Rome offers has the slightest atom of the simple but sublime religion of Jesus Christ, who sat upon the mountain-side and taught the noblest truths in the simplest language. They are the old tawdry paraphernalia of worn-out Paganism, refurbished and re-introduced by the most impudent priestcraft that ever palmed itself upon the world.

This it is that men are calling a part of the Religious World. Romanism is Antichrist, pure and simple. Daniel, Paul, and John have described it with the pen of inspiration, and painted it with living colors, and the pictures they made of it hang on the walls of the future, so that every eye can trace its origin, its terrible and damning work, and its awful doom. Daniel tells of “the little horn,” before which three of the ten horns fell ; which signify the ten states under control of imperial Rome. These three horns represented the Exarchate of Ravenna, given the Pope Stephen I. by Pepin, King of France, in A.D. 755. The second was the Kingdom of the Lombards, subdued by Charlemagne of France, and made over to the Pope in A.D. 774. And the third was the State of Rome itself, which was given the Pope by Louis the Pious.

It was upon the acquisition of these states that the Pope became a temporal ruler. It is said, the little horn ” had eyes like the eyes of a man,” ” and a mouth speaking great things,” ” great things against the Most High.” Assuming Divine titles, such as “His Holiness”; “Head of the Church”; “Christ’s Vicar upon Earth” ; “Infallibility,” etc., etc. But more than this assuming to dispose of rewards in heaven and hell, as well as on the earth ; changing laws of principles and conduct, and conditions of education ; a power to depose rulers, give away states or kingdoms, release subjects from their oaths of allegiance ; each of which acts, and all together, being an invasion of God’s prerogatives, as the king, ruler, saviour, judge of all men, and, therefore, such was speaking ” things against the Most High.” His ” look was more stout than his fellows,” causing him to claim supreme control over the church, the state, and the world; compelling his people cardinals, bishops, priests, or whomsoever they were, to kiss his feet ; and princes, at one time, to hold his stirrup while he mounted his horse ; and, in some instances, to lay themselves down that he might put his foot upon their necks. Asserting as Pope Paul and Pius did to Henry of France and Elizabeth of England, that as Pope they had a sovereignty above kings and people, and that, by divine appointment, was over nations and over kingdoms, to root out and to cut down, and to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant. Further, it is added :

” He made war with the saints.”

So Paul, in 2 Thess. 2, follows up Daniel and John in Revelation 13 ; uncovers the beast like unto a leopard, and his feet as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion, and the dragon gave him his power and his seat and great authority. Then go on to Rev. 17, and the battle with Rome is described: ” The Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords and King of kings ; and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful” This is Romanism that is now being destroyed. The Pope has no longer temporal power. Let God’s children all over the world tell the truth, and her and his so-called spiritual power shall be destroyed, consumed by the spirit of the mouth of our Lord, and by the brightness of his coming, as Christ shall shine in the effulgence of proclaimed truth. Is not this papalism, when it would figure as the religion of Jesus Christ, a fraud? If so, say so; and the work of redemption will be accomplished. Let the cry arise : ” Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”

For those who come out of Rome, there is freedom in Jesus Christ ; for those who remain in, there are perils such as have not yet been visited upon any race or class : ” For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”

To write the history of Jesuitism is to give in detail the record of sanctified scoundrelism, as with the face of a saint and the heart of a devil it has lived and wrought in this world, to do its worst against Christianity, brotherly love, manhood and rightness.

This is an awful charge. But it is also an awful failure of language when the attempt is made to tell the truth concerning this monster of iniquity. Jesuitism proves that, in human debasement, incarnate fiendishness and devilish capacity for being bad, man in the nineteenth century is equal to any horrid character that may have figured on the historic page.

A cannon-shot hit the leg of a scoundrel instead of his head, as in Spain he stood before Pampileuno’s walls. For religion, catholicity and man, that was the unluckiest cannon-shot recorded in history ; for when the tibia of the wounded patient knitted they marvelously supported the body of a man who with the heart of a devil has been permitted to masquerade in the robes of a saint. Those familiar with jail philosophy can well appreciate the impulse which drives the criminal, convicted of thieving or burglary, or murder, and on the verge of the tomb, to indulge in fancies of huger thieving, or a crueler and more infamous murder, and to long for life or unshackled arms that he might become pre-eminently notorious by its enactment. Now such a thought came over the brain of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Order, profanely called, of Jesus, and he recovered and was successful. The Jesuit University is built in Washington as Conspiracy Hall, in hopes that liberty may be throttled in its stronghold. Loyola took the name of Jesuits for his Order, because of pretended visions of God, the Father, who is claimed to have appeared visibly to him, and desired His Son, Jesus Christ, who stood by laden with a heavy cross, to take special care of him and his companions, which Christ promised to do. They are dangerous, because they declare no villainy, no treachery, nor cruelty to be criminal, provided it tends to the benefit of their Society.

In 1762, the King and Parliament of France were moved against the Order, and to be satisfied as to the grounds of complaint against it, they appointed a commission, consisting of five princes of the blood, four peers of France, seven presidents of the court, thirteen counsellors of the grand chamber, and four teen other functionaries. This commission examined one hundred and forty-seven Jesuit authors of celebrity, and in their report they say: “This perversity of the doctrine maintained constantly, and with out interruption, by the priests, scholars, and others styling themselves of the Society of Jesus, would destroy the natural law, that rule of life which God himself has written in the heart of man ; and, as a natural result, would break all the bonds of civil society, authorize theft, perjury, impurity, the most criminal, and, generally, every passion and every crime, by teaching secret compensation, equivocation, mental reservation ; would uproot every feeling of humanity among men, by favoring homicide and parricide ; in fact, would overturn the principles and practices of religion, and substitute in its stead all kinds of superstition, by favoring magic, blasphemy, irreligion, and idolatry.* Clement XIV., in his bull suppressing the Order, declares that it has been censured by Popes Urban XII., Clement X., XI., XII., Alexander VII., VIII., Innocent IX., XII., XIII., and Benedict XII., and then proceeds by saying: ” After a mature deliberation, we do, of our certain knowledge and the fulness of our apostolic power, suppress and abolish the said Society. We deprive it of all activity whatever of its houses, schools, colleges, hospitals, lands, and, in short, of every place whatsoever, in whatever kingdom or province they may be situated. We abrogate and annul its statutes, rules, customs, decrees, and constitutions, even though confirmed by oath, and approved by the Holy See, or otherwise. We declare all and all kind of authority, the general, the provincial, the visitors, and other superiors of said Society, to be forever annulled and extinguished, of whatever nature soever the authority may be ; as well in things spiritual and temporal.”

Be it remembered, that – up to A.D. 1860, this Order of persons had been expelled no less than seventy times from countries in which they had been living and applying their principles, and that these were almost all Roman Catholic countries ; and yet they have a most popular church in Washington, a college in Georgetown, and now are building the University, with the countenance of the representatives of the Great Republic, in less than a quarter of a century after their assassination of Abraham Lincoln !

Let us learn how they train men for infamous deeds.

Behold them consecrating the dagger of the assassin for, perhaps, some man now under the ban.

The following is the Jesuit’s manner of consecrating both the persons and weapons employed for the murdering of kings and princes by them accounted heretics. The person whose silly reasons the Jesuits have overcome with their more potent arguments is immediately conducted into their sanctum sanctorum, designed for prayer and meditation. There the dagger is produced, carefully wrapt up in a linen safe guard, enclosed in an iron sheath, engraven with several enigmatical characters, and accompanied with an Agnus Dei; certainly, a most monstrous confutation so unadvisedly to intertwine the height of murderous villainy and the most sacred emblem of meekness together. The dagger, unsheathed, is hypocritically bedewed with holy water, and the handle, adorned with a certain number of coral beads, put into his hand, thereby assuring the credulous fool that as many effectual stabs as he gives the assassinated prince, so many souls he should redeem out of purgatory on his own account. Then they deliver the dagger into the homicide’s hands, with a solemn recommendation, in these words :

“Elected son of God, receive the sword of Jephthah; the sword of Samson, which was the jawbone of an ass; the sword of David, wherewith he smote off the head of Goliath ; the sword of Gideon ; the sword of Judith ; the sword of the Maccabees ; the sword of Pope Julius II., wherewith he cut off the lives of several princes, his enemies, filling whole cities with slaughter and blood. Go forth prudently, courageously, and the Lord strengthen thine arm.”

Which being pronounced, they all fall upon their knees, and the Superior of the Jesuits pronounces the following exorcism :

” Attend, O ye Cherubim ; descend and be present, O Seraphim. You thrones, you powers, you holy angels, come down and fill this blessed vessel the parricide with eternal glory ; and daily offer to him (for it is but a small reward) the crown of the blessed Virgin Mary, and of all the holy patriarchs and martyrs. He is no more concerned among us ; he is now of your celestial fraternity. And thou, O God, most terrible and inaccessible, who yet has revealed to this instrument of thine, in thy dedicated place of our prayer and meditation, that such a prince is to be cut off as a tyrant and a heretic, and his do minions to be translated to another line, confirm and strengthen, we beseech thee, this instrument of thine, whom we have consecrated and dedicated to that sacred office, that he may be able to accomplish thy will. Grant him the habergeon of thy divine omni-potency, that he may be enabled to escape the hands of his pursuers. Give him wings, that he may avoid the designs of all that lie in wait for his destruction. Infuse into his soul the beams of thy consolation, to uphold and sustain the weak palace of his body ; that, contemning all fears, he may be able to show a cheerful and lively countenance in the midst of present torments or prolonged imprisonments ; and that he may sing and rejoice with a more than ordinary exultation, whatever death he undergoes.”

This exorcism being finished, the parricide is brought to the altar, over which, at that time, hangs a picture containing the story of James Clement, a Dominican friar, with the figures of several angels protecting him and conducting him to heaven. This Clement was accounted a blessed martyr for his barbarous murder of Henry III., King of France. This picture the Jesuits show their cully ; and, at the same time, presenting him with a celestial coronet, rehearse these words : ” Lord, look down and behold this arm of thine, the executioner of thy justice ; let all thy saints arise, and give place to him ; ” which ceremonies being ended, there are five Jesuits deputed to converse with him, and keep the parricide company ; who, in their common discourse, make it their business, upon all occasions, to fill his ears with their divine wheedles ; making him believe that a certain celestial splendor shines in his countenance, by the beams whereof they are so overawed as to throw themselves down before him and kiss his feet ; that he appears no more a mortal, but is transfigured into a Deity ; and, lastly, in a deep dissimulation, they bewail themselves, and feign a kind of envy at the happiness and eternal glory which he is so suddenly to enjoy ; exclaiming thus before the credulous wretch : ” Would to God the Lord had chosen me in thy stead, and had so ordained it by these means, that being free from the pains of purgatory, I might go directly, without let, to paradise.” But if the persons whom they imagined proper to attempt the parricide prove anything squeamish or reluctant to their exhortations, then, by nocturnal scare crows and affrighting apparitions, or by the suborned appearances of the Holy Virgin, or some other of the saints, even of Ignatius Loyola himself, or some of his most celebrated associates, they terrify the soon retrieved misbeliever into a compliance with a ready- prepared oath, which they force him to take, and thereby they animate and encourage his staggering resolution. Thus these villainous and impious doctors in the arts of murder and parricide, sometimes by the terrors of punishment, sometimes by the allurements of merit, inflame the courage of the unwary, and, having entangled them in the grooves of sacrilegious and bloody attempts, precipitate both soul and body into eternal damnation.

This is the method by which Jesuits clear themselves from their enemies. How happy, then, must that nation be, where Loyalists flourish !

Add to this the Jesuit’s oath, and the peril seems increased : “I do renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or state named Protestant, or obedience to any of their inferior magistrates or officers.”

“I do further declare that the doctrine of the Church of England, the Calvinists, Huguenots, and of others of the name of Protestants, to be damnable ; and they themselves are damned and to be damned that will not forsake the same.

” I do further declare, that I will help, assist, and advise all or any of His Holiness agents, in any place wherever I shall be, to extirpate the heretical Protestant doctrine ; and to destroy all their pretended powers, regal or otherwise.

“I do further promise and declare, that notwithstanding I am dispensed with to assume any religion heretical, for the purpose of propagating of the Mother Church’s interest, to keep secret and private all her agents councils, from time to time as they intrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by words, writing, or circumstance whatsoever, but to execute all that shall be proposed, given in charge or discovered unto me, by you, my ghostly adviser, or any of this sacred convent. All this I swear, by the blessed Trinity and blessed Sacrament, which I am about to receive, to perform, and on my part to keep inviolably ; and do call all the heavenly and glorious host of heaven to witness these my real intentions, to keep this my oath.

” In testimony whereof, I take this most holy and blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, and witness the same further with my hand and seal, in the holy convent, this day of A.D.,” etc.

This oath evidences that every Jesuit is a traitor to the play, ready at any moment to perform any act that will further the interests of his order. It permits him to be a hypocrite, and to profess religion simply to plot against it and overthrow it. Jesuitism makes religion a pretense and a sham and plotting and rascality a business, and yet it runs the Church of Rome, and is treated by one of the great political parties as an ally worthy of confidence and support. Why were the Jesuits reinstated by Pio Nono, and confirmed in their position by Leo XIII? To answer this-question, we must go back to 1868. Then, to take away the States of the Church from the rule of the Pope, was to bring universal crash to every European empire. Fortunately, Emperor William had no faith in such prognostications. Within the Church of Rome was a conflict as to the propriety of pronouncing the Pope infallible. Discussion went on throughout the Roman Catholic world. The prophecy of Paul, in 2 Thess. 2:3,4, was to be fulfilled ; “the man of sin, the son of perdition,” was to ” exalt himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped ; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” This was fulfilled in A. D. 1870. Two hundred thousand people have borne Pio Nono to his throne in St. Peter’s and worshipped him as God. He is absolute in power. French bayonets uphold his temporal power. It looks as if the Pope was supreme.

Open again the Word of God to Rev. 17:11, and read the doom of Louis Napoleon, ” the beast that was,” is Napoleon I ; “and is not,” for there was a time when the Napoleonic power was out of sight and out of mind. After which, Louis Napoleon climbed to power, betrayed Mazzini, and Garibaldi in Italy, became the beast upon which the Harlot of the Tiber rode ; ” and is the eighth and is of the seven,” for it will be remembered, he built on the Napoleonic dynasty, and went to perdition. This is prophecy. Read a page from history. The Minister of France walks in the palace-yard of Emperor William and makes a remark which gives offence. Napoleon had boasted of his prowess, and thought a war only was necessary to make him Master of Prussia, as was his uncle before him. Emperor William resented the affront and rebuked the speaker. As a result, war was declared ; and the German army, as if on a picnic- excursion, overran France, encamped at Versailles, and took possession of Paris, and Louis Napoleon as an exile disappeared from the affairs of Europe. The army of France was withdrawn. The army of Victor Emmanuel was invited by the people of the States of the Church to enter Eome as King of Italy. He came. The Pope retired to the Vatican as the spiritual sovereign of Roman Catholics, but as temporal ruler no more.

It was to the Pope a humiliation, and, perhaps, prepares the way for his destruction. Without an army, without support, he turned to the only power in the world in which he could trust to do the work of conspirators, assassins, and revolutionists, the Jesuits. He reinstated them. They be came the right arm of his strength, and have been seeking his restoration to temporal power. Every one who knows what their principles and history are, will feel satisfied that, like the Indian boomerang, they are much more likely to injure the hand that uses them than those whom they are employed to oppose. The condition of the Pope is pitiable. He lives, as it were, on sufferance ; no longer the mighty and powerful ruler of the past, but influential simply because of his power outside of Rome, not inside. The Bible has entered Rome, the Word of God is not bound.

We have been accustomed to bless God for that fatherly care of Divine Providence, which neither allowed the era of American colonization to be hastened, nor that of the Reformation to be deferred. Had these events been differently arranged, it has been said had Spanish blood, and not English, flowed in the veins of our first settlers, or had the Mayflower borne to our shores the foundations of a Catholic colony, and had Roger Williams been a Jesuit missionary or had the schemes of French conquest, that would have made Canada but the starting point of North American empire, been successful, how different had been the annals of the country, and the entire race ! All that reads well. But when we remember that Providence, R. I., is almost a Roman Catholic town that a bishop was recently installed there in the presence of all the magnates of the state, and that Washington is in the lap of Rome, it becomes us not to boast of deliverance, but to recall our peril and prepare to resist the encroachments of liberty’s foe. Remember, that the Jesuits ruling Washington may dispense with all laws, human and divine, dissolve all oaths and vows, and free men in the Cabinet of the President from the obligations which bind other men. So soon as a city or country is under their control, no member of the community can promise to himself security, either to his life, honor, or estate. Nay, the person of the President is not exempted from danger, when he is once the object of Jesuitical spleen.

Shall Jesuits be welcomed or expelled? is the question which is yet to agitate the people of the United States. Up to the present time, so great has been the love of liberty in the hearts of the people, that they have tolerated with impunity anarchists, revolutionists, and Jesuits. The idea of suppression for opinion’s sake has been repugnant to the sentiment of the majority. But a reaction is setting in. The people begin to see that it is cowardice to throw up the hands at the dicta of this blood-stained crowd, and permit them to scuttle the ship on which we are making a common voyage. Self-preservation, if nothing else, will compel the people of the United States to take the most stringent measures against the evil of the time, and to give even clearer scrutiny to the methods and principles and conduct of the Jesuits. They work in darkness, and they oppose the truth. Seven millions of people in free America, and 250,000,000 throughout the world, are ruled by their mandate. The Pope has enthroned them in power and reinstated them in all their former possessions. With the people over whom they have control, argument goes for nothing. The needs of the country are cast aside as unworthy of regard. The requirements of the church is their all and in all. Oaths are valueless, if to keep them imperils the Order, or the church. Their history is a continued series of associations, massacres of innocent people, conspiracies and machinations against existing laws and orders. The masses they have incited to revolt, and the rulers to bloody and fruitless wars. Corruption they sow broadcast over the land in order to further their doctrines of treason, perjury, falsehood, and murder. Brazen as they are, they use their power of religion as a cloak to hide their sins against God, and their sins against man. Today their one object of detestation is the public school system of the United States. They see that the education of the masses is their ruination. In the South there are millions of freedmen growing up in ignorance, owing to the inability of the several States to educate them. Well has the Hon. Henry W. Blair, in the Senate, called attention to the duty of the nation to educate the rising generation. “It is of very little consequence,” said the Senator, ” relatively, what becomes of the present generation. What we are, we are, and are likely to be ; but it is of great importance what shall be the fate of the future, which depends so largely upon the conduct of the present. The real question is, whether this generation, with natural powers for the control of the destiny of the country for the time being, is to make that provision for the generation to come which has been made for the generation existing by those who have preceded it ; whether this generation, so far as it has the capacity to do so, is to make better preparation for the discharge of its duties on the part of the coming generation, so far as it should be made, than was made by those who preceded us.” If the Christian and intelligent people of the United States are not awake to the importance of this measure, the Jesuits are. They saw from the first that Romanism is doomed, if the people of this land are to be educated. Jesuitism understands that a great fight is already out lining itself for the future between the common schools of the United States and Romanism. Jesuitism is not afraid. She fights education openly and secretly. Said Senator Blair: “Upon this very floor, soon after we had passed this bill, full two years ago, and while it was in the hands of a packed committee in the House of Representatives, where it was finally strangled, on this very floor, a senator showed me a letter which I read with my own eyes, the original letter of a Jesuit priest, in which he begged a member of Congress to oppose this bill and to kill it, saying, that they had organized all over the country “for its destruction ; that they succeeded in the committees of the House, and they would destroy the bill inevitably ; and if they had only known it early enough, they could have prevented its passing through the Senate. They have begun in season this time ; but they will not destroy this bill.

“Twelve years ago, when I was a member of the House of Representatives, and when we were under taking to enact a constitutional amendment which was to prevent the appropriation of public money to the support of sectarian schools in this country, a friend of mine pointed out to me upon that floor nine Jesuits, who were there log-rolling against that proposed amendment of the Constitution. There in Washington is that Jesuit organization which has set out to control this country, which has been repudiated by every free country, Catholic and Protestant, in the Old World : they have come to our borders ; they are among us today, and to stay ; and they understand that they are to secure the control of this continent, by destroying the public school system of America. They are engaged in that nefarious, wicked work. And as Jesuits have been expelled from the Old World, let me say, the time is soon coming when the Jesuits will be looked upon as more the enemy of this country than is the Anarchist today. And the process either of their expulsion, or of their conversion, will be the one in which the American people will sometime be engaged, unless the Order change their programme and their work.”

Brave words were these of Senator Blair, the bravest spoken for many a day ! The Senate passed the Bill. When it went to the House, the Jesuits again showed their hand. The Presidential election being near, made men careful. The usual Jesuit lobby was present, and the bill was referred to a committee appointed by the Jesuits servant, the Speaker of the House, where it will lie until the citizens awake to their peril, and send men to Congress less susceptible to Jesuitical influence. The speech was delivered Feb. 15th, 1888. On May 25th, 1888, Mr. Blair introduced the following joint resolution ; which was read twice, and ordered to lie on the table :

“Resolved by the /Senate and House of Representatives of the United /States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein) , That, the following amendment to the Constitution of the United States be, and hereby is, proposed to the States, to become valid when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States, as provided in the Constitution :

ARTICLE

” SECTION 1. No State shall ever make or maintain any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

” SEC. 2. Each State in this Union shall establish and maintain a system of free public schools, adequate for the education of all the children living therein, between the ages of six and sixteen years, inclusive, in the common branches of knowledge, and in virtue, morality, and the principles of the Christian religion. But no money raised by taxation imposed by law, or any money or other property or credit belonging to any municipal organization, or to any State, or to the United States, shall ever be appropriated, applied, or given to the use or purposes of any school, institution, corporation, or person, whereby instruction or training shall be given in the doctrines, tenets, beliefs, ceremonials, or observances peculiar to any sect, denomination, organization, or society, being, or claiming to be, religious in its character, nor shall such peculiar doctrines, tenets, beliefs, ceremonials, or observances, be taught or inculcated, in the free public schools.

” SEC. 3. To the end that each State, the United States, and all the people thereof, may have and preserve governments republican in form and in substance, the United States shall guaranty to every State, and to the people of every State and of the United States, the support and maintenance of such a system of free public schools as is herein provided.

” SEC. 4. That Congress shall enforce this article by legislation when necessary.” Another plot. The Jesuits have formed a colonization scheme, with a capital of $2,000,000, to aid Romanists in getting control of the South.

THE CONVENTION.

All the Southern States were represented except Florida, Texas and Arkansas, and most, if not all the great Southern railroad corporations were like wise represented by their Presidents or other officers. The following is taken from the Atlanta Evening Journal of April 26th, being part of the report of that paper :

“ Gov. Fitzhugh Lee, of Virginia, was selected as President. Committees on business and resolutions were appointed by the delegations from the respective States. Col. W. P. Price was made the chairman of the Georgia delegation, and Mr. Sandy Cohen, of Augusta, selected as secretary. Governor J. B. Gordon, Bishop Becker, Patrick Walsh, and E. P. Howell, were chosen as the Committee for Georgia. Interesting addresses were made by Cardinal Gibbons, Rt. Rev. Bishop Kane of West Virginia, Rt. Rev. Bishop Northup of South Carolina, and Governors Gordon of Georgia and Richard son of South Carolina. The speech of Gov. Gordon is especially highly commended.

“At the night session, the Immigration Committee adopted the following resolutions : “Resolved, That an Immigration Society be established, with headquarters in the city of New York, to be styled The Southern Immigration Association.

“Resolved, That this Association be placed under the care of a board of directors, composed of one member of each Southern railroad or other corporation, trade, industrial or other organization in each state, county, city or town, situated east of the Mississippi river, that will contribute the sum of $1,000 towards the expenses of said Association on or before July 1st next, and that on the second Tuesday of July, 1888, the board so constituted shall meet in New York, and proceed to organize, and adopt such by-laws, rules and regulations as may be necessary for its government.

“Resolved, That until such organization is perfected, Major John D. Kelly, Jr., be constituted chief of the Association, with power to call the board together whenever said contributions from railroads or other corporations, trades, industrial or other organizations of states, cities, counties and towns, shall have reached the aggregate sum of $20,000 ; and when such call has been made, the board of directors shall proceed immediately to perfect a permanent organization, as provided for in the second resolution.

* Resolved, That immediately upon adoption of these resolutions, the Secretary of the convention shall give notice of the same to the Governor of each of the Southern States, to the President of each of the Southern railroads, and to the Mayor of every city, and to every town in the Southern States east of the Mississippi River, having a population of 5,000 or more, and to solicit the co-operation of said officers in furthering the objects of this convention.”

The central office of this association is located at New York.

Concerning this convention, it is meet that all should be informed. It met April 25, 1888, at Hot Springs, North Carolina. There were present the cardinal, bishops, priests, politicians and railroad men. The object for which the conference was called was the consideration of Catholic immigration to the South.

Slavery, whatever were its evils, fenced off Roman immigration from Europe, and threw it North, so that, of the 16,000,000 foreigners who have come to the country, not more than 600,000 have settled in the Southern States.

It is known that the negroes in the South are Republicans ; and if their votes are counted they will become a power. The Jesuits attempt to offset this by a foreign vote. Romanism is advancing through our open gates like a mighty force, bulldozing and corrupting our legislators, and demanding privileges and exemptions for itself which no other sect would do. How long will it be before the Jesuits shall engineer bills through the halls of Congress as they have done in New York?

CARDINAL GIBBONS VIEWS ON THIS PUBLIC QUESTION.

Cardinal Gibbons has just returned from the South. Regarding the immigration convention held recently at Hot Springs, N. C., he says: “The class of immigrants that the convention wants to bring among the people of the South are thrifty and well-to-do natives of Ireland and Germany. We do not want anarchists or paupers. The South needs development badly, and I know of no better way than to offer inducements to honest emigrants. I deny that the movement is one to increase the power of the Catholic Church in the South, other than what legitimate increase may follow from such. The Church upholds the law, and that should be sufficient guaranty to any intelligent mind of the sincerity and honesty of our purpose.” Will the American people be deceived by this Jesuitical special pleading for this Romish scheme ?

CAN THE JESUITS BE EXPELLED?

A recent writer has said, that in expelling the Jesuits, not alone all Protestant Americans would unite, but thousands upon thousands of the most intelligent members of the Roman Catholic Church would join hands. Jesuitism is almost as dangerous to them as to Protestants. There is no religion in Jesuitism. It is foreign to the principles of the gospel, inimical to liberty, and a conspirator against the State. Because of their insatiate greed for power and influence, they have been feared, hated, driven out. It is believed that it will be so in this, free land. Some deed will be performed, some word spoken, which shall uncover the traitor ; when the American people will arise and make short work of the invader that seeks to crush out freedom, that despotism resting on ignorance, on superstition and error, may thrive. The cry will yet be heard : “Expel the Jesuits.” Then, vox populi shall be the vox Dei.

The few seem to know ; the many reckon, it happened so. Such are oblivious to the fact, that before even Washington was even a dream in the minds of men, Rome had plotted to hold the continent. By Rome, we mean the power that makes Rome what she is, and what she is to be, ” the prince of the power of the air,” who has incarnated himself in Jesuitism, as Christ is incarnated in Christianity ; the power that works in darkness, and plans the suppression of the the truth and the overthrow of the rule of Christ. ” For we wrestle not,” says Paul, “against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, and against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”(Eph. 6:12) John said: “He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose was the Son of God manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. “(1 John 3:8) In this manifestation of Christ through the proclamation of the truth, lies the hope of the world. If then we charge Romanism with being cunning, subtle, and sly, the reason for the charge is supplied in the words quoted, which inform us of the cunning craftiness whereby Rome lies in wait to deceive.

THE POWER IS UNSEEN.

It is shadowy. It inhabits the air and infects it. Romanism is the malaria of the spiritual world. It stupefies the brain, deadens the heart, and sears the conscience as with a hot iron. It stands across the track of the world s life, with gifts in its hands, offering rule, supremacy, power and wealth to all who will fall down and worship her.*

They who yield have peace and praise. They who refuse must fight a desperate foe. The many do not believe this. They are blinded by ambition and fear, and they see it not. Deaf are they and they hear not the truth, and yet the truth remains. The what is, is the outgrowth of the what has been. Don t forget it. A wise, astute, cunning, comprehensive intellect has helped Romanism in the past, and is helping it now.

Washington is in the lap of Rome, because of influences which stirred the hearts of people and made them to act worse than they knew.

A few facts will make all this plain. Columbus was actuated by a desire to promote the interests of Romanism, when he traversed an unknown sea and discovered this Western World. Cortez and Pizarro went to Mexico and Peru, and captured them for the same purpose. Their lives were full of cruelty, but that did not hurt them with Rome. Lord Baltimore came to Maryland to find a refuge for persecuted” (2 Thess. 2:8,9) Romanists and named the place of retreat Mary’s land.

To escape the fangs of Romanism and priestly intolerance, the Puritans forsook their homes beyond the sea, came to New England, and on Plymouth Rock built an altar to liberty, sought on bleak New England shores freedom to worship God. They have been called narrow in their thought, and it is claimed they meant by liberty, liberty for themselves, and the right to banish all who thought differently.

Roger Williams, in the furnace fire of affliction and persecution, had the fetters of slavery to creed burned away, and came forth, through the wilderness and the sleet and snows of winter, to ” What Cheer Rock,” where he became the champion of liberty for all.

Archbishop Hughes once said : “Far be it from me to diminish, by one iota, the merit that is claimed for Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and perhaps other states, on the score of having proclaimed religious freedom, but the Catholics of Maryland, by priority of time, had borne away the prize.” This is untrue, both as regards time and character of what purported to be religious freedom. The Roman Catholic colony sailed up the Potomac in 1634. In Maryland the boasted law was passed in 1649, two years after the doctrine of religious freedom was proclaimed in Rhode Island. Bancroft, in speaking of what was done in Maryland, says : “The controversy between the king and the parliament advanced, the overthrow of the monarchy seemed about to confer unlimited power in England upon the embittered enemies of the Romish Church ; and, as if with a foresight of impending danger, and an earnest desire to stay its approach, the Roman Catholics of Maryland, with the covert countenance of their governor and of the proprietary, determined to place upon their statute-book an act of guaranty of religious freedom, which had ever been sacred upon their soil. This is the language of the Act : And whereas the enforcing of the conscience in matters of religion had frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequences in those commonwealths where it has been practiced, and for the more quiet and peaceable government of this province, and the better to preserve mutual love and amity among the inhabitants, no person within this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall in any ways be troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion, or the free exercise thereof.” This, then, is their law poor as it is. In Rhode Island , their code of laws passed in 1647, closes with the following noble avowal of religious liberty to all: ” Otherwise than this what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of God. And let the lambs of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation, in the name of Jehovah their God, for ever and ever.”

At a time when Germany was the battle-field for all Europe, in the implacable wars of religion ; when even Holland was bleeding with the anger of vengeful factions ; when France was still to go through the fearful struggle with bigotry ; when England was gasping under the despotism of intolerance ; almost half a century before William Penn became an American proprietor ; and two years before Descartes founded modern philosophy on the method of free reflection Roger Williams assisted the great doctrine of intellectual liberty. It became his glory to found a state upon that principle ; and to stamp it upon its rising institutions, in characters so deep that the impression has remained to the present day, and can never be erased without the total destruction of the work. The principles which the first sustained, amid the bickerings of a colonial faith, next asserted in the general court of Massachusetts, and then introduced into the wilds of Narragansett Bay, he soon found occasion to publish to the world, and to defend as the basis of the religious freedom of man kind ; so that, borrowing the rhetoric employed by his antagonist in derision, we may compare him to the lark, the pleasant bird of the peaceful summer, that, affecting to soar aloft, springs upward from the ground, takes his rise from pole to tree, and at last surmounting the highest hills, utters his clear chorals through the skies of morning. He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert, in its plenitude, the doctrine of the liberty of conscience, the equality of opinions before the law ; and in its defense he was the harbinger of Milton, the precursor and the superior of Jeremy Taylor. For Taylor limited his toleration to a few Christian sects ; the philanthrophy of Williams compassed the earth. Taylor favored partial reform, commended lenity, argued for forbearance, and entered a special plea in behalf of each tolerable sect : Williams would permit persecutions of no opinion, of no religion ; leaving heresy unharmed by law, and orthodoxy unprotected by the terrors of penal statutes.

Without comment, let us notice what Bancroft says of the Maryland statutes :

” The clause for liberty in Maryland,” he says, ” extended only to Christians, and was introduced by the proviso, That whatsoever person shall blaspheme God, or shall deny or reproach the Holy Trinity, or any of the three Persons thereof, shall be punished by death. Any person using any reproachful word or speeches concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of our Saviour, or the holy Apostles or Evangelists, or any of them, for the first offense, were to forfeit five pounds sterling to the lord proprietary, or, in default of payment, to be publicly and severely whipped and imprisoned, as before directed ; and for the third oflfense to forfeit lands and goods, and be forever banished out of the province. ”

Cardinal Gibbons defines religious liberty to be the free right of worshipping God according to the dictates of a right conscience, and -of producing a form of religion most in accordance with his duties to God.” In other words, religious liberty is the free right of worshipping according to the commands of [Vol. 1, p. 256] the church of Eome, and of producing a form of religion in accordance with the commands of the Pope. Behind such a definition the Inquisitorial tortures of Torquemada in Spain were practised, the Waldenses and Albigenses were exterminated by fire and sword, Ridley and Latimer were burned at the stake, the fires were kindled at Smithfield for the burning of the Word of God, and the inhuman barbarities witnessed in convents and elsewhere where Rome has control, are sanctioned and endorsed. Full religious liberty means perfect liberty in our relation to God, to believe or not to believe, to worship or not to worship, as conscience may dictate. In the realm of religious liberty, suasion is the only weapon to be used. God alone is the Lord of the conscience. For this principle Roger Williams, Isaac Backus and others contended, and the doctrines they enunciated have shed a light which causes the thrones of despotism to stand out in horrid contrast with the altars of Republican hope.

After the proclamation of religious liberty came the formation of the Republic. A nation was born. A capital became a necessity. It has been said : The American capital is the only seat of Government of a first-class power which was a thought and the performance of the Government itself. It used to be called, in the Madisonian era, “the only virgin capital in the world.” {Geo, Alfred Townsend, in his Washington City, Outside and Inside} St. Petersburg was the thought of an emperor, but the capital of Russia long remained at Moscow, and 31Peter the Great said that he designed St. Petersburg to be only a window looking into Europe. Washington City was designed to be not merely a window, but a whole inhabitancy, in fee simple, for the deliberations of Congress, and they were to exercise exclusive legislation over it. So the Constitutional Convention ordained, and in less than seven weeks after the thirteenth State ratified the Constitution, the place of the Capital was designated by Congress to the Potomac River. In six months, the precise territory on the Potomac was selected under the personal eye of Washington. The home of the so-called Father of his Country was Mt. Vernon. Virginia was then the Empire State. Her population outnumbered both New York and Pennsylvania. Baltimore was then the Queen City, and Annapolis offered a safe retreat for Congress, who had been insulted in Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvanian authorities neglected to afford adequate protection. Then Congress resolved to have a place of its own.

Maryland was an early applicant for the seat of Government, and so was Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana ; but the Federal City came to Maryland and was located on the banks of the Potomac, very largely because of the munificent offer made by Virginia, and of the paramount influence of Washington. At that time Georgetown was a port of entry, and was a slave- market, and largely settled by Romanists. The Jesuit College had been established there, and priest and people were quick to see the opportunities of advancement placed within their reach. The influence of Roman Catholic Maryland has been noticeable in the “City of Magnificent Distances” from the first. Behind Maryland, and in league with Jesuit and Priests, was and is the power referred to, “The Prince of the power of the air.” This fact must be kept in mind. It explains the mysteries that envelop the city.

Does it not tell us another truth, that God is not afraid. Though Satan is potent, he is not omnipotent. Though Rome is very prudent and wise, she has not all wisdom. Up above us all is a Being who sees the end from the beginning, and though “the lot is cast into the lap, the disposal thereof is with the Lord.” Let us believe this. “He that hath a dream, let him tell a dream, and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. Is not my word like a fire? saith the Lord, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces ? ” (Jer. 23:28, 29)

It was July 16th, 1790, that President Washington approved the bill in six sections which directed the acceptance of ten miles square for the permanent seat of the Government. Georgetown had been laid out for forty years. The Jesuit mission of Maryland, began by Father Andrew White, Father John Grovernor and Father Timothy Hayes, in 1633, antedates the settlement of all the original thirteen states, except Virginia and Massachusetts.

The Jesuit College had been founded in 1789, one year before the capital was located on the Potomac. It was chartered as a University in 1815. It had been weak. In 1872, though ten Jesuit professors taught, there were but fifty-six students. The Convent of Visitation was founded in 1799. Virginia was called ” the Mother of Presidents, and the Mother of States.” She had then a population of 750,000; Pennsylvania had 434,000 ; and New York 340,000. North Carolina, with 394,000, outnumbered Massachusetts with 379,000. It was not until 1820 that any state passed Virginia ; but in 1830 New York and Pennsylvania had bidden her good bye ! ”

The Capitol was staked out the year after Frank lin died, thirty years before the death of George III., in Goethe s 52nd year and Schiller s 32nd ; sixteen years before the first steamboat, two years before Louis XII, was guillotined, when Louis Phillippi was in his 19th year, when George Stephenson was a boy of ten, the year John Wesley died, in Napoleon’s 22nd year, the year Morse was born and Mirabeau was buried, in the third year of the London Times, just after Lafayette had been the most powerful man in France, three years before the death of Edward Gibbon, while Warren Hastings was on trial, in Burke s 61st year, in Foxe’s 42nd, Pitt s 32nd, in the Popedom of Pius VII.

The laying-out of the city was taken in charge by Major L Enfant. In the survey, the little creek called the Tiber a name so significant to Romanists ; though it designates a little creek, long afterwards the eyesore of the city obtained significance in the estimation of Roman Catholics.

So much for history. Rumor has it that the Southerners voted against a Northern town, that slavery might find protection beneath the shadow of the Capitol, where she reared her Auction Block, and did her best to perpetuate her infamies. Is it not possible that Rome, the foster-parent of slavery, hoped to find in slaveholders allies and helpers to promote the interests of this twin-relic of mediaeval barbarism, which it is hoped may be removed with out a civil war and without compelling the nation to wade through a sea of blood? Victor Hugo, in his Les Miserables, describes the devil-fish. Its long, floating arms envelopes its victim, and silently bears it to the vortex of ruin. The devil-fish of Victor Hugo s imagination is matched by the skill displayed by Rome in Washington, which it seeks to hold.

Mighty as is Rome, it has been baffled and beaten elsewhere, and can be beaten again. At this hour, it looks as if an untimely surrender had been made. The truth proclaimed will awaken the people to the infamy of the deed, and they will take back what belongs to them, and Washington shall be free.

[nexpage title=”CHAPTER V. JESUITS CLIMB TO POWER IN WASHINGTON”]

Jesuits sue for the favor of the great and powerful. To obtain this, they decry faith in God, join in attacks on Rome, play the atheist or the infidel. Jesuitism permits its votary to do what pleases him. Submission to God is not in their creed. Jesuitism, in its practice, pays a premium on talent, on trickery, on cunning. It glories in subtlety. It is “all things to all men.” Falsehood, theft, murder, none of these things stand in its way. According to the compendium published in Strasburg in 1843, it is written as follows :

“Perjury Should it be asked how far a man should be bound, who has taken an oath in a false manner, and for the purpose of deceiving, the answer is, that in point of religion he is not bound at all, because he has not taken a true oath; but in point of justice he is bound to do that which he has sworn fictitiously and in order to deceive.” There is honor for the people in America ! Robbery is permitted, and so is murder ! Jesuitism is free to accomplish its designs. Among the wants of mankind may be reckoned an appetite for deception; a desire inherent in our depraved natures to bring to an agreement the claims of the Deity with the indulgence of our frailties; a mild impatience for the conveniences and splendors of a religious structure in which the history of delusion may be enjoyed to the full. And most prodigally does the Romish church minister to this demand. Ample and complete indeed was the apparatus which she provided for the accommodation of all the various passions and propensities of man.

When the structure which she had reared had reached its perfection, it “had a chamber for every natural faculty of the soul, and an occupation for every energy of the natural spirit.” She there permitted every extreme abstemiousness and indulgence, fast and revelry; melancholy abstraction and burning zeal; subtle acuteness and popular discourse; world renunciation and worldly ambition; embracing the arts and the sciences and the stores of ancient learning; adding antiquity and misrepresentation of all monuments of better times, and covering carefully with a venerable veil that only monument of better times which was able to expose the false ministry of the infinite superstition. {Irving’s Babylon, page 238}

It is needless to add that the sorcery which thus drugged the world, was, from the first, most prodigally patronized by the vices and wants of human nature. In Washington, nothing is done by Romanists to frighten the most timid. Nothing to waken people up. Nothing to scare or alarm. And yet whoever enters Washington is met by this unseen influence. If he surrenders, be he president, department clerk, or minister of the gospel, there is peace. If he refuses to yield, and stands for the liberties of the people, then there is a fight. The powers of hell are evoked. His path is blocked. His limbs are fettered. His words fall like lead, and are no longer winged with power. This is known; and men who wish promotion recognize the truth, and adjust their plans accordingly.

Rome as a machine in politics is a success. The Pope is the church, since 1870. The Jesuits rule the Pope.

It is said that Leo XIII. thought himself to be Pope. The Jesuits thought differently. The Pope was poisoned. His agony was excruciating. A Jesuit approached him; told him the truth : ” You are poisoned. You have so long a time to live. If you surrender, the antidote is ready ” He surrendered to Jesuitism, and lives as their machine, to be worked in their interest, and as the foe of all that is ennobling and improving among men. Does that story seem incredible? It is but a repetition of what has occurred again and again. Jesuitism, that has been banished from every country in Europe, finds in the United States a welcome and a sphere for action. The Cardinal is the mouthpiece and servant of the Order. As a political machine, it is with out a rival. It is not hindered by principle or even pretension. It does what it will pay to have done. It works for its own interest, first, last, and all the time. It helps the party that will do its behests blindly and without questioning. It delivers its goods. If it promises votes for reward, it gives the votes and expects the reward. Powerful at Washington, it is equally powerful outside. Offend the Order at the Seat of Government, and a whispered word brings opposition from every quarter, if that be necessary; while it delivers a single blow with equal force, and is feared everywhere, because of its capabilities to work mischief in any given locality.

In the days of slavery, it was the ally of despotism. It was supposed to be the sure ally of the Confederacy; or, perhaps, the attempt to draw out of the Union never had been made. What it could not do openly, it did in secret. The lovers of liberty not only overthrew slavery, but proved to Romanism that the cohorts of liberty are to be feared. Hence Romanism withdrew from public gaze, and, adopting the tactics of Uriah Heep, served that it might rule. The audaciousness of Rome is only equalled by its industry. It never tires. It is in league with all the forces of evil. Three-fourths of the saloon keepers are Romanists. A politician of Cincinnati declared, “I would rather have the help of one saloon than of five churches.” The probability is, the churches could not be brought to the support of such a man. The saloons could. Rome runs them. They pay for it. Week after week, Sisters, in the service of Rome, visit them and obtain their weekly stipend, and bestow the blessing of the church on the infamous traffic.

Rome climbs to power because it is joined to every form of evil, is in league with the enemy of all righteousness, and runs with the multitude in evil-doing. To Rome Satan said, “Fall down and worship me, and 1 will lift you to places of power and influence.” The deed was done. The result has followed. Place, then, an organism that is utterly unscrupulous at the direction of a party, that controls the press and the plug-uglies,” the pulpit and the penal class, that lays one hand on the homes of fashion and culture, and the other on the tenement-house; one on the banking office, and the other on the workshop and factory, that marshals the aspirants after power and the class that only cries for gain, that steps upon the platform as adviser, and into the caucus as director, that is at all times and everywhere capable of achieving results, and it is not strange that its power is evoked and that its behests are obeyed. Rome has climbed to power in Washington because men have forgotten country and God, and served evil for the sake of gain. It has been said :

“The Inquisition is not only one of the horrors of history, but one of its greatest lessons also. It is the greatest argument to prove that the only safety of nations is in justice and liberty.”

In a few years Rome will become able to establish the Inquisition here, unless a speedy change for the better comes over the spirit of our people. When I looked upon the cells of solid masonry standing back to back in the cellar of a Catholic church in New Jersey, and noticed the size of them, and that they were exactly such ones as are described in history, in which human beings were walled up alive, I said to myself, Who is to be walled up to die in there ? ” I stood upon the wall of an unfinished church, to take my observation that wall was several feet thick. A woman was wheeling a baby-carriage upon it, and she had plenty of room. Not the cry of a hundred men could be heard through such a wall when finished. What do innocent churches want of such walls in a free country ? Ah ! the not distant future will tell, if “the Catholics become a considerable majority.”

That kind of a cell is not confined to New Jersey. The cells and underground passages in the cellar of the Jesuit college in Washington would alarm the American people, if they were not case-hardened and dead to reason. In one cellar beneath a Roman Catholic church is a cell in which is an iron cellar. It can be closed air-tight. What horrid crimes have been committed there, God only knows. Rome is not changed, in spirit or in purpose. She boasts of her intolerance, and practices her inhumanity when ever she can. Let a member of Congress determine, because of public opinion, and perhaps because of the intrinsic merits of a bill that obtains the approval of his judgment and because he believes it will advance the interests of his constituency to refuse a vote to advance a scheme upon which Rome has set its heart, or to pass an appropriation bill in which Rome has an interest, and presto ! he finds himself antagonized by a spirit that infects the air and confronts and destroys his influence. An unseen hand is found directing affairs at the nominating convention and manipulating ballots at the polls. Because of this, the power of Rome is dreaded and courted in Washington and throughout the country.

ROME IS WELL SERVED.

Cardinal, archbishops, priests, brothers, monks, nuns, sisters of charity and of the poor these, and an innumerable multitude beside, do her bidding. They will tell the truth, or a falsehood, in accordance with the needs of Rome. They will cringe and crawl as beggars, or frown and threaten as masters. They will deceive the very elect.

PAUL DESCRIBES THEM.

They are “lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural aifection, truce breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness and denying the power thereof. . . . For of this sort are they which creep into houses and lead captive silly women, laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth; from such turn away.” ( 2 Tim. 3:2-7)

Beyond what are called the sacred orders, Rome has a vast constituency, which are being organized by the Jesuits into a great number of secret societies, the principal of which are : “The Ancient Order of Hibernians” , “ Irish American Society “, “Knights of St. Patrick”, ”Knights of the Red Branch” etc., etc.; while it is said, and believed, there are 700,000 men enrolled under the name of U. S. Volunteers, Militia, and officered by some of the skillful generals and officers of the Republic. These are trained to antagonize the most sacred principles underlying the Constitution of the United States; such as, the equality of every citizen before the law, liberty of conscience, independence of the civil from ecclesiastical power, freedom of worship, etc., etc.

The United States have established schools, where they invite the people to send their children, that they may cultivate their intelligence and become good and useful citizens. The church of Rome has publicly cursed all these schools and forbidden their children to attend them, under pain of excommunication in this world and damnation in the next. Not only does she antagonize our school system, claiming at the outset that it bore a religious character, because the Bible found in it a welcome; but having been the cause for banishing the Word of God, she pronounces the schools godless, and sends forth the decree to have all her children housed in the parochial school, and then, with an effrontery and inconsistency that is simply astounding, she seeks to officer the schools of Protestants, so that in some of the public schools in which there is hardly a single Roman Catholic child, and where there is a parochial school in the immediate neighborhood, Rome, through suffrage, obtains control of the School Board in our large cities, and then fills the schools with Roman Catholic teachers to instruct the children of Protestants. In one such school are forty-one teachers, thirty-nine of whom are Roman Catholics.

The Constitution of the United States finds in the people the source of civil power. Rome proclaims this principle impious and heretical, and claims that all governments must rest upon the foundations of the Catholic faith, with the Pope alone as the legitimate and infallible source and interpreter of the law. The Hon. Richard W. Thompson, late Secretary of the Navy, said : “Nothing is plainer than that, if the principles of the church of Rome prevail here, religious freedom is at an end. The two cannot exist together. They are in open and direct antagonism with the fundamental theory of our Government everywhere.”

This statement would not convey any news to an intelligent and an instructed Romanist. The Roman Catholic Bishop Ryan, speaking in Philadelphia recently, said:

We maintain that the Church of Rome is intolerant; that is, that she uses every means in her power to root out heresy. But her intolerance is the result of her infallibility. She alone has the right to be intolerant, because she alone has the truth. The church tolerates heretics when she is obliged to do so; but she hates them with a deadly hatred, and uses all her power to annihilate them. If ever the Catholics should become a considerable majority, which in time will surely be the case, then will religious freedom in the Republic of the United States come to an end. Our enemies know how she treated heretics in the Middle Ages, and how she treats them today, where she has the power. We no more think of denying these historic facts, than we do of blaming the Holy God and the princes of the church for what they have thought fit to do.”

This, though not a cheerful view, tells the truth, and prepares us, with renewed interest, to study the proofs, showing that Washington is in the lap of Rome, that we may better be prepared to under stand the terrible tyranny there exercised, and the unscrupulous uses to which the results of this power is applied.

No sooner had the District of Columbia been designated as the seat of the Capital of the United States, than Rome entered it, not as master, but as servant. Pius VII. had just reached the Papal chair, while the Continent about him was quaking beneath the resounding tread of Napoleon’s embattled host. Romanism was having a hard struggle in Europe. She was not yet at home in America. She was on sufferance. Clement the Fourteenth had issued the bill abolishing the Society of Jesuits, just previous to the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America, saying, as he did so : ” I sign my death-warrant; but I obey my conscience.” ” Watch the pot,” became his watchword, as he dismissed one cook supposed to be under Jesuit control, and appointed another, a monk by the name of Francis, whom he thought he could trust.

The active prudence of the good monk did not disconcert the Jesuits; it only rendered them more ingenious in Europe, and coaxed them in great numbers to find a home and a theatre of operations in the regions beyond.

The following was the infernal trick they employed to attain their ends in Rome: “A lady of the Sabine, entirely devoted to them, had a tree in her garden which bore the handsomest figs in Rome. The reverend fathers, knowing that the Pope loved this fruit very much, induced the lady to disguise herself as a peasant, and go and present these figs to Brother Francis. The devotee did so several times, gained the confidence of the Franciscan, and one day slipped into the basket a fig larger than the others, into which a subtle poison, called aquetta,FF was injected. Up to this time the Holy Father had enjoyed perfect health; he was well made, though of the ordinary height; his voice was sonorous and strong; he walked with the activity of a young man, and everything presaged a long old age to him. From that day his health failed in an extraordinary manner; it was remarked with alarm that his voice was sensibly failing. To those first symptoms of his sickness was joined so violent an inflammation of his throat that lie was obliged to keep his mouth constantly open; vomiting then succeeded the inflammation, accompanied by pains in his bowels; finally, the sickness increasing in its intensity, he discovered that he was poisoned. He wished to make use of antidotes, but it was too late; the evil was beyond remedy, and he had only to wait the close of his life. For the three months that he endured this terrible agony, his courage never failed him for a moment; one day only, after a more violent crisis than all the others, he said : “Alas! I knew well that they would poison me, but I did not expect to die in so slow and cruel a manner.” Remember, a woman was the instrument of the Jesuits, as was Mary Surratt, a century later, in the taking off of the great Emancipator. The Pope was changed into a shadow. His flesh was eaten out by the corrosive action of the “aquetta” his very bones were attacked and became softened, contorting his members and giving them a hideous form. At last, worn out with suffering, the poor victim of the execrable Jesuits died, Sept. 22nd, 1774. Something of this was known by the builders of the Republic in America. In Assam missionaries are compelled to get accustomed to snakes. They climb up their door-jams; they find sleeping places in the roof and ceiling above them; They look down upon them, while they rest in bed. Sometimes a poisonous reptile is touched, and bites and kills. This is bad. Thousands of natives fall a prey to the reptiles, who live, and move, and have being in the country; yet, after all, missionaries get used to snakes. They learn to tolerate them. Some learn to pet them. They see natives who become snake-charmers, and boast of their ability; indeed, get their living by handling and sporting with snakes. The story is matched by the way Roman Catholics have come to be not only tolerated, but finally petted, courted, if not loved, in America. At the outset, the people felt a great repugnance towards them. The Christian people of the United States gave Roman Catholics a wide berth. The less they had of them the better. The story of the Inquisition was familiar. Washington dreaded foreign influence, and never saw but one Roman Catholic in whom he had comfort, the immortal Lafayette. Jefferson, Madison and others were afraid of the influence attempted to be exerted by the mischievous, persecuting, unreliable association known and designated as the Roman Catholic Church, which was to them ” The Wicked” – “The Mystery of Iniquity “– “The Harlot of the Tiber” The oppressor and inhuman foe of the Church of God in all ages and all crimes. Hence Rome entered Washington, as else where, as an object of dread. That College in Georgetown, District of Columbia, was regarded as a Jesuit nest. It was let alone by the North, and largely by the South. Then came the convent. Nuns began to appear. Their pious faces, demure appearance, deceived the very elect. The establishments they wanted for eleemosynary purposes, went up silently and almost unnoticed. Here was the Providence Hospital, corner Second and D streets. Beautiful name! All thought well of it. It was founded in 1862. That was in the midst of the war. The nuns wished to help nurse the wounded.” Why not let them? Who can do it better?” men said. The camel got his head in when hospital tents were whitening the hillsides and valleys of the land. Thaddeus Stevens asked and obtained an appropriation of $32,000 for the Providence Hospital. In 1864 it was incorporated. The Sisters of Charity were to have charge. The name Sisters of Charity ” sounds well. In 1867 the present building was commenced. It is now two hundred and eighty feet in length, built of brick, and will accommodate 250 patients, and the government supports seventy-five free beds.

Samuel J. Randall, the son of a Baptist, linked to the denomination by many enduring ties, married a wife in sympathy with Rome, gave his daughter to a Roman Catholic, and found in the hospital the best of care after those terrible nervous prostration attacks which come of too great mental strain when stimulus no longer furnishes relief. There he could go. All that love and care could do for him was done; all that political influence could do for them was done. And so appropriation after appropriation has been smuggled through; until, it is said and believed that, since 1866, over one million of dollars have been given by the nation to support Roman Catholic institutions in the City of Washington. This will be a surprise to many members of Congress now on duty. It will not be believed by some. Yet it is probably under, rather than over the truth. Rome builds her walls in troublous times. It was during the war that she appeared, the war in which she wrought as the traitor to liberty. She obtained a foothold from which it seems almost impossible to dislodge her. She came stealthily and unobtrusively : came as a helper by profession, as a flatterer by practice. Because women, dressed in the garb of nuns, came to strong men and asked for help, it was thought ungallant to deny them. They had been in the hospitals. The surgeons prized them. They gave no trouble. If things were wrong, they never made reports. Physicians and surgeons might be drunken and cruel, the Sisters of Charity gave no sign. The bad had all things in common. So they prospered there, and were rewarded when they needed help in Washington. Rome knows how to employ women in carrying forward her great schemes. Her history shows this.

ROME CAN BE SEEN AND STUDIED HERE.

In presenting Romish splendors and glories we are not compelled to cross the sea, to enter Italy, to pass through the gates of the seven-hilled city, to pass up the Appian or any other way; to enter St. Peter, or wander through the interminable passages and galleries of the Vatican. The Rome in which the Coliseum stands, and churches innumerable are found side by side with ruins sacred to memory and history, is not in our thought when it is declared that Rome found a place in the lap of Washington before Washington came to rest so quietly and contentedly in the lap of Rome. By Rome is meant, the spirit that distinguishes her, and the influences which gathered power in days that were dark and days that were bright. By Rome is meant, the men who serve at her altars; now known as a monk, then as a bishop, anon archbishop or a cardinal, but first and last as a Jesuit.

Lord Robert Montagu, formerly the companion of the Jesuits, says: “The system of the Church of Rome is a wonderful mechanism. Its centre is the Pope. Yet it is independent of the Pope. Many a Pope has been a dotard; very many have been debauchees; and still the machine works on, irrespective of his idiosyncrasies. It is the Cabinet, the Privy Council, the College of Cardinals that governs. That body never dies. One old man and another falls away, like a sere and yellow leaf; but the tree remains; the tradition and knowledge of centuries are still there. The records of the past are added to the daily experiences of the present; and that experience is being ever gathered in every corner of the earth, wherever there is a priest or a missioner. From every race, from every land, from every people, nay, from every family, there stretches a telegraphic wire of secret intelligence to the central section of the Vatican. There the intelligence is used by free minds, who are destitute of family, without all the affections that are natural to men; without a country or a home, without patriotism, without restraint of obligations, oaths, moral principles or divine laws; because the word of the Pope is supposed to tear those holy fetters away as gossamer webs; and priestly absolution is held to wash out even the slightest taint of sin.”

“That is right which is done to advance the power of the Pope. That is true which the Pope may please to assert ex cathedra; that which favors the interests of the church is good. Even crime is commendable if it be done for the church. The advance of the Papacy has always been as the advance of the plague, irresistible, unsparing, remorseless, and deadly. Its myriads of secret agents overmatch armies and dispose of their generals. Its purposes are fathomless as the sea and silent as the grave : its action in every state, setting nation to hamper nation, and exciting one statesman against another; breaking up, dividing, crumbling its enemies, while its own party is always united; conspiring everywhere towards one object. Ever victorious, it will triumph, until the great hour for the doom of the harlot, which sits upon the nations of the earth, has struck, until the warning voice has been heard through the world,

“Come out of her my people.”

Having increased from 45,000 in 1783 in the United States, very largely through emigration and annexation; and having worked in accordance with one fixed and comprehensive plan, viz. : to get all possible in land, in influence, in gifts, and give out nothing and lose nothing, having adopted a system of borrowing money by a kind of saving-bank process, illustrated by Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati, whereby millions of dollars have been obtained and used for the purchase of real estate, building vast structures, and mortgaging them for all they can carry, Rome has an appearance of prosperity, the result of dishonesty and deception, and entirely misleading. In Cincinnati and elsewhere, these vast sums used have been stolen from the poor, who have no redress except in suits of law, which are expensive, and which result in putting the litigant under the ban of the church.

The Pope claims that the church has an innate, legitimate right to the entire earth. Rome takes, holds, and uses property as if she were master. This property, to the extent of $300,000,000 in the U. S., is vested in the bishops. The people who give the money have no control of it. In England, Rome obtained possession, at one time, of one-third of the Kingdom; and it was only through the statute of mortmain deliverance was obtained. In Spain, in Mexico, in Italy, and in other Catholic countries, the civil power had to resort to confiscation, so that the people might have an opportunity to build; hence Church property should be taxed, and then Rome would be compelled to disgorge. The city of Brooklyn is robbed annually of $100,000 taxes on one piece of property captured by Jesuit cruelty and cunning, and yet there is not a church, nor an ecclesiastical edifice on it. The entire separation of church and state is the principle of our government, and to prevent the possibility of any sect, or combination of sects, from imposing, or even attempting to impose, a state church upon the United States, it was enacted March 4th, 1789, in the first amendment to the Constitution, that ” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ” and yet public land and money has been given by the Government to the Roman Catholic church amounting to millions of dollars. The block on which the Fifth Avenue Cathedral stands in New York is valued at $4,000,000. Land has been given in many military posts for Roman Catholic chapels, in direct antagonism to the letter and spirit of the Republic.

This is the Rome that entered Washington, so soon as the wilderness began to bud and blossom towards its present life and state. Let us admit the truth. Rome has silently and stealthily coiled her folds about the capital, and few are aware of the peril which threatens the peace and prosperity of the nation. {See Frontispiece} Into Washington Rome came with exceeding care and grace. She has risen to power and dominion through the instigation of Satan and the instrumentality of designing men. Rome seeks political supremacy at the capital and throughout the nation. Is it not high time that every loyal citizen, and friend of religious and civil liberty, should awake to the importance of firmly withstanding the emissary in those places where she seeks control? No man who is a loyal Roman Catholic is properly qualified to be a representative in our national or state legislatures. No man who truckles to Romanism is not to be a representative of a free people.

Let us not forget that the signal of our nationality was the signal of Rome’s irrevocable decree to crush us in our might; and commencing with the honeyed expressions of the tongue and a sardonic smile upon her face, she has received largely and enjoyed long our national confidence and hospitality. We remembered that it was not the least of America’s glory, that her Roman Catholic sons fought and suffered and periled for her liberty; and we did not thus perceive that the Jesuitism, which then and now absolutely controls the church of Rome in the United States, never had anything in common with our institutions, the Declaration of Independence, or our Republican government. There is an eternal hostility between the principles of Washington and the principles of Popery, between the spirit of Romish priests and prelates and that of the fathers of the Republic, who owned allegiance only to God, and required no intercessor but His well-beloved Son . There were no surpliced traitors, no perfidious prelates, in that great convention which formed the eternal code of our liberties, and wrote our everlasting principles; but God-fearing, God-depending, God-trusting men of robust and manly life. It was no vulnerable conceited popinjay but the spirit which had drawn lightning from the skies who arose in that assembly, and to solve doubt, and difficulty, and danger said : ” We seem to be at our wits ends; we need help from above. Let us pray” They knelt the collected wisdom of America before the God who had given them Independence, that He might guide them to a Constitution wise and holy enough to save it. Let not their work be in vain. Put the trumpet to the lip, and sound the alarm : Papal Despotism has Washington in her grasp! The presence of the dragon is here and is felt; his breath is diffusing its poison; his touch has wounded, and already partially withered our schools, the ballot-box and the Bible. Men claiming to be Protestants are bartering the principles of American liberty for priestly influence and papal despotism. To head against it, truth must be told. Then will the clouds of mental and moral darkness be dissipated, and the poor, blinded Papists, in bondage to priestcraft, will come forth into the freedom of Bible and Republican independence.

The female Jesuit in America, as in Europe, is to be dreaded. No one can follow the trail of the Romish serpent without being convinced that Satan did not turn from women after he wrought the ruin of the father of the race through his seductive power over Eve. Through woman he finds a passage-way to the heart of man. No greater peril confronts us than is found in the readiness with which Protestant young men marry Roman Catholic wives. Gen. Wm. T. Sherman beclouded his life, gave up his hold upon the children God might give him, and so was robbed of his boy, and did injustice to his own high aims, when he took to his heart a woman who had first given herself to the priests of Rome. Because of this, he publicly declared he could not accept the nomination for the Presidency. Whatever he may do, or not do, she has been the willing and untiring servant of Rome. By her wiles another brilliant man lost the Presidency, and is today a broken wreck. There were good reasons why God forbade the children of Israel marrying wives from the heathen about them. When this was done, the woman captured the man and carried with her the children. Solomon, with all his wisdom, could not withstand her wiles. Rome understands this power, and places schools, filled with brilliant and captivating ladies, near the military posts, so as to capture the young men. Major-General Schofield was born into a Christian home, and had an honored father, who was a Baptist minister, but a Romish wife has taken him into the embrace of Rome. Let the warning be heeded. Judge Jesuitism by its infamous conduct towards the amiable Clement. Pius the Sixth came next. We cannot describe the plottings and conflicts which disturbed the church prior to his election. His character is made apparent by the utterance : Pius the Fifth is the last Pope canonized by the church, I wish to walk in his footsteps” Pius the Fifth was the instigator of the St. Bartholomew massacre. Pius the Sixth has been described as enterprising and irresolute, interested and prodigal, suspicious and careless, false in heart and knavish in mind. Pius the Sixth had two children by his own sister! {History of the Popes, by Louis Mare De Gormen, p. 398. Ibid., p. 403} His conduct infected Romanism.

It was during his life as Pope, that Leopold of Tuscany, brother of Joseph Second of Austria, determined to clean out Tuscany by resisting the polluting tendencies of the Papacy. In “Why Priests Should Wed ” there is no more terrible picture than is here set forth. Scipio di Ricci, through investigations, brought out revelations which horrified Europe. From the declarations of the nuns, it was shown that in the convents of St. Lucia and St. Catherine at Pistoria, the female Dominicans received the confessors in the chapter and abandoned themselves to the most unbridled excesses of libertinage on the very steps of the altar; other nuns owned that frequently jealousy, or the inconstancy of the monks, led to serious collisions; that they disputed for the provincial, or prior; that they deprived themselves of their money or effects for their confessors; that several Dominicans had five or six mistresses at once, who formed a kind of seraglio; that at each promotion of a provincial in the monastery of the men, the newly chosen went to the convent to choose a favorite, and that the novices, entirely naked, were ranged in two rows for his inspection; that he placed his hand on the head of her who pleased him most and made her his mistress at once” Why are nunneries in Washington better than these pest houses? Has Rome changed ? Scipio di Ricci, under the direction of Leopold, fought these enormities, and Pius the Sixth fought the Reformer and fulminated bull after bull against him. To clean out the impurities of the Papacy condemned the Pope of Rome.

Then it was Voltaire led the philosophers in their attack upon the church. Free thought in Europe led to untrammeled thinking in the New World. Louis the Sixteenth expiated his crimes upon the scaffold. A Republic was proclaimed in France. It was the out growth of the birth of the Republic of the United States. Pius the Sixth fulminates a bull of excommunication against the French nation, designating it by the names of “impious” ” sacriligeous ” and ” abominable,” and calls doAvn upon it the thunders of heaven and earth. The Convention sends the following letter to His Holiness: “The Executive Council of the Republic to the prince bishop of Rome. Pontiff, You will immediately discharge from your dungeons several French citizens who are detained in them. If these demands are ineffectual, you will learn that the Republic is too bold to overlook an outrage, or too powerful to allow it to go unpunished.”

Then came the fight with Napoleon Bonaparte. Pius the Sixth endeavored to appease the storm; but these conflicts, and, above all, his debauchery with the beautiful Duchess de Broschi, his daughter, gave a, fatal blow to his health. His two bastards, Romnald and the Duke de Broschi, hastened to lay hands on the treasures collected in the Vatican. Up rose the people against the Pontiff kings informing him that he was no longer anything in the government.” And my dignity,” exclaimed the Pope, anxiously; “what becomes of it?” “It will be preserved to you,” said General Cervani; “and a provision of two thousand Roman crowns is granted you to maintain your rank.” “And my person, what is to become of it?” “It is safe,” replied Cervani; “and they will even grant you a hundred men for your guard.” ” I am still Pope, then,” said the destroyer of his sister’s virtue, with a strange laugh. Thus he went on, until the resources of life were used up by age, debaucheries, and excesses. A paralysis, which had at first fallen on his limbs, extended to his entrails, and freed the earth, on the 29th of August, 1799, of the last pontiff of the eighteenth century.

Then came Pius the Seventh. The new pope was elected after one hundred and four days of discussion and strife. To Napoleon he was indebted for his election. To Napoleon he became servile and fulsome, and exhausted all forms of adulatory thanks. He it was who left Rome and went to Paris to consecrate the Consul who had changed the Republic into an empire, and took to himself a crown. Pius the Seventh restored the Jesuits to power. He persecuted the good, and helped the bad; and on the 6th of July, 1822, fell in his chamber and broke his hip, and died April 20, 1823.

The Papacy, weak in Europe, was not strong in America. The Jesuits were alive there and here. They were hated there as here they prospered there as here. Into Washington Rome came, not as a novice, but as an adept in the art of ruling. Every thing was new and untried. Help was welcomed, come from whence it might. The Jesuits were wary and discreet. They represented an organization that joined together ancient civilizations. Truly has Macaulay said : “No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon and when camel-leopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of supreme pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the Nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the Eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.”

Rome was full of life and vigor. Republics had been throttled in Europe. The attempt was to be made to destroy the one being established in America. There is much about Rome to give it prestige. Age does much. Pretension does more. She assumes apostolical pre-eminence. Few care to prove the falsity of the claims. They tolerate, they endure, and some embrace.

ROME POSES

as the sole authorized channel of Divine grace to saints and sinners. She has large endowments and accumulated wealth. She holds her church-edifices, monasteries, convents, educational and charitable establishments, by such a tenure as to be independent of contemporary fear or favor. By the skillful use of the political and social influence connected with its wealth and numbers and centralized organizations, it has facilities for advancing to honor, and otherwise repaying, those who sustain and honor her, and for hindering or preventing the prosperity of those who oppose her.

She has also an element of great strength in her grandeur and showy magnificence. Her grand cathedrals and churches, situated in the most desirable situations; her gorgeous ceremonies, and pompous processions, with all the adjuncts of unrivaled music and artistic splendor, produce their effect. Churches went up. They were beautiful to the eye. Priests walked in humility, not in pride. The war was no sooner over, than Rome built for the colored people the handsomest and most stately structure in Washington. That was smart. None knew it better than the priests of Rome. Pictures of the most costly character were hung on its walls. The altar drapery was of the best. White priests ministered at the altar; but schools were established for the education of black priests and black nuns. They call it St. Augustine. The name is good. The blacks and whites bow down together before false images and alike disobey God, and people call it “religion.”

The Jesuits built St. Aloysius. In Washington all regard Jesuitism with favor. St. Matthew’s is the home of diplomats. The great find there a welcome, and bow down to graven images. England disgraces herself and insults this country by sending a Roman Catholic as Minister to our Government; while she attempts to throttle the serpent seeking her life at home.

St. Patrick, on G and 10th Streets; Holy Trinity, Georgetown; Immaculate Conception, N and 8th Streets; St. Aloysius for the Jesuits, St. Augustine for the exclusive use of colored people; St. Dominic, E and 6th Streets; St. Joseph’s; St. Mathew’s, N and 15th Streets; St. Paul’s, 15th and V; St. Peter’s on Capitol Hill; St. Stephen s, Pennsylvania Ave. and 25th Street; St. Teresa’s Anacosta; Visitation Convent Chapel, Tenallytown; St. Ann’s, attended from Georgetown College. The descendants of Luther and Calvin came to America to have a church without a Pope, where they made a government without a throne. Will they fail?

That question must be answered by this generation. The conduct of the American people today is shaping the destiny of the nation’s future. In the past, Some has asked permission to exist. This request it was American to grant. Today she demands the right to rule. This it will be American to repress.

In one way or another Rome pushes her way to seats of power and influence. Is it because Protestants are too modest, or too indifferent, to resist? The Romish Priest is in the workhouse caring for paupers because Protestant ministers neglect to do it. He gets a chaplaincy in the prison and jail for the same reason. It is come to be believed that Roman Catholics are adapted to care for our eleemosynary institutions; such as hospitals, houses of refuge, orphan asylums and institutions of kindred character, as are not Protestants. Let us not find fault with Romanists for doing what Protestants neglect to do. Nothing could be more unfair or unwise. Let us not give over to Romanists work that we ought to do ourselves. It is a surprising fact, that every hospital in Washington is in the hands of Roman Catholics with one exception, and that has the treasurer and three members of the Board, Roman Catholics; that Sisters of Charity are the nurses; and that American citizens are compelled to see these representatives of a faith utterly distasteful to the majority enthroned in power.

As a rule, American citizens do not like the head gear of the “Sisters.” “Why can t they take off those white-winged sun-bonnets in the ward?”asked one poor fellow, reared in a Protestant home, and yet sick in a hospital. “Sun-bonnets! “sneered another of the irreverent critics; “they re a cross between a white sun-bonnet and a broken down umbrella; and there’s no name that describes them.”{Mary A. Livermore, in “The Story of the War,”pp. 219}

This language describes the feeling of very many in the hospitals in Washington. They do not like the head-gear or the manners of the so-called Sisters of Mercy.”It is theory that there are no nobler and no more heroic women than those found in the Catholic sisterhoods. The fact explodes the theory. They are like other women: some are good, some are bad. Some kind, some cruel.

Rev. J. W. Parker, D.D., pastor, at one time, of the E-Street Baptist Church, of Washington, D.C., related, that his own brother was in a Washington hospital, and that nuns were the nurses. He desired a drink of water in the night, and asked for it, and overheard them say, “He is a heretic; let him choke.”

A friend in such a hospital, with nuns as nurses, found herself in a constant worry, because she would keep her New Testament by her side, and would have her pastor visit her. The nuns did every disagreeable thing possible, until the minister told them that if such conduct did not cease, it would be reported at headquarters, and punishment would be demanded.

Another woman, who had been at one time a Roman Catholic, and who had been converted to Christianity, found herself in the hospital ministered unto by the Sisters of Mercy. They brought to her bedside a priest. She declined to see him. He persisted in coming. Her Protestant friends and the minister were told that she had gone back to the Church of Rome and that she did not wish them more. They believed the story, and stayed away for the time. They insisted on administering “extreme unction,”daubed her with oil and drenched her with holy water, leaving her to die. The minister forced his way by the guards and got into the room.

“Why have you left me to the pitiless persecutions of these enemies of Christ?”

“They told me you wished it; that you had gone back to the idols of Rome, and turned your back on Christ.” “It is a lie, a Popish lie; I have asked for you daily, I turned with loathing from their mummeries, but was compelled by weakness to endure this oil and holy water. Take me out of here.”

The woman was removed to a home of love, where she was cared for. Why is such cruelty tolerated?

Clarence was the brother of the architect who supervised the construction of a large addition to the most important public building in Washington. Clarence had won the heart of a daughter of a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet. Her sister was married to an eminent lawyer, who was afterward a member of Garfield’s Cabinet. The lady insisted upon a reformation of life, and his taking up and following some honest occupation. He accepted a position under his brother, but soon fell into his former ways. Worn out with a debauch which lasted several weeks, he entered the Providence Hospital, which deserves to be styled “The Drunkard’s Retreat.”Then he professed the Roman Catholic religion, without a reformation of life, and without giving up his cups even for a brief period, and in that faith lived and died a drunkard, and was buried in consecrated ground.

Another and a sadder scene. A lady, beautiful in face and form, was upon her death-bed. The priest came to administer extreme unction. He had, of course, the room to himself, and while with the lady alone, attempted an assault. She shrieked for help. The daughter, despite the rules of the church, burst into the room. “Turn the wretch out, “exclaimed the mother, “and promise me, that come what will, you will never allow a priest to approach you, nor have more to do with the Church of Rome. “The promise was made. Years passed. The daughter grew sick. Her friends were Roman Catholics. Her money was gone. She was compelled to be ministered unto by a Roman Catholic nurse, and because she would not suffer a priest to come and administer extreme unction, and die in the faith of Rome, they drew the bed from beneath her dying form, and left her upon the bare slats to lie, until a Protestant friend, now living in Washington, brought pillows and placed beneath her and took her to her own house, where she died. Then they would not let her rest, but dug up her body, carried it to consecrated ground, and boasted that she died in the Church of Rome.

Because such conduct is possible, Roman Catholic surgeons oppose the employment of Protestant nurses and declare they will not have them in the service, and that only the Sisters of the Catholic Church shall receive appointments. “I sought,”said Mrs. M. A. Livermore, “for the cause of this decision.” “Your Protestant nurses are always finding some mare’s nest or other, “said one of the surgeons, “that they can t let alone. They all write for the papers, and the story finds its way into print, and directly we are in hot water. Now, these sisters never see anything they ought not to see, nor hear anything, and they never write for the papers, and the result is, we get along very comfortably with them. It was futile to combat their prejudices, or to attempt to show them that they lacked the power to enforce their decisions.”

Does not this explain why the * Sisters of Mercy “are preferred in Washington? “There is not a hospital in Washington where a Christian can go and feel that he or she is not confronted by Roman Catholics. Columbia Hospital for women, supported by Congress, has a drunken, brutal, Roman Catholic surgeon in charge. Priests are banqueted, and given full sway in the house; all the illegitimate children are christened by them, and the influence of Rome pervades “every department. The hospital erected in memory of the sainted Garfield is infested by them, because of the idea, so prevalent, that Romanists are the only people who can do charity work. Alas for humanity, when such ideas prevail!”

Miss Mary A. Livermore, in her “Story of the War,”speaks of the persistent effort to fill hospitals with “Sisters of Mercy,”and exclude good, trained, excellent Protestant nurses. They would not be daunted or turned back. “Our husbands, sons and brothers need us and want us. If the surgeons are determined to employ Roman Catholic nurses, to the exclusion of Protestant, we shall contend for our rights, and appeal to the Secretary of War.”They carried the day, and filled the land with their forces. Had the Protestant ladies of Washington manifested equal courage and persistency, they could have held control. The United States Hospitals got clear of the head-gear of the nuns, and filled their places with trained Protestant nurses.

On the tenth of June, 1861, Secretary Cameron vested Dorothea Dix with sole power to appoint women nurses in the hospitals. Secretary Stanton succeeding him, ratified their appointment. Miss Dix desired women over thirty years of age, plain almost to repulsion in dress, and devoid of personal attractions. Many of the women whom she rejected, because they were too young and too beautiful, entered the service under other auspices and became eminently with her work of relief. To their honor, be it said, the “boys”reciprocated her affection most heartily. “That homely figure, clad in calico, wrapped in a shawl, and surmounted with a * shaker bonnet, is more to this army than the Madonna to a Catholic,” said an officer, pointing to her as she emerged from the Sanitary Commission headquarters, laden with supplies.”

Mary A. Bickerdyke was born in Knox County, Ohio, July 19, 1817. She came of Revolutionary ancestors, and was never happier than when recounting the stories told her when a child by the grandfather who served with Washington during the seven years struggle. Her husband died two years before the breaking out of the war. She was living in Galesburgh, 111., and was a member of the Congregational Church when the war broke out. Hardly had the the troops reached Cairo, when, from the sudden change in their habits, sickness broke out, and the ladies sent down Mother Bickerdyke. After the battle of Belmont she was appointed matron of the large post hospital at Cairo. The surgeon was given to drunkenness; he had filled all the positions in the hospitals with surgeons and officers of his sort, and bacchanalial carousals in the “doctor’s room “were of frequent occurrence. “Sisters of Mercy”in that hospital would have been quiet. Soldiers might suffer. Officers and surgeons might drink to drunkenness, especially if they were Roman Catholics; but they would be mute and observing. They are this way in the hospitals in Washington, where drunken surgeons revel, priests christen their illegitimate children, while Government supports the concern, and all goes merry as a marriage bell.

Not so with Mother Bickerdyke. In twenty-four hours surgeon and matron were at swords points. She denounced him to his face; and when the garments and delicacies sent her for the use of the sick and wounded disappeared mysteriously, she charged their theft upon him and his subordinates.

He ordered her out of the hospital, and threatened to put her out, if she did not hasten her departure. She replied that she would stay as long as the men needed her, that if he put her out of one door she should come in at another. When anybody left, it would be he, and not she. She told him she had lodged complaints against him at headquarters. Finding a ward- master dressed in the shirt, slippers and socks that had been sent her for the sick, she seized him by the collar in his own ward, and disrobed him “saws ceremonie”before the patients. Leaving him nude, save his pantaloons, she uttered the parting injunction, Now, you rascal, let’s see what you ll steal next.”

To ascertain who were the thieves of the food she prepared, she put tartar emetic in the peaches left on the table to cool. Then she went to her own room to await results. She did not have to wait long. Soon the sounds from the terribly sick thieves reached her ears, when, like a Nemesis, she stalked in among them. There they were, cooks, table-waiters, stewards, ward-masters, all, save some of the surgeons suffering terribly from the emetic; but more from the apprehension that they were poisoned.

“Peaches don t seem to agree with you, eh?”she said, looking at the pale, retching, groaning fellows, with a sardonic smile. “Well, let me tell you, that you will have a worse time than this, if you keep on stealing. You may eat something seasoned with rat-bane one of these nights.”Colonel Grant was then in command. The thieves were returned to the regiments, honest men were substituted in their places, the drunken surgeon was removed, and one of the noblest of men was put in charge. That is the value of having an honest Christian woman.”

“I never saw anybody like her,”said a volunteer surgeon who came on the boat with her after the battle of Fort Donelson; “there was really nothing for us surgeons to do but dress wounds and administer medicines. She drew out clean shirts or drawers from some corner whenever they were needed. Nourishment was ready for any man, as soon as he was brought on board. Every one was sponged from blood and the frozen mire of the battle-field, as far as his condition allowed. His blood-stiffened, and sometimes horribly filthy uniform, was exchanged for soft, clean, hospital garments. Incessant cries of Mother! Mother! Mother! rang through the boat in every note of beseeching and anguish. And to every man she turned with a heavenly tenderness, as if he were indeed her son.”(pp. 484). Next we see her at Savannah, Tenn., among the sick and perishing. One of the surgeons went to the rear with a wounded man, and found her wrapped in the gray overcoat of a rebel officer; for she had disposed of her blanket shawl to some poor fellow who needed it. She was wearing a soft, slouch hat, having lost her inevitable Shaker bonnet.

“Madam, you seem to combine in yourself a sick- diet kitchen and a medical staff. May I enquire under whose authority you are working?”

Without pausing in her work, she answered him, “I have received my authority from the Lord God Almighty; have you anything that ranks higher than that? “and went on with her work without looking up.

Later on, at Memphis, she found a medical director who was a Catholic, who nationally gave preference to the Sisters of Mercy as nurses. He disapproved of nearly everything Mother Bickerdyke did, and tried to get rid of her. He abused her, thwarted her, and sought to dismiss her attendants and assistants. Through the storm she went to the General, got an order in her favor, and then told the director : “Its no use, for you to try and tie me up with your red tape. There’s too much to be done down here to stop for that. And doctor, I guess you hadn t better get into a row with me; for whenever anybody does, one of us always goes to the wall, and taint never me!”They became the best of friends, and Protestant nurses came to be rated in accordance with their value. A drunken surgeon hindered her work; she got him discharged. Officers of the highest rank believed in her, and cheerfully granted her request. The surgeon went to General Sherman and asked to be reinstated. “Who put you out?”An old meddlesome woman by the name of Bickerdyke.” “Ah! Mother Bickerdyke! If she put you out, you must stay out; for she ranks me.”

At Chattanooga her life reads like a romance. We cannot describe her versatility of talent and genius displayed in saving life. General Sherman had issued orders forbidding agents of sanitary stores, or agents of any description, to go over the road from Nashville to Chattanooga. Mother Bickerdyke was their only hope. She could influence Gen. Sherman as could no other person. Her pass from Gen. Grant would take her to Chattanooga, despite Gen. Sherman’s prohibition.

“Halloa! How did you get down here?”asked one of the General’s staff officers, as he saw her enter Sherman’s headquarters.

“Came clown in the cars, of course; there’s no other way of getting down here, that I know of,”replied the matter-of-fact woman; “1 want to see General Sherman.”

“He is in there, writing,”said the officer, pointing to an inner room; “but I guess he won’t see you.”

“Guess he will; “and she pushed into the apartment.

“Good morning General; I want to speak to you a moment. May I come in?” “I should think you had got in,”answered the General, barely looking up, in great annoyance. “What’s up, now?”

“Why, General,”said the earnest matron, in a perfect torrent of words, “we can t stand that last order of yours, nohow. You ll have to change it, sure.”

“Well, I m busy to-day, and cannot attend to you. I will see you some other time. “She saw the smile in the corner of his mouth, and replied : “General! don t send me away until you fix this.”He fixed it, and for weeks all the sanitary stores sent from Nashville to Chattanooga, and the forts of that road, were sent, directly or indirectly, through this mediation of Mother Bickerdyke.

This woman, distinguished for common sense, for devotion to the soldiers, is left without employment, and nuns that never saw a battle-field, and Sisters of Charity that never had any sympathy with the soldiers, are placed in charge of Government hospitals, because Protestants are dumb when they ought to speak, and blind when they ought to see.

This wonderful woman was for years without recognition from the Government, and is now in the pension office of San Francisco, when she belongs to the best hospital position in the gift of the Government. As when Moses and Aaron appeared before Pharaoh and used their wonder-working rod the magicians imitated them, so when the white wings of hospital tents were brightening the vision in various portions of the land Rome saw her opportunity and began her work in Washington.

The Providence General Hospital, corner of 2d and D streets, is famed in Washington. It was erected in the midst of the war.

Enter this hospital. Nuns have charge. The patients, be they Protestant or Roman Catholic, are expected to attend service in accordance with the forms of Rome. Proselyting is a business, and when this is impossible, the patient suffers.

Capt. Amos Cliff was in the Pension Bureau. He was sick. He carried to the hospital a watch and money, and after paying his board for a week, died. All his effects disappeared, as is the custom. The Grand Army Relief Committee, at the head of which is Capt. Frank A. Beuter, having learned of his death, went with Capt, D. A. Denison to inquire for him. No intelligence was furnished. He was a dead soldier. They knew where to look for his remains. His body was found in the Medical College, being cut- up by the surgeons. The Grand Army boys took the mutilated remnants of a brave soldier, and, purchasing a coffin, sent what was left of an honored father to his friends. They who are so particular about giving a Roman Catholic burial, surrendered the body of a Grand Army soldier to the surgeon, not caring what was done with it or where it went, to a pauper’s grave or a surgeon’s table.

Imagine Mother Bickerdyke in such a position, and how different would be the treatment received!

It is fashionable to bow down to Rome. All seem aware that there are seven millions of Roman Catholics in this country. The many forget that there are fifty millions who are not Roman Catholics, who have some rights in this free land, which all are under some obligation to respect. The Protestant element waits for a leadership. American citizens should be jealous of their rights. They should be, not only self-respecting, but self-asserting. God has planted, preserved and grown this nation, not to bow down to the worst despotism the world ever saw ; but to lift up the enslaved, and cause them to read their possible destiny in the lines of promise written by God’s providence in the marvellous possibilities placed within their reach. The Republic of the United States is to be the educator of the world. American citizens must keep this thought in mind, and so develop a higher type of humanity, better hospital service, a broader Christianity, and a nobler living than has hitherto blessed the world.

How Rome crept into Washington has been described. Stealthily, slowly, meekly, but surely, she came; and she came to stay. Long before the Revolution Rome was here. Washington saw her, and warned against her insidious influence. She came among us in poverty of spirit and in the ashes of humiliation. Anna Ella Carroll, of Maryland, a descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, recited the story of Papal aggression, told of the holy confidence of the Pope, how the Jesuits determined “to convert every house in America into a fort, and to keep the gates open and the houses without defence.”Protestants came and went freely, their honor, piety and loyalty to the Government was everywhere highly esteemed; and soon American Protestants placed their children in their hands for safe-keeping; helped them build their churches and public institutions because of their avowed purpose to enjoy our free institutions. They paraded in biblical plainness, and shut up the mystery of their pages from all sensitive readers. But while they wrote with a crow-quill for American liberty, they were making shoes to pinch the feet of the children whom they seduced to enter their schools, colleges and convents. They captivated women with little holy playthings, sympathized with their weaknesses, and ministered to their ills. They shut up the beautiful and innocent to make vows for Papal Jesuitism in free America. When they get the daughters, they want the sons, and in the name of liberty ask for the children. Their Propaganda of Rome, of Lyons, of France, of Vienna and Austria, build colleges, nunneries and monasteries, in which they offer education almost without money and without price, that they may stifle the hopes of the youth entrusted to their care.

Religious toleration has given welcome to a Jesuit priesthood that is making a religion without God and a state without liberty. They denounce the public schools, curse the Bible, murder history, and maim and mutilate literature. They teach American children, that all the founders of this Republic were Papists; that Washington, the father of his country, died a Roman Catholic, and in his last moments, it is asserted, confessed and communicated by the Romish Bishop of Baltimore; and that the relations of this great American patriot, fearing Americans would repudiate their hero, desired the secret never to be disclosed. The Romish community claim that they know of this conversion, and the Washington who wanted none but “Americans on guard,”is a candidate for beatification by the Pope of Rome. Of course Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a Catholic. Lafayette, who came to our help, was brought here, it is claimed, through the interposition of Bishop Carroll, the Catholic, who in the interests of the Republic went to France to plead our cause. The best Republicans, they teach, are all Romanists. The writers of their school books exclude the history of distinguished Protestants, and fill their pages with the biographies of men and women who were loyal to Rome. This Papal influence came seeking little by little; it assumed, then boasted, and now denounces us. They say, Out of the church is no salvation. The monk says, Pray and read; while he stalks forth as though he had all America on a string of beads, carrying a pent-up fire to burn up the suspected and reviled intellects which come near him. Jesuitism was born in Spain, reared in France, developed under Papal Rome, and diffused in the United States of America. The Company of Jesus, now in the United States, is great, powerful, and oppressive. It is mysterious and demoniacal, defying our science and weaving its malice over the brightest hopes of the world.

To describe Jesuitism, that was regarded as too foul and devilish to be borne even in Roman Catholic countries, seems to be a duty. Founded in 1534, and sanctioned by Pope Paul III. in 1540, it was expelled from England, 1581; France, 1594; Portugal, 1598; England again, 1604; France again, 1606; Russia, 1717; Portugal again, 1759; France again, 1762-3; Spain, 1767; Genoa, 1767; Venice again, 1767; Sicily, 1767; Naples, 1768; Malta, 1768; Parma, 1768; all, with the exception of England and Russia, being strictly Roman Catholic states. Eventually, the Order was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV, in 1773; but continued to exist under other names, and disguised under the title of “Brothers of the Faith.”It re-entered France, and had there several colleges in its hands, which were closed in 1828; some of them have since been reopened, and within the last twenty years, the number of persons belonging to the Order has been doubled. The Society was re-established by Pope Pius VII. in 1814, and finds free scope to carry out its treasonable designs under the American flag. Though it has stifled free thought wherever it could, introducing as their first injunction in all their schools, “Let no one, even in matters which are of no danger to piety, ever introduce a new question; “though it persecuted Galileo and oppressed Columbus; yet this Jesuit priesthood walks the soil of the Republic as a benefactor and finds in presidents and congressmen willing subjects of its will.

Henry IV. of France admitted to Sally, that he allowed the Jesuit priesthood to enter Catholic France only because he feared them! Philip II. of Spain, said: The only Order of which I know nothing is the Jesuit.”This, interwoven with Popery, is the Roman Catholic church of the United States. The federal compact, formed by the New England colonies in 1643, to resist the Indians, was the first Union made by the Anglo-Saxon upon our soil, and prepared the way for their Declaration of Rights later on. Jesuitism fought liberty amid its birth-throes. On the 10th of June, a resolution was adopted by a bare majority, and to obtain the unanimous sentiment of all the colonies a postponement was made until July, after securing the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Difficulties like mountains towered in the path of the Fathers. A spirit of opposition and discord pervaded their councils. They were driven to seek God’s help. Congress paused to ask His guidance and blessing; and until He gave strength, union seemed impossible. The Committee reported on the twenty-eight of June, and on the 4th of July, 1776, by the final decision of Congress and the vote of every colony, this Declaration was engrossed; when, on the second of August, all the members present, and some who became so after the fourth of July, signed it in behalf of all the people. The bells then pealed the advent of Independence. But Romanists were then, as now, opposed to the upgoing structure. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the thirteen original States were not ratified until 1781, because the Roman Catholics of Mary land opposed and refused to unite; so steadfast has ever been the opposition of the Romish priesthood to our liberty. {Etudes Religeuse}

Attention has recently been turned to where the Jesuits are at work and what they are doing. “In the Balkan Peninsula there are forty-five Jesuit missionaries; in Africa, and especially Egypt, Madagascar, and the Zambesi region, 223; in Asia, especially Armenia, Syria, and certain parts of China, 699. In China alone the number is 195 all of French nationality. In Oceanica, including the Philippines, the Malay Archipelago, Australia, and New Zealand, the number is 270; in America, including certain specified States of the Union, portions of Canada, -British Honduras, Brazil and Peru, 1,130; the total number of Jesuits scattered over the Globe, in purely missionary work, being 2,377. These are of various nationalities: but the vast majority are French. In the distribution great attention is paid to nationality; thus in Illyria, Dalmatia, and Albania, they are all Venetians; in Constantinople and Syria, Sicilians; in Africa, Asia Minor and China, French; while no French Jesuits are to be found in any part of the American Continent. In the Bombay and Bengal Presidencies, they are Germans and Belgiums, respectively; in the Philippines, Spanish; in the Malay Archipelago, Dutch; in Eastern Australia and New Zealand, Irish; in the United States, Germans, Neapolitans, and Piedmontese, are found working in specified and distinct districts; those laboring among the Indians of Canada are Canadians; in the British West India Colonies, they are English; in Central America, Spaniards; in South America, Italians, Spaniards and Germans, the Italians and Germans having all Brazil to themselves, doubtless because of the enormous Italian and German immigration to Brazil. It will be understood that the spheres of labor of the different orders, are carefully laid down at Rome.”

During the war, Washington saw the peril. While the American Eevolution was progressing, our Continental Congress forbade any but her native sons to be employed in the foreign service of the country. Said George Washington: “You are not to enlist any person suspected of being an enemy to the liberty of America.”One hundred chosen men were to be enrolled to form a corps to be instructed in the manoeuvres necessary to be introduced into the army, and serve as models for the execution of them. “They must be American-born. “”Put none but Americans on guard “came, because of the fear of foreign influence. “I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner amongst us, except the Marquis de Lafayette.” { Letter to Governor Morris, White Plains, July 24, 1778, by Geo. Washington} Thomas Jefferson recommended to the Postmaster General “to employ no foreigner, or revolutionary tory, in any of his offices.”This was in the olden time. Notwithstanding this,– concession followed concession, until the offices of the land were filled with foreigners, and American- born citizens were at a discount. Said Archbishop Hughes: “Irishmen in America are learning to bide their time. Year by year the Irish are becoming more and more powerful in America. At length the propitious time will come some accidental, sudden collision, and a Presidential campaign at hand. We will then use the very profligacy of our politicians for our purposes. They will want to buy the Irish vote, and we will tell them how they can buy it, in a lump, from Maine to California.”{Pp. 352}

At present, Washington is in the toils of Rome. The serpent has entwined its folds about the Capitol, and all who would have honor, peace or promotion must bend the neck. It was in 1855 a writer declared, that the National Administration was in the hands of a foreign, Roman-Catholic hierarchy. The Postmaster General was an Irish Roman Catholic at the dictation of the Pope of Rome, to obtain direct access to the postal concerns and dearest rights of the American people.”

In the State Department at Washington, not only a majority of the subordinates were foreign Roman Catholics, but they occupied the most important posts in the trust and confidence of the American Government. “Are you a Roman Catholic foreigner?”is the question put to the applicant, and, if answered in the affirmative, the sons of Revolutionary officers, who gave their houses to the flames and their bodies to the bayonet, are indecently thrust aside. Our naturalization laws are evaded criminals and paupers vote down Americans at the ballot-box. Public and free schools are antagonized, the Bible driven out, expelled and burned. The police of our large cities are largely foreigners; while at one time thirty-nine on the police force of New York were branded as criminals from the prisons of Europe. These are the hordes which rush to our shores for democratic liberty, and have imposed upon them by the Jesuit masters the obligation to go armed to the ballot-box, and vote for Rome at the dictation of the Pope, and against liberty – against the public school, and the best interests of their adopted country.

At least four-fifths of these aliens come to our shores to escape the persecution of the Papal despots at home, and to find refreshment in pastures green beyond the sea. These fill our poor-houses, our jails, prisons, and lunatic asylums; and why not? Jail birds are promised liberty if they will emigrate to America. In 1837 the Mayor of Baltimore detected a shipload of 260 persons, at Fort McHenry, who as criminals were brought into port in irons. The Mayor remonstrated, and asked Martin Van Buren to order them back; but he replied, that there was no power to prevent their landing, and so these miserable wretches were permitted to join the party that flattered the Rebellion and attempted to break up the union of States by breaking up the union of hearts. Through out Germany, as throughout Ireland, agents in the pay of steamship lines, who desired freight, advised the maimed, deformed, and crippled to take passage to Baltimore, New Orleans and Quebec, instead of New York, because in those places no laws exist to prevent their landing. Father Chiniquy relates, in his “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,”these facts (pp 668-687):

“It was in the spring of 1852, a large assembly, composed principally of priests, met at Buffalo, to confer with D Arcy McGee, then editor of the free man’s Journal, in regard to peopling the prairies of the West with Irish Roman Catholics. He published several able articles to show that the Irish people, with very few exceptions, were demoralized, degraded, and kept poor, around their groggeries, and showed how they would thrive, become respectable and rich, if they could be induced to exchange their grog-shops for the fertile lands of the West. A large assembly gathered. Great was the disappointment of D Arcy McGee when he saw that the greatest part of those priests were sent by the bishops of the United States to oppose and defeat his plans.

“He vainly spoke, with burning eloquence, for his pet scheme. The majority coldly answered him: We are determined, like you, to take possession of the United States, and rule them; but we cannot do that without acting secretly, and with the utmost wisdom. If our plans are known, they will surely be defeated. What does a skillful general do when he wants to conquer a country? Does he scatter his soldiers over the farm-lands, arid spend their time and energy in ploughing the fields and sowing grain. No! He~ keeps them well united around his banners, and marches at their head to the conquest of the strongholds, the rich and powerful cities. The farming countries then submit, and become the price of his victory, without moving a finger to subdue them. So it is with us. Silently and patiently, we must mass our Roman Catholics in the great cities of the United States, remembering that the vote of a poor journeyman, though he be covered with rags, has as much weight in the scale of power as the Millionaire Astor, and if we have two votes against his one, he will become as powerless as an oyster. Let us then multiply our votes; let us call our poor but faithful Irish Catholics from every corner of the world, and gather them into the very hearts of those proud citadels which the Yankees are so rapidly building under the names of Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, Buffalo, Albany, Troy, Cinncinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Francisco, etc. Under the shadows of those great cities, the Americans consider themselves as a giant and unconquerable race. They look upon the poor Irish Catholic people with supreme contempt, as only fit to dig their canals, sweep their streets, and work in their kitchens. Let no one awake those sleeping lions, to-day. Let us pray God that they may sleep and dream their sweet dreams a few years more. How sad will be their awakening, when, with outnumbering votes, we will turn them out forever from every position of honor, power and profit! What will those hypocritical and godless sons and daughters of the fanatical Pilgrim Fathers say, when not a single judge, not a single teacher, not a single policeman will be elected if he be not a devoted Roman Catholic? What will those so-called giants think of our matchless shrewdness and ability, when not a single senator or member of Congress will be chosen, if he be not submitted to our holy father the Pope? What a sad figure those Protestant Yankees will cut when we will not only elect the President, but fill and command the armies, man the navies, and hold the keys of the public treasury! It will then be time for our faithful Irish people to give up their grog-shops, in order to become the judges and governors of the land. Then our poor and humble mechanics will leave their damp ditches and muddy streets, to rule the cities in all their departments, from the stately mansion of Mayor of New York, to the humble, though not less noble, position of teacher.

Then, yes! then, we will rule the United States, and lay them at the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, that he may put an end to their godless system of education, and sweep away those impious laws of liberty of conscience, which are an insult to God and man! D Arcy McGee was left almost alone when the votes were taken. From that time the Catholic bishops and priests have gathered their legions into the great cities of the United States, and the American people must be blind indeed, if they do not see that, if they do nothing to prevent it, the day is very near when the Jesuits will rule this country, from the magnificent White House at Washington, to the humblest civil and military department of this vast Republic. They are already the masters of New York, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Paul, New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah, Cincinnati, Albany, Troy, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Francisco. Yes! San Francisco, the great queen of the Pacific, is in the hands of the Jesuits.

“From the very first days of the discovery of the gold mines of California, the Jesuits had the hope of becoming masters of these inexhaustible treasures, and they secretly laid their plans with the most profound ability and success. They saw at once that the great majority of the lucky miners, of every creed and nation, were going back home as soon as they had enough to secure an honorable competence to their families. The Jesuits saw at a glance that if they could persuade the Irish Catholics to settle and remain there, they would soon be masters and rulers of that Golden City, whose future is so bright, so great! And the scheme, worked day and night with the utmost perseverance, has been crowned with perfect success. The consequence is, that while you find only a few American, German, Scotch and English millionaires in San Francisco, you find more than fifty Irish Catholic millionaires in that city. Its richest bank (Nevada Bank) is in their hands, and so are all the street railways. The principal offices of the city are filled with Irish Roman Catholics. Almost all the police are composed of the same class, as well as the volunteer military organizations. Their compact unity in the hands of the Jesuits, with their enormous wealth, make them almost supreme masters of the mines of California and Nevada.

When one knows the absolute, abject submission of the Irish Roman Catholics, rich or poor, to their priests, how the mind, the soul, the will, the conscience, are firmly and irrevocably tied to the feet of the priests, he can easily understand that the Jesuits of the United States form one of the richest and most powerful corporations the world ever saw. “It is well known that fifty Catholic millionaires, with their myriads of employees, are, through their wives and by themselves, continually at the feet of the Jesuits, who swim in a golden sea.”No one, if he be not a Roman Catholic, or one of those so-called Protestants who give their daughters to the nuns and their sons to the Jesuits to be educated, has much hope, when the Jesuits rule, of having a lucrative office in the United States, to-day. It is to San Francisco that you must go to have an idea of the number of secret and powerful organizations with which the Church of Rome prepares herself for the impending conflict, through which she hopes to destroy the schools, and every vestige of human rights and liberties in the United States. Washington is the nerve-centre of the organism. Baltimore is the city in which the machinery of Rome lies concealed. If it is true that from this centre the war was planned to disrupt the Union, it ought to be known.

The Jesuits are a military organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father-abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is Power power in the most despotic exercise; absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms, and at the same time, the greatest and the most enormous of abuses. The General of the Jesuits insists on being master, sovereign over the sovereign. Wherever the Jesuits are admitted they will be masters, cost what it may. Their Society is by nature dictatorial; and, therefore, it is the irreconcilable enemy of all constituted authority. Every act, every crime, however atrocious, is a meritorious work, if committed for the interest of the Society of the Jesuits, or by the order of its General.

In the allocution of September, 1851, Pius IX. said: “That he had taken this principle for a basis, That the Catholic religion, with all its votes, ought to be exclusively dominant in such sort, so that every oilier worship shall be banished and interdicted.””You ask, if the Pope were lord of this land and you were in a minority, what he would do to you? That, we say, would entirely depend upon circumstances. If it would benefit the cause of Catholicism, he would tolerate you; if expedient, he would imprison or banish you, probably he might hang you. But be assured of one thing, he would never tolerate you for the sake of your glorious principles of civil and religious liberty.”

The Rambler, one of the most prominent Catholic papers of England, Sept. 1851, says: ” Without Romanism, the last awful civil war would have been impossible. The South would never have dared attack the North, had they not had the assurance from the Pope that the Jesuits, the bishops, the priests, and the whole people of the Church of Rome would help them. Because of this, the Roman Catholic Beaure-guard was chosen to fire the first gun at Sumter. The Pope of Rome was the only crowned prince in the whole world who recognized the Southern Confederacy, and the pirate ship Alabama was commanded by Admiral Semmes, a Roman Catholic. Rome has not changed. The enemy of liberty before the war, it seems inexplicable that the defenders of liberty, and the victorious champions of freedom, should so far forget history, and so utterly ignore the rights of the Republic, as to play into the hands of Rome, the eternal foe of the principles embodied in the Republic.

“Another fact, to which the American Protestants do not sufficiently pay attention is, that the Jesuits have been shrewd enough to have a vast majority of Roman Catholic generals and officers to command the army and man the navy of the United States.”

“Rome is a constant conspiracy against the rights and liberties of man all over the world; but she is particularly so in the United States. The laws of the church of Rome are in absolute antagonism to the laws and principles which are the foundation- stones of the Constitution of the United States.”

The United States affirm the equality of all citizens before the law. Rome denies it. Liberty of conscience is proclaimed by the United States. Rome declares it to be a godless, unholy, and diabolical thing. Separation of Church and State is an American doctrine. Rome is for the union. The State is but the annex. The church is all in all.

The Constitution of the United States fights persecution for opinion’s sake; Rome champions it.

The United States seeks, through the public school, to secure the education of all the children. Rome curses the public schools, and seeks to supplant them with others in which Romanism shall be taught.

The United States recognizes in the people the primary source of civil power. Rome proclaims this principle heretical and impious. She says that “all government must rest upon the foundation of the Catholic faith, with the Pope alone as the legitimate and infallible source and interpreter of the law.”

All this shows that Rome is the absolute and irreconcilable foe of the United States. Being entrenched in Washington and feared there, it is feared throughout the Republic. Beaten there, its defeat will not be difficult elsewhere.

THE charge that Romanism was the assassin of Abraham Lincoln was first brought to the attention of the American people by Rev. Charles Chiniquy in his “Fifty Years in the Church of Rome.”The proofs are there. Rome has answered the charges in the old way, by fire. Again and again have her minions tried to destroy man, book, and plates by burning the place where the book was printed and stored. Over and over again they have tried to kill the great apostle, but he still survives, and the light he kindled is shedding its glad radiance upon the world.

In 1851 he removed with a colony to St. Anne, Illinois, to begin the cultivating of the prairies of the West with Roman Catholics. His experience there was terribly sad. Born in Kamoraska, Canada, July 30, 1809, converted to Christ by reading the Scriptures when but a child, as a priest his life shows that a pure man in the Church of Rome has a hard time. No sooner had he begun his life in Illinois than he found a dissolute priesthood in antagonism to him and his work. They plotted against his reputation, and charged him with crimes which, if not disproved, would have incarcerated him in the State penitentiary for life.

It was then he turned to Abraham Lincoln, who, first as a lawyer and afterwards as a friend, served him with matchless ability. Because of this, when Mr. Lincoln became President of the United States, and was threatened by Romish priests with assassination, Father Chiniquy came to Washington to warn him of his peril, and give him proof of a friendship that through years remained unchanged. As an evidence of their close intimacy turn back a little. We are in Urbana, Illinois. Behold Abraham Lincoln as the champion of the betrayed priest.

A priest had accused Father Chiniquy of assaulting a woman, and had offered to give one of his dupes a large sum for swearing to the charge. Twelve men had proven the accuser to be a drunkard and a disreputable man; and yet it seemed impossible to secure any testimony that would disprove the charge.

Said Abraham Lincoln: “There is not the least doubt in my mind that every word this priest has said is a sworn lie; but the jury think differently. The only way to be sure of a verdict in your favor is, that God Almighty would take our part and show your innocence. Go to him and pray, for he alone can save you.”

All that night he spent in prayer; at three o clock in the morning he heard knocks at the door. On opening it, he saw Abraham Lincoln with a face beaming with joy. The story of the trial had been published in the Chicago papers. His condemnation was prophesied.

Among those who bought the papers was a man named Terrien. He read the story to his wife. She was much affected, and declared that it was a plot against a true man, saying: “I was there when the priest, Le Belle, promised his sister 160 acres of land if she would swear to a false oath and accuse Chiniquy of a crime which he had not even thought of, with her.”

“If it be so,”said Terrien, “we must not allow Father Chiniquy to be condemned. Come with me to Urbana.”Being unwell, Mrs. Terrien said: “I cannot go; but Miss Philomene Moffat was with me then, she knows every particular of the wicked plot as well as I do. She is well, take her to Urbana.”

This was done, and Father Chiniquy was saved. The joy of his deliverance was mixed with sorrow, because of what he feared his deliverance would cost his friend. Tears ran down his face. “Why weep? “asked Abraham Lincoln. “Because,”said Father Chiniquy, “of what it may cost you.”There were ten or twelve Jesuits in the crowd who had come from Chicago and St. Louis to see me condemned to the penitentiary, but it is on their heads you have brought the thunders of heaven and earth; nothing can be compared to the expression of their rage against you, when you not only wrenched me from their cruel hands, – but made the walls of the court – house tremble under the awful and superhumanly eloquent denunciation of their infamy, diabolical malice, and total want of Christian and humane principle in the plot they had formed for my destruction. What troubles my soul just now and draws my tears is, that it seems to me I have read your sentence of death in their bloody eyes. How many other noble victims have fallen at their feet. He tried to divert my mind; then became more solemn, and said: “I know the Jesuits never forget nor forsake. But man must not care how or when he dies at the post of honor or duty.”

A few years pass. Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States. On his way to Washington a Roman-Catholic plot to assassinate him was frustrated by his passing incognito, a few hours before they expected him. In August, another plot was concocted; which, coming to the ears of Father Chiniquy, caused him to go to Washington. The story of his experience and the relation of what the President said to him is of thrilling interest.

President Lincoln then told him: We have the proof that the company which had been selected and organized to murder me was led by a rabid Roman Catholic named Byrne; it was almost entirely composed of Roman Catholics. More than that, there were two disguised priests among them to lead and encourage them. Professor Morse, the learned inventor of electric telegraphy, tells me that recently, when he was in Rome, he found the proofs of a most formidable conspiracy against this country and all its institutions. It is evident that it is to the intrigues and emissaries of the Pope we owe, in great part, the horrible civil war which is threatening to cover the country with blood and ruin.”

Mr. Lincoln had been astonished by the statement published in the Roman Catholic papers that tie had been born into the Roman Catholic church and had been baptized by a priest. They called him a renegade and an apostate on account of that, and heaped upon his head mountains of abuse.

“At first,”said Mr. Lincoln, “I laughed at that, for it is a lie. Thanks be to God, I have never been a Roman Catholic. No priest of Rome has ever had his hand upon my head. But the persistency of the Romish press to present this falsehood to their readers as a gospel truth must have a meaning. What is it?”

“It was this story,”said Father Chiniquy, “that brought me to Washington. It means your death. It is told to excite the fanaticism of the Roman Catholics to murder you. In the church of Rome an apostate is an outcast who has no place in society and no right to live. The Jesuits want the Roman Catholics to believe that you are a monster, an enemy of God and of his church; that you are an excommunicated man. Gregory VII. decreed that the killing of an apostate is not murder, but a good Christian act. That decree is incorporated in the canon law which every priest must study, and which every good Catholic must follow. My dear Mr. President, my fear is that you will fall under the blows of a Jesuit assassin, if you do not pay more attention than you have done up to the present time to protect yourself. Remember, because Coligny was a Protestant, he was brutally murdered on St. Bartholomew s night; that Henry IV. was stabbed by the Jesuit assassin, Rev-aillac, the 14th of May, 1610, for having given liberty of conscience to his people; and that William, Prince of Orange, the head of the Dutch Republic, was stricken down July 10th, 1584, by Girard, the fiendish embodiment of all that was crafty, bigoted, and revengeful in Spanish Popery. The church of Rome is absolutely the same today as she was then; she does believe and teach today as then, that it is her duty to punish by death any heretic who is in her way, or an obstacle to her designs.

“My blood chills in my veins when I contemplate the day which may come, sooner or later, when Rome will add to all her iniquities the murder of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Yes,”said Abraham Lincoln, “Professor Morse has already opened mine eyes to this subject. He has truly said: Popery is a political system; despotic in its organization, anti-democratic and anti- republican, and cannot therefore exist with American republicanism.

“The ratio of the increase of Popery is the exact ratio of the decrease of civil liberty. “The dominion of Popery in the United States is the certain destruction of our free institutions.””Popery, by its organization, is wholly under the control of a foreign, despotic Sovereign.””Popery is a union of Church and State; nor can Popery exist in this country in that plenitude of power which it claims as a divine right, and which in the very nature of the system it must continually strive to obtain, until such a union is consummated. Popery is, therefore, destructive to our religious and civil liberty.”

“Popery is more dangerous and more formidable than any power in the United States, on the ground that, through its despotic organization, it can concentrate its efforts for any purpose with complete effect; and that organization being wholly under foreign control, it can have no real sympathy with any thing American. Popery does not acknowledge the right of the people to govern, but claims for itself the supreme right to govern people and rulers by divine right. Popery does not tolerate the liberty of the press. It takes advantage, indeed, of our liberty of the press to use its own press against our liberty; but it proclaims in the thunders of the Vatican, and with a voice which it pronounces unchangeable, that it is a liberty never sufficiently to be execrated and detested. It does not tolerate liberty of conscience or liberty of opinion. They are denounced by the Sovereign Pontiff as a most pestilential error, a pest of all others to be dreaded in the State. It is not responsible to the people in its financial matters. It taxes at will, and is accountable to none but itself.” {Foreign Conspiracy of the United States, by S. F. B. Morse, p. 129. }

These utterances were based on undisputed facts. Abraham Lincoln believed them, hence he said: “If the Protestants of the North and the South could learn what the priests, nuns, and monks, who daily land on our shores, under the pretext of preaching their religion, were doing in our schools and hospitals, as emissaries of the Pope and the other despots of Europe, to undermine our institutions and alienate the hearts of our people from our Constitution and our laws, and prepare a reign of anarchy here, as they have done in Ireland, in Mexico, in Spain, and wherever there are people that wish to be free, they would unite in taking power out of their hands.”

If Abraham Lincoln had said this to the American people rather than to an individual, they would have taken this power out of the hands of Rome, and buried slavery and Romanism in a common grave.

It is now known that the conspirators against liberty relied upon the support of Romanists in the North and in the South. But when the echoes of the guns of Sumter flew over the land, it called into active life the slumbering patriotism of a great people; the tide swept everything before it; the people would brook no opposition. Romish priests and people bowed to the supremacy of the patriotic sentiment. Flags were unfurled from church-spire and from house- top. No Romish conspirator in the great cities of the North dared show his hand; the people ran away from their priests; their conduct was a revelation. It showed to papal emissaries that a people who had fled Europe because of despotism, were not ready to betray liberty in America, the land of the free. Hence Romanists who had enjoyed the blessings of liberty enrolled themselves under the star-spangled banner, and went trooping off to the war* for the Union. Romish priests were taken by surprise; they bent before the swelling current. Flags floated from cathedral spires and parish steeples until Rome was heard from, and then flags were pulled down, lest their church should ignore its sacred calling. They forgot that the Pope lived in Rome because of the help, not of spiritual power, but of the support of French bayonets; that in St. Louis, Mo., when the great cathedral was dedicated, the host was elevated to the music of belching cannon, flags were unfurled and lowered before the wafer- God of Rome, and that soldiers with drawn swords stood on each side of the high altar during service, claiming that in Roman Catholic St. Louis, or in Spain, the military is recognized as the right arm of the church.

Romanism opposed the North because Romanism is the foe of liberty. Romanism encouraged the South because the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy rested upon human slavery. How the colored people of the South or the North can forget this and unite with the Roman Catholic church is a mystery. It is the theory of Rome that the toilers should be kept in ignorance. Gentlemen for the palace and serfs for the field, is the spirit of Romanism, incarnated in every despotic government where its power is supreme.

Louis Napoleon, the ally of Pius IX., expected to build up in Mexico a Roman Catholic kingdom, and unite it with the Southern States, and so establish a Latin Empire in the new world.

The Emancipation Proclamation spoilt the programme. How strange, how inexplicable are events, when studied in the light of an over-ruling Providence! For months, Abraham Lincoln had a vow registered before Almighty God to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and give freedom to the negro, providing a victory was won at An tie tarn. The victory came. But Wm. H. Seward and S. P. Chase objected to the issuance of the Proclamation at a time of general depression in military affairs. The President waited until he could wait no longer. He called a Cabinet meeting, read his paper, and declared his purpose to send it forth. Suggestions were made. Some were received, some were rejected. The Proclamation went forth, and winged its way over the world. It reached France at the time when Louis Napoleon had proposed, and was about sending forth a letter recognizing the Southern Confederacy.

That morning the Proclamation of Liberty appeared. Paris was ablaze with excitement. Vivas of liberty filled the air, and Napoleon, knowing that a recognition of the Southern Confederacy was impossible, Maximillian was surrendered to his fate, and the dream of a monarchy in Mexico was exploded,

Claiming that Abraham Lincoln was an apostate, the plot was laid to destroy him. On Dec. 3rd, 1863, Pius IX. uncovered his hand and heart in his letter to Jefferson Davis. That letter, after all that Abraham Lincoln had borne and was bearing for the brotherhood of man, was a severe sword-thrust at his heart and hope.

“Illustrious and Honorable President: We have just received, with all suitable welcome, the persons sent by you to place in our hands your letter, dated the 23rd of September last.” He then takes ground, not for liberty, not for the deliverance of 4,000,000 bondsmen from the hell of human slavery, but for peace; which meant, building up the Confederacy on slavery as a corner-stone.

“We, at the same time, beseech the God of mercy and pity to shed abroad upon you the light of his grace, and attach you to us by a perfect friendship,”

“Given at Rome at St. Peter s, the 3rd day of December, 1863, of our Pontificate, 18. Pius IX.”

This letter came like a clap of thunderin a clear sky. Let us keep a few dates in mind. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued Sept. 22, 1862. This was followed by another, issued Jan. 1st, 1863, giving freedom to all slaves, and also that such persons of suitable condition would be received into the armed service of the United States, to garrison forts, and man vessels of all sorts in said service. And upon this, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

Deliberately and ostentatiously, the Pope on the December following recognizes the Southern Confederacy, sides with despotism against liberty, and takes under his protection the chief conspirator against the Republic of the United States! “Have you read the Pope s letter?”said Abraham Lincoln to Father Chiniquy, “and what do you think of it?”(p. 701).

“That letter is a poisoned arrow thrown by the Pope at you personally, and it will be more than a miracle if it be not your irrevocable death-warrant.

“That letter tells logically the Roman Catholics, that you, Abraham Lincoln, are a bloody tyrant, a most execrable being, when fighting against a government which the infallible and holy Pope recognizes as legitimate.”

In reply, Mr. Lincoln spoke with great feeling, saying: “You confirm me in the views I had taken of this letter of the Pope. Prof. Morse is of the same mind with you. It is indeed the most perfidious act which could occur under the present circumstances. You are perfectly correct when you say that it was designed to detach the Roman Catholics who had enrolled in our armies. Since the publication of that letter, a great number have deserted their banners and turned traitor; very few comparatively have remained true to their oath of fidelity.”

There are some terrible facts hidden from the people. “It is known that when Meade, a Roman Catholic, was to order the pursuit of Lee, after the battle of Gettysburg, a stranger came in haste to head-quarters, and that stranger, said Mr. Lincoln, was a distinguished Jesuit. After ten minutes conversation with him, Meade made such arrangements for the pursuit of the enemy that he escaped almost untouched, with the loss of only two guns.”(p. 702.)

“This letter of the Pope has changed the nature of the war. Before they read it, Roman Catholics could see that I was fighting against the Southern Confederacy, with Jefferson Davis at its head. But now they must believe that it is against Christ and his holy Vicar the Pope that I am raising my sacreligious hands. We have daily proof that their indignation, their hatred, their malice against me, are a hundred fold intensified. New projects of assassination are detected almost every day, accompanied with such savage circumstances that they bring to my memory the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the gun-powder plot. We find on investigation, that they come from the same masters in the art of murder, the Jesuits.

Then Mr. Lincoln declared that the New York riots were a Popish plot, and that

was their instigator. When told by the President that he would be held responsible if they were not stopped, Archbishop Hughes faced the rioters, addressed them as friends, and invited them to go back home peacefully, and all was ended, after the most fiendish manifestations of hate, seen in the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum and the trampling out of the lives of helpless children in their mad fury. We will not recount the bloody deed, though in the terrible treatment of John A. Kennedy and the murder of Col. O Brien and his mutilation, we are reminded of the horrid barbarities inflicted upon Coligny in Paris, which shows that the spirit of Popery is unchanged.

furnishes a terrible count in this indictment against Rome.

“I have,”said Abraham Lincoln, “the proof that Archbishop Hughes, whom I had sent to Rome that he might induce the Pope to urge the Roman Catholics of the North at least to be true to their oaths of allegiance, and whom I thanked publicly when under the impression that he had acted honestly, according to the promise he had given me, is the very man who advised the Pope to recognize the legitimacy of the Southern Confederacy, and put the weight of his Tiara in the balance against us and in favor of our enemies. Such is the perfidy of Jesuits”(p. 70-4) .

Two cankers are biting the very entrails of the United States, the Romish and the Mormon priests. Both are aiming at the destruction of our schools, to raise themselves upon their ruins. Both shelter themselves under our grand and holy principles of liberty of conscience, to destroy that very liberty of conscience. The more dangerous of the two is the Jesuit priest, for he knows better how to conceal his hatred, under the mask of friendship and public good. He is better trained to commit the most cruel and diabolical deeds for the glory of God.

Abraham Lincoln had learned much, and unlearned much more. He declared himself to be of Roman Catholics. “Once I was; now, it seems to me, that, sooner or later, the people will be forced to put a restriction to that clause of unlimited toleration toward Papists.””I am for liberty of conscience in its truest, noblest, broadest, highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the Pope and his followers the Papists, so long as they tell me, through their councils, theologians, and canon laws, that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find an opportunity”(p. 705).

“This does not seem to be understood by the people,”continued Mr. Lincoln. “Sooner or later, the light of common sense will make it clear to everyone, that no liberty of conscience can be granted to men, who are sworn to obey a Pope who pretends to have the right to put to death those who differ from him in religion “(p. 706).

69is beginning to be discussed. Father Hecker says: “The Roman Catholic is to wield his vote for the purpose of securing Catholic ascendency in this country.”They vote as servants of the Pope, not as patriots.

It was stated by Pius IX: “The Catholic religion, with all its votes, ought to be exclusively dominant in such sort that every other worship be banished and interdicted.”

We are putting into hands those potential ballots which will be, and are being, used against liberty. A theocracy controls them against which there is no protection. Emile DeLaveleye, the celebrated Belgian Liberal, has shown that an extended suffrage gives unlimited power to Rome in all those countries where her religion is the religion of the large mass of the people, and Gambetta s last letter contained this: “Do not adopt universal suffrage in your country; it will put you under the yoke of the clergy.”

“From the beginning of the war, there has been, not a secret, but a public alliance between the Pope of Rome and Jeff. Davis, and that alliance has followed the common laws of the world s affairs. The greater has led the smaller; the stronger has guided the weaker. The Pope and his Jesuits have advised and directed Jeff. Davis on the land, from the first shot at Fort Sumter, by the rabid Roman Catholic Beauregard. They were helping him on the sea, by guiding and supporting the other rabid Roman Catholic, Pirate Semmes.”

was ever present. Warnings came to him from friends in America, and beyond the Sea. Secretary Stanton placed guards about him, at the Soldier’s Home and at the White House. The President did not believe that these could secure him from harm. He lived with Christ and for men, and went on. Opening his Bible to Deut. 3:22-28, the words made a profound impression upon his mind: “Ye shall not fear them; for the Lord your God shall fight for you.” Then came the assurance that he was not to pass into the Canaan of peace. “Get thee up unto the top of Pisgah; look abroad; see the land and rest: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan.”

His drawing near to God did him good. It is what we are, not what we profess, that tells the story. As Abraham Lincoln drew near to God, the people drew near to him. No longer was he called the horrid names which once characterized the opposition press. The God in him was conquering the devil about him. Each morning he gave a certain hour to reading the Scriptures and prayer, and came forth from his room ready for duty, with that light shining in his face which glorified Moses as he came down from the mount. This, while it made him friends with the soldiers and the people, maddened the Romanists.

In the light of what was to come so soon, we delight to go back and read statements like the following:

“When little Willie Lincoln died, the mind of the bereaved father was deeply affected by the thoughts of death. It was during the battle of Gettysburg that he shut himself up with God, and then such a sense of the presence of God and of his own unworthiness came to him and took possession of his soul, as to overwhelm him. From that day he dated his entrance into a new life. A Christian friend delighted to relate how, in the carriage, Mr. Lincoln begged the visitor to describe as clearly as possible what was the peculiar evidence which one might rely upon as assurance that he had become a Christian.”

The simple story, as furnished by John, was repeated. It was explained, that when a poor sinner, conscious that he could not save himself, looked to Jesus Christ, saw in his death a full atonement for the sinner’s sin, and believed that Christ’s death was accepted as a substitute for the sinner’s death, he felt himself to have been delivered from the Divine wrath, and to be at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”The President, in a tone of satisfaction, said: “That is just the way I feel.”All this paved the way for what was to come. The war was over,”The soldiers of the Confederacy were going to rebuild their homes and to re- cultivate their fields, with blessings instead of cursings following them. Soup-houses had been placed for the starving at the base of flag-staffs, where the stars and bars had usurped the place belonging to the flag which is the ensign of hope for all lands and climes.

Friday, the 14th of April, 1865, had come. It was a day memorable in many ways. On this day, Beauregard had fired on Sumter. On this day, General Anderson, amid the thunder of cannon and the cheers of loyal hearts, had again raised the flag over the ruins of Sumter.

is noteworthy. He had written to a friend that he was going to use precaution. He had said: “The Jesuits are so expert in their deeds of blood, that Henry IV. said it was impossible to escape them, and he became their victim, though he did all he could to protect himself. My escape from their hands, since the letter of the Pope to Jeff. Davis has sharpened a million of daggers, is more than a miracle.”

He breakfasts with his son, Captain Robert. Lincoln, who was on General Grant’s staff, having just returned from the capitulation of Lee, and the President passed a happy hour listening to all the details. At eleven o clock he attended his last cabinet-meeting. When it was adjourned, Secretary Stanton said he felt that the Government was stronger than at any previous period since the Rebellion commenced; and the President is said, in his characteristic way, to have told them that some important news would soon come, as he had a dream of a ship sailing very rapidly, and had invariably had that same dream before great events in the war, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg.

THE invitation for President and Mrs. Lincoln, General and Mrs. Grant, Speaker Colfax and wife, to attend the theatre, is now known to have been a part of the plot. Lincoln, not because he loved the theatre or cared for the play, but to please the people and obtain needed rest, yielded to the persuasion of his wife, and to the sentiment which rules very largely the crowned heads of Europe, when the king goes to his box in the theatre that the people might see him and that he might see the people. General Grant did not go, nor did Mr. Colfax, and other invited guests. Lincoln was disappointed; rode around with his wife and invited Colonel Rathbun and his wife to seats with them: they accepted the invitation and saw the horrid deed performed.

The box of the theatre was made ready for his assassination. John Wilkes Booth, an illegitimate son of his father, had been boasting for days in drunken moods of what he was to do. He had united with the Roman Catholic Church, though he was drinking to excess and plotting the murder of America’s noblest citizen, with Roman Catholic priests, who instructed him and inducted him into the Church, and promised him protection and support in his nefarious crime.

In the book of testimonies given in the prosecution of the assassins of Lincoln, published by Ben Pitman, and in the two volumes of the trial of John Surratt, 1867, we have the legal and irrefutable proof that Rome directed the movements of Booth; that the plot was matured in the house of Mary Surratt, 561 H Street, Washington, D. C.; that Father Lehiman, a priest, made her house his home; that Father Wiget and other priests were constantly going in and out: and that all the details of the conspiracy were planned there and provided for. Booth was made to feel that he was the instrument of God in ridding the world of Lincoln. The day before his death, he wrote: “I can never repent, though I hated to kill. Our country owed all her troubles to him, Lincoln, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”So thought Ravillac, the assassin of Henry IV. Both were trained to believe that there was no sin in killing the enemy of the holy church and of the infallible Pope.

Let us draw aside the curtain:

The evening came. The President is sitting in his box in the theatre. He is resting in a rocking chair. A man enters the door of the lobby leading to the box. He closes the door behind him. He draws a pistol, and shoots the President in the back of his head. The shriek of Mrs. Lincoln pierces the ears of all. Booth leaps upon the stage, brandishing a dagger, and flies, saying as he does, “Sic semper tyrannis.”His horse at the door is held by a Roman Catholic. He leaps upon, it and rides away.

Proof that Rome directed the arm of J. Wilkes Booth is seen:

First. In the fact that the house of Mrs. Surratt, a Roman Catholic, where the plot was laid, swarmed with priests.

Second. The Mr. Lloyd, who kept the carbine which Booth wanted for protection, was a Roman Catholic.

Third. Dr. Mudd, who set the leg of Booth, was a Roman Catholic.

Fourth. Garrett, in whose barn Booth took refuge and where he was shot, was a Roman Catholic.

Fifth. All the conspirators, says General Baker, the great detective, were attending Roman Catholic services, or were educated as Roman Catholics.

Sixth. Priests sheltered and spirited away John Surratt, and Pope Pius IX. gave him a place among his guards,

Seventh. The plot was known as far away as St. Joseph, Minn., 40 miles from a railroad, and more than 80 miles from a telegraph. Rev. F. A. Conwell, late chaplain of a Minnesota regiment, was told at that place at six P.M. on April 14th, the night of the assassination, by the purveyor of the monastery filled with priests, that President Lincoln and Secretary Seward had been killed, four hours before the deed was attempted. How was it known? There is but one answer. The conspiracy which cost Abraham Lincoln his life was resolved upon by the priests of Washington and communicated to priests in far-away St. Joseph. Charles Boucher, a priest in Canada, swears that John Surratt was sent to him by Father Lefierre, the canon of the bishop of Montreal. For months he concealed him, and then shipped him to Rome. Why? Because it was in the bond. They promised the murderers protection on earth, so far as they could give it to them, and a crown in heaven if they died in the attempt.

Eighth. The rejoicing of Romanists* at the outset, and until they saw their peril. Mrs. Surratt, the day after the murder, said, without being rebuked, in the presence of several witnesses: “The death of Abraham Lincoln is no more than the death of any nigger in the army.”

Why is not more made of it? Cowardice explains it all. Fear was on every side. The leaders declared, We are just through with one war; if we make an attack on the Roman Catholic church and hang a few of their priests, who could be proven guilty of participating in the plot, a religious war would be the result. Nothing would have been easier than to have proven the criminality of the priests; but this was carefully avoided, from the beginning to the end of the trial. When their eyes were opened to their peril, the fear of the priests was pitiable. They say that their damning deed had frozen the milk in the breasts of millions. Jesuitism, with the tread of a panther and the cunning of a sleuthhound, shrank away, and hid from sight for the time. Alas! politicians seemed smitten with the same dread. Father Chiniquy declared that, when, not long after the execution of the murderers, he went incognito to Washington, to begin his investigations about the true and real authors of the deed, he was not a little surprised to see that not a single one of the men connected with the Government to whom he addressed himself would consent to have any talk with him on that matter, except after he had given his word of honor that he would never mention their names in connection with the result of the investigation. He says: “I saw with profound distress that the influence of Rome was almost supreme in Washington. I could not find a single statesman who would dare face the nefarious influence, and fight it down.”This was the policy of Lincoln. On this rock his bark struck, and went down.

The Romanism that assassinated President Lincoln is in our midst, unchanged in spirit and in purpose. Upon the American people devolve fearful responsibilities,

First. “We can tell the truth about Romanism.”

Second. “We can tell the truth to Romanists.”

Third. “We can hold America for Americans.”

Had Abraham Lincoln voiced the utterance, it would have made him the evangel that would have carried hope to the millions of earth. The work he left undone we must undertake, and then shall Romanism find here a grave, into which the roots of liberty shall go and find nutriment, while above shall tower the hardy trunk, from whose wide branches shall hang fruits which, gathered by God’s best children, shall fill the garners of hope, and make this Immanuel;s Land.

It will surprise the people of the great free republic of the United States to learn that

FIFTEEN THOUSAND DEPARTMENT CLERKS

are under the surveillance of Rome. This seems like a strange statement. The many will say it cannot be true. The fact remains. Romanism is the dominant power in the Capital of the United States. The war which Rome helped to bring on, and which she hindered as best she could when she saw it was to eventuate in liberty, resulted in her advantage rather than to her detriment. The reason for it is difficult to explain. Had Abraham Lincoln told the truth about Romanism to the people, the curse would have been wiped out. The reason he did not, and gave for not doing it, influences thousands at the present time, viz. : fear of a religious war.

It seems inexplicable that the power which assassinated Abraham Lincoln should have been fostered and aided by the people who slew slavery and who recognized the fact that Romanism was its chief ally. Who can think of Thaddeus Stevens patting this monster that slew the great Emancipator, without a shudder of horror, mingled with a feeling of incredulity. A strange fear of Rome came upon the politicians of all parties after the civil war was over. Proofs abounded of the disloyalty of this life-long foe of liberty. They were unheeded. They remain unheeded. From dozens of letters, and from unnumbered clerks in the departments, information is furnished that, after the 1st and 15th of every month, nuns have the free run of the departments, and can ask every clerk and every head of a department for money to help on the Church of Rome. Some of these letters are sad beyond expression. The wife of a Union soldier writes :”I am in —- Department. There are nine Irish to one American. The persecution to which I am subjected, in hopes of driving me out, is difficult to describe and hard to bear. They preach their religion and their politics. If a word is said against it, the air is made blue with profanity, and such words as, Get out, you heretic; we ll make it hot for you, are heard on every hand.”

to any of the Departments, and can do what she desires. Any one without the black robe and bonnet would be thrust out by the door-keepers. These are admitted by special order. Must this be borne? Is not this an outrage to Christian employees in a free Government? Drop the word”Christian.”Is it not an outrage on American citizenship? Has Rome any claim upon these clerks in the service of the Government? Suppose Baptists or Presbyterians should ask the privilege of going through the departments to solicit funds for church purposes, would the request be granted? Most assuredly not.

We have said the clerks were under the surveillance of Rome. Suppose they do not like it? What can they do about it? Seven men, members of the Grand Army of the Republic, some from Northern states, some from Southern, told how they were not only asked by these nuns to give twice a month, but that they were afraid not to give. They related how the heads of the departments are very largely either Roman Catholics, or afraid to antagonize them, and because one of their number expressed his mind in regard to the outrage of having these black-robed minions of Rome tramping through the departments and asking American citizens to contribute to the support of”The Harlot of the Tiber”his name was handed in as a man who had insulted a saintly nun, and at the close of the month his dismissal came, and no reasons given. They who refuse to give are reported, and when vacancies are required, their names are ready for use. The result need not be described. Fear of losing their places is everywhere apparent. It affects society, muzzles the press, and chains the pulpit.

If there is one doctrine distinctively American, it is that there must be a separation between church and State. If there is one doctrine distinctively democratic, it is that the State must support the representatives of the Church of Rome.

for Ireland, we need it in Washington. The Capital, the Departments, the President s House, the Post Office, the Foreign, and now the Interior Department, are under the domination of Roman Catholics, the instigators of the Civil War and the assassins of Abraham Lincoln, the life-long foe of liberty here, and throughout the world.

lies in the fact, that the men in office live, when at home, in different places, which are also under the dominance of Rome.

Several members of Congress related that it is the custom of the nuns to visit every member of Congress soon after he arrives : they ask for a contribution. If they give, well. If not, it is reported.

A Northern lady, a good Baptist, whose husband is independent of public patronage, rented rooms to a member of Congress. Hardly had he got his trunk unstrapped, before two nuns came. The girl let them in. They were asked to call again after the gentleman got settled. They were no sooner out, than the lady of the house said:”If those women come again, seat them in the hall, and don t let them in until I see them.”The next day they were seated in the hall, and she came down. The lady is utterly fearless, and has no respect for, nor fear of black-robed Sisters of Charity.

“What do you want?”

“To see the Member of Congress”

“What for?”

“To see him.”

“He has a wife, and don t need the attentions of other women.”

“We wish to see him for the church.”

“He is not a Roman Catholic, and has a better church, which he helps support.”

Then the old nun claimed she wished to go into a private room to fix her shoe.”Fix it here : you are not afraid of me, are you?”

Then she spoke up, and asked :”Do you refuse to let me see a Member of Congress in this house?”

“I do.”

“Then we will take the number of this house, and it may be to your injury.”-

“All right; take it, and advertise it, if you choose; my house cannot be made a run-way for Romish hirelings.”

It is a simple fact, that the house is always full of occupants, and is felt to be a retreat from the incursions of Romanists.

Is there any good reasons why the Roman Catholic church should become a universal beggar, and yet house the Pope in the largest palace in the world, and feed her cardinals, bishops, lady-superiors, priests and nuns on the fat of the land?

Was there ever a set of dupes like Romanists, who, as a rule, live in squalor, while the money drawn from the poor is placed on the largest structures of the land.

More wealth is under her control than is possessed by the representative of any nation, sect, or faith. Her wealth is a secret. Out of Peter s Pence comes a great patrimony. Rome claims to be beneficent, and so becomes the recipient of bounty from the State, as well as from individuals. No sect is less so. No people give so little to any object outside of their own communion.

fifteen hundred feet in length, eight hundred in breadth, with twenty courts, miles of galleries filled with pictures and statuary, two hundred stair-cases, eleven hundred rooms, the construction of which has cost more than one hundred millions of dollars, and yet he is the pensioner of the whole world!

As a rule, the people who belong to the Church of Rome are poor. In Roman Catholic countries where Romanism rules supreme, they are very poor. In Ireland, in the Roman Catholic districts, the men and women sleep in ditches and herd with pigs. It is surprising that, in New York, Romanists, living in tenement houses, in garrets and cellars, are content to abide in squalor, while the archbishop, whose iron hand was laid on every free impulse, and all who sympathized with it, lives in a palace, and is fed on food that befits the table of a king. The Pope has for his own use four Palatine cardinals, three prelates, and a master, ten prelates of the private chamber, amongst whom are cup bearers and keepers of the wardrobe, two hundred and fifteen domestic prelates, and more than four hundred women. Then follows two hundred and forty-nine supernumerary prelates of the private chamber, four private chamberlains of the sword and cloak, Roman patricians, a quarter-master, major, a correspondent-general of the post, one hundred and thirty fresh private chamberlains of the sword and cloak. Next come two hundred and sixty-five honorary monsignori, extra urbem, six honorary chamberlains of the sword and cloak, then eight private chaplains; then two private monsignori of the tonsure, or, barbers in short, but monsignori just the same; then eighteen supernumeraries. In all, one thousand and twenty-five persons; besides the Palatine administration and the tribunal of the major-domo, the Swiss guards the gens d arms, and a legion of servants. Does it not need a brazen effrontery, which is astonishing, to send priests and nuns all over the world to extract the pence from the pockets of the poor, to keep in luxury this army of men, for the most part privates, who earn not a dollar, and are utterly worthless as aids to humanity? If it be difficult for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, how shall he who inherits the Vatican enter there, who has treasures of all sorts, many precious gems, countless works of art, vessels of silver and gold, and more than a thousand servants? On his head is not one crown, but three. He is borne on the shoulders of men. He compels his votaries to kiss his toe, and enjoys an income of millions.

In the United States, the attempt is being made to rival Europe. The Cardinal s palace in New York, built of marble, tilled with choice works of art, cost an immense sum. The dwellings of bishops and priests are planned on a magnificent scale. The gate into Rome is not strait, and the way is not narrow. They can carry with them bad politics, bad principles, bad practices and bad lives, and yet if they will give their consciences to the priests, and believe what they are taught concerning penance, absolution, forms and ceremonies, the conditions of becoming a Roman Catholic are met. A change of heart is not in the programme. A blameless, pure life is not in the bond. It is not strange that error thrives beneath the shadow of Romanism. Rum-selling is not a sin, and if rum-drinking were even a disgrace, few are the priests who would be respectable. Mormonism fattens on polygamy, and Mohammedanism, that painted a heaven in which lust should have full play, and the bestial nature supremacy, won a large following, and holds it, because the carnal heart can there find full play for passion and desire. Romanism is a match for either Mormonism or Mohammedanism. The priests practice polygamy under another name, and find in the church a carteblanche for the promptings of the natural heart.

A deception, because it claims to have been built on St. Peter in Rome; when there is not a scintilla of evidence that Peter ever saw Rome. He was the apostle of the circumcision. He went to Babylon, and from there wrote his epistles. Paul went to Rome, and called the names of the prominent ones he met; but never mentioned Peter, who lived and died in the East. But Romanism without Peter in Rome is a failure; and so the lie, that he came to Rome, lived there twenty-five years, was in the Marmantine Prison over which St. Peter s towers, and died crucified head downwards, in the place upon which the Vatican stands, where the Pope lives, all this is unblushingly lifted into prominence as if it were a truth, when all history knows it to be false.

Romanism is a fraud because it pretends to have power which does not belong to it. Tradition usurps the place of Scripture, it subordinates the inward and spiritual to the outward and visible; it obscures and stifles the life of faith and love, by its absorbing attention to the things of sight and show; instead of relying on Jesus, who is the Christ, and was offered once for all, it makes a new Jesus and a new atonement at every Mass; instead of having one mediator between God and man (1 Timothy, 2:5), it makes the mother of Jesus both a mediator and a God, and treats, likewise, its thousands of other canonized (real or unreal) saints as mediators, to be prayed to and honored for their superhuman merit and power. By its connected doctrines of confession and penance, and absolution and indulgence, it places the consciences, persons, and property of many women and children in the power of the priest; it speaks lies in hypocrisy, sears the conscience as with a hot iron; it changes the truth of God into a lie, and worships and serves the creature more than the Creator; it turns the consolations and comforts of religion, the means of grace, and the hope of glory, into so much merchandise, to be disposed of according to the vender, and the ability or necessity of the purchaser; in fine, it sets forth another gospel than the free gospel of Christ, another standard than the perfect law of God, other ordinances and other conditions of salvation than those which the Lord Jesus has established. It has fellowship with darkness .rather than light, and is in affinity with Satan and his angels, rather than with Jehovah. And yet, bad as it is in character and in practice, the Republic of the United States gives to this assassin of President Lincoln, to this enemy of all righteousness, to this instigator of the civil war, rights denied to the representatives of Jesus Christ s Gospel, and compels fifteen thousand employees of the Government to give to its support, or to have their places endangered, and their living confiscated!

Romanism is a fraud, because it claims to be in line with apostolic succession, when there have been at least thirty schisms in the church. Two popes have claimed St. Peter s chair at one and the same time, and fought and led armies to maintain the supremacy. In 1414, the Council of Constance cashiered three popes, John XXIII., Gregory XIII. and Benedict XIII. as deserving the deepest execration, and as guilty of most horrible crimes.

Popes have been guilty of the most horrible practices. What matters it though Pope Joan was taken with the pains of childbirth on a public parade, though mistresses and harlots had control of the Chair, Rome as unblushingly holds out her pauper hand and cries Give! as if she had a good history, and was backed by a decent life! Romanism is indifferent to Scripture and public opinion.

Romanists want a Peter for Rome, and they get him. In spite of Scripture, they will hold on to him; and for all Scripture can do, Peter may yet become a second Romulus, suckled by a wolf, and the founder of the Eternal City. It would be as true as much of the history they are making for the youth of America.

Is it not enough to tolerate Romanism? Shall the free people of America be compelled to give to its support? Shall this church be permitted to dominate the State? This is being done in many portions of the Republic. Shall a halt be called?

This question must be answered. Romanism is for the first time uncovering its intent in America, and revealing the fact that the spirit of hellish hate which dominated the organism in Spain, and also in Italy, characterizes it in the Republic, where, it was said, free institutions were to change its purpose and modify its nature. A good time to answer the question has come. Freemen are at last beginning to understand that freedom is in peril. Romanists who hope for better things are tiring of the old despotism, and are beginning to seek for the new life.

In a city cursed with malaria is a cesspool, so large that it spreads contagion through many cellars, up into offices, into stores, and infects the town. In winter, they do not clean it out, because of the cold. In summer, they have another excuse. It is covered with boards. Ever and anon one rots. A horse breaks through and is ruined. A man falls in and dies. Then comes a spasm of indignation, and many declare the cesspool must go; but it stays; it is working mischief.

Romanism is much like it. It poisons the air and affects the health, wherever its virus is inhaled. It is bad, and bad continually. Few care to touch it, or describe it. The cesspool is covered over. It ought to be cleaned out, but it is not. There are reasons why the many fail to attack the error or fight the sin. It controls votes how many, few know. The leaders of the Romish cohort are astute, far-seeing and brave. They work together, strike an organized blow, are conscienceless, and so are never hindered by principle or restrained by honor, rightness or righteousness. They are a bandit against virtue, education and progress. They are not ashamed of it. They will shut the best histories out of the school. There is a spasm. Meetings are held; Rome is attacked, and Rome is silent; but the books stay out, and Protestant teachers turn Catholics for place and pelf, and Rome laughs and moves on, securing the acquiescence, if not the favor, of politicians. So in regard to morality. A man breaks through into the cesspool. He is covered with filth. Romanism is revealed, and the people declare now it must go; but a new board is laid over the hole; lime is thrown in; the stench is killed for the moment, and Rome increases in power. Rome stands by Rome as true men would do well to stand by true men, but as true men seldom do, while the emergency is on, and help is needed.

Why Priests Should Wed,”was written to save women and girls threatened by the filth of the Confessional. Much that is vile, and too filthy to be read with pleasure or profit to the individual perusing it, has been omitted. For this, the author has been blamed by good men and women.”We do not know about it,”they say.”You say, there is a cesspool. You say it is beyond human belief for vileness. We do not have more than the words of men like you. The offensive matter is locked up in Latin. It is beyond our reach. This thing of Romanism concerns Americans. Romanism is doing all in its power to capture the United States. It will succeed, unless the truth be told concerning it.” Such is the view of good Christian men. Romanism is bringing forth as bad fruit in Washington as elsewhere. Assaults are made on virtue. Nunneries are used as assignation houses there as elsewhere, because Romanists live there as elsewhere. This ought to be brought to the attention of the people, if they are to be delivered. It is fashionable to speak of Romanism as a part of the Christian world.

Encyclopedias do it; so do ministers of Evangelical denominations. It is a shame that this is true, yet true it is. Romanism is the”mystery of iniquity.” It is a horrible stench in the nostrils of humanity, borne because of the lack of power to remove it. Hated of God, it is yet to be hated of man. But, in the meantime, the people have a battle to wage with error, and a duty to discharge. Roman ism must be exposed. Uncover the cesspool, and it shall bring upon itself destruction.

In”Why Priests Should Wed,” Dens and Liguori were quoted, and all that could be decently written was put into type, and a challenge was sent forth asking Romanists to deny it, if they could; or for Congress to appoint a Commission to investigate the charges brought against the priesthood of the Roman Catholic church because of the practice of Auricular Confession, and to demand persons and papers competent, in evidence, to declare whether such confessional is calculated to pollute the minds of the people, and undermine the foundation of our Republican institutions. Thousands and tens of thousands of these petitions were signed and sent to and read in the Senate and House of Representatives, and nothing has been done about it.

In the meantime, the author congratulates himself as having”built better than he knew,” because Romanists know what is left out in the blank spaces as Protestants do not, and the effect of the book has been helpful to Romanists, great numbers of whom, because of its appalling revelations, have abandoned Rome forever. It has been charged that, in”Why Priests Should Wed,” the quotations are largely from Dens and Liguori, and not from theologians of the Roman Catholic Church in America. This was because Dens theology has been endorsed by the prelates in Ireland as”the best book on the subject that could be published, as late as Sept. 15th, 1808, and by the Archbishop of St. Louis, Mo., in Feb. 1850,, by Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia, in 1861 . A thousand dollars reward was offered in 1873 to any Accredited Roman priest or bishop y^ho will disprove the horrible disclosure contained in a book translating the Latin into English and German, from the Secret Theology of Peter Dens and Francis P. Kenrick, published in Chicago, 111. No reply has been made, because a refutation is impossible.

The truth is not hidden; but it is not scattered. Show what Romanists are, what they teach, and how they live, and decent people will cut loose from it; and the President, unless he be lost to all self-esteem and sense of decency, and the respect of mankind, would as soon walk the streets with a painted representative of the house which is”the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death,” as to lock arms with the Red-Robed Cardinal, the representative of the Harlot of the Tiber.

It is not necessary to confine attention to the works of Dens and Liguori. John Hughes, archbishop of New York, and Francis Patrick Kenrick, arch bishop of Philadelphia, have sanctioned all the vileness of the past, and sent forth contributions as vile as any that preceded. These are accessible. In the book,”Theology in Use in the Theological Seminary and Sacred Theology for Students,” by Francis Patrick Kenrick, are descriptions of”adulterers with the mouth” (p. 130) , of the manner in which the marriage bed is to be used and is defiled (1. vi., n. 917), and suggestions concerning intercourse too filthy to be written; of the sin of evading offspring, and the means employed to produce the result; of the guilt of Sodomy, and how the sin is committed between husband and wife (1. vi., n. 916); of the sin of rendering one s-self impotent, and much more in the same strain. PARISH PRIESTS AND OTHER CONFESSORS PROVIDED FOR. Because this is frequently denied, we quote in full;”VIII. Of Luxury. If, however, it should be foreseen that pollution will ensue from some cause that is necessary, or useful, or advantageous to some body, although the mind is averse to it, there is no sin, so long as there is no danger in consenting to it. Hence, even though involuntary pollution should be foreseen, it is proper for

• “1. Parish Priests, and also other confessors, to hear the confessions of women, to read treatises on obscene subjects, to touch the parts of a sick woman, to accost, kiss or embrace women according to the custom of the country, to wait on them in . bathing, and other things of a similar character.
• “2. It is lawful for any one who suffers great itching in the privates, to relieve it by touching, although pollution may follow.
• “3. So also it is useful to ride on horseback for a person, even though pollution should be foreseen,”and much more of the same character.
• “4. It is lawful to lie in any position to rest more conveniently.
• “5. To take warm food or drinks, in moderation, and to lead in decent dances.” {Francis Patrick Kenrick’s Theology, vol. 3, p. 172} Into this lap of Rome, look. The Parish Priest is given absolute control of the bodies of the women of the Roman Catholic church, and of all others he may capture. Liguori grants a priest two women a month. Kenrick permits a lascivious scoundrel to gratify his lustful inclinations. When wife or daughter is the victim, does not the permission given in the theology place the entire church under suspicion? Somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife shut up with the priest in the Confessional, or in his home, is his victim.

Let us turn now to the”Garden of the Soul,” a prayer-book commonly used in the Roman Catholic churches, and for sale at all Roman Catholic book stores, and commended by Archbishop Hughes, and on pages 213 and 214 are these questions, to be asked by a Roman Catholic priest of any female, from seven up to seventy.

“Have you been guilty of fornication, or adultery, or incest, or any sin against nature, either with a person of the same sex, or with any other creature? How often? Or have you designed or attempted any such sin, or sought to induce others to it? How often?”Have you been guilty of pollution, or immodest touches of yourself? How often?

“Have you touched others, or permitted yourself to be touched by others immodestly? or given and taken wanton kisses, or embraces, or any such liberties? How often?”Have you looked at immodest objects, with pleasure or danger? read immodest books, or songs, to yourself, or others? kept indecent pictures? willingly given car to, and taken pleasure in hearing loose discourses? or sought to see or hear anything that was immodest? How often?

“Have you exposed yourself to wanton company? or played at any indecent play? or frequented masquerades, bulls, comedies, with danger to your chastity? How often?”Have you been guilty of any immodest discourse, wanton stares, jests, or songs, or words of double meaning? and how often? and before how many? and were the persons to whom you spoke or sung married or single? For all this you are obliged to confess, by reason of the evil thoughts these things are apt to create in the hearers.

“Have you abused the marriage-bed by any action contrary to the order of nature? or by any pollutions? or been guilty of any irregularity, in order to hinder your having children? How often? (Ways to ascertain all this are pointed out by Bishop F. P. Kenrick, in the theology which every priest must study) . Have you, without just cause, refused the marriage debt? and what sin followed from it? How often?

“Have you debauched any person that was innocent before? Have you forced any person, or deluded any one by deceitful promises, etc.? or designed, or desired to do so? How often?

“Have you taught any one evil that he knew not of before? or carried any one to lewd houses?” etc. How often?”

“Have you willingly taken pleasure in unchaste thoughts or imaginations? or entertained unchaste desires? Were the objects of your desires maids, or married persons, or kins folks, or persons consecrated to God? How often?

“Have you taken pleasure in the irregular motions of the flesh? or not endeavored to resist them? How often?

“Have you entertained with pleasure the thoughts of saying or doing anything which it would be a sin to say or do? How often?

“Have you had the desire or design of committing any sin, of what sin? How often?” Can an unmarried priest ask these questions of the women of his flock, full of life, of blood, of impure thoughts, without finding out all he wants to know to ascertain where victims for his lust abide? These questions are asked in every town where is a Roman Catholic church, and lives growing out of them are lived; and this places the cesspool, full of contagion, in juxtaposition with us all. Paul asked:”Shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of a harlot? God forbid. What! know you not that he which is joined to a harlot, is one body?”(1 Cor. 6:15,16.) The fact is apparent, whoever tolerates Romanism tolerates harlotry of the worst and vilest descriptions.

TURN NOW TO DENS, WHO IS AUTHORITY.

“A confessor has seduced his penitent to the commission of carnal sin, not in confession, nor by occasion of confession, but from some extraordinary occasion. Is he to be denounced?” A. No. If he had tampered with her from his knowledge of confession, it would be a different thing, because, for instance, he knows that person, from her confession, to be given to such carnal sins.”

Imagine a girl, fallen through the misconduct of a priest. She becomes alarmed. She goes to another confessor; tells her story. Confessors are advised not lightly to give credit to any woman whatsoever accusing their former confessor, but first to search diligently into the end and cause of the occasion, to examine their morals and conversation. In other words, break doiun the witness.”For which reason, observe, that whatever person, either by herself or by another, falsely accuses or denounces a priest as a seducer, incurs a case reserved for the supreme Pontiff.” (Antoine, p. 428.) There is no protection for virtue in the Roman Catholic Church. The priest tells the woman she does not sin by yielding. He confesses to a priest and is absolved. All unite against virtue. Is not the window open? Cannot men see the character of Romanism to which the Republic and the United States surrenders?

WHAT WILL CITIZENS OF THE REPUBLIC DO ABOUT IT?

This is the question which must be answered by Christian men and women. Nuns walk the streets of Washington in procession, with smiling faces, and defiant, don t-care look: sleek priests dwell in palatial residences, and have things their own way. Members of Congress surrender their wives and daughters to their care. Vast sums are given to propitiate the favor of Rome. The peril increases; not because Romanists outnumber Protestants, but because Protestants are silent who ought to speak.

THERE IS THE LAP OF ROME,

in Washington! The Nation’s Capital has fallen into it, and ministers are as silent about it as if there were no peril. For shame!!!

All this shows, as was said in”Why Priests Should Wed,” that Francis Patrick Kenrick and John Hughes, who wrote, must have had an acquaintance and a practice in indulgence entirely opposed to the profession of celibacy or the existence of virtue. The book of Kenrick and the”Garden of the Soul”ought to be suppressed by legal enactment, and Auricular Confession should be banished from the Roman Catholic Church in America. Polygamy among Mormons is virtue personified, in comparison. Auricular confession is now the prolific source of gross licentiousness, and is destructive of virtue in the hearts of the priests who officiate in the Confessional. These infernal questions, framed by Bishops Kenrick and Hughes, propounded by bachelor priests to females of all ages, from seven years and upwards, and the obligation of the Confessional, binding them under pain of Eternal Damnation to eternal secrecy, is bringing forth a terrible harvest of lust and crime.

Rome does not preach, she plots. Rome cares not for public opinion or public remonstrances, so long as she can control votes, and get on increasing in wealth and power. In Eugene Sue’s”Wandering Jew,” Jesuits are uncovered in their hellish plottings and intrigues. The American of to-day ought to read that book of yesterday, for it reveals what practices, what machinations, what slavery, what abject ruin confronts the young men who shall give themselves to the control of the Jesuits in the American University now being built at Washington. One of the most beautiful characters in literature is”Gabriel the priest .” An orphan, placed in the care of good and honest Catholics if such there are is surrendered by them to the Jesuits, because of facts which came to them concerning property on the way to a certain family, which the Jesuits determine to obtain and hold. As a result, for years, the plottings go on, that orphans may be robbed, and good and innocent people may be deprived of their rights.

Of the general course of education, it is not necessary to speak. It has been described a, thousand times. It is the same at this time as in the days that are gone. But of the training much ought to be said. Gabriel enters the college. He says:”On the day of my joining it, the Superior said to me, in pointing out two of the pupils a little older than myself, These are the companions with whom you are to associate: you will walk with them always, but all three together; the rules of the House forbidding any conversation between two persons alone.”The students from the Jesuit College in Washington go in threes, not in twos. Americans see it, and do not fight it.

TRAINED TO BE SPIES.

“The same regulation enjoins, that you should listen attentively to what your companions may say, in order that you may report it to me, for those dear children may have, unknown to themselves, evil thoughts, or may contemplate the committing of a fault; but if you love your comrades, you must apprize me of their evil inclinations, in order that my paternal remonstrances may spare punishment, by preventing offence; for it is always better to prevent a fault than to punish it.

It happened sometime after, that I myself had been guilty of an infraction of the rules of the House; on which occasion the Superior said to me: My child! you have deserved a severe punishment, but you shall be pardoned, if you will promise to detect one of your companions in the same fault that you have committed.” And all this is done in the name of all that is most holy.

Gabriel ashamed of such conduct, asked if it were wrong to be an informer. The answer:”A student has no right to discriminate between right and wrong, but only to obey; that to the confessor belonged the responsibility,” uncovers the fetters that binds those under the control of Jesuits. His life was spent in an atmosphere of terror, of oppression, and suspicious watchings. Every effort is made to close the heart against all the gentle and tender emotions; to make of every young man a sneak, a hypocrite, a traitor. Lying follows in the wake of such teaching. According to the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, this is trivial. Now let us see the outcome. The education in the college is finished. Into the semi nary Gabriel went, comparatively innocent. He was now to be prepared for the holy ministry. Let us see how the work goes on.

“You placed in my hands a book, he said, “containing the questions that a confessor should put to young men, to young girls, to married women, when they presented themselves at that tribunal of penitence.”” My God,” exclaimed Gabriel, trembling,”I shall never forget that terrible moment. It was in the evening, I withdrew to my room, taking that book with me, composed, as you told me, by one of the fathers, and revised by a holy bishop.””It is impossible,” said Eugene Sue, writing for the French,”to give even in Latin an idea of the infamous book.”

Said Mr. Given, in his bold, excellent work,”Of the Jesuit and the University:””I experience considerable embarrassment in commencing this chapter, as it has to treat of a book that it is impossible to translate, and difficult to cite from its text; because the Latin insults modesty by its plain speaking. I must, there fore, crave the indulgence of the reader, and will promise him in return to withhold as much obscenity as I can.” Further on, in reference to the question imposed by the compendium, Mr. Given exclaims, with generous indignation:”What then must be the conversations that pass, in the retirement of the Confessional, between the priest and a married woman? I forbear to say more.”

The author of the”Discoveries of the Bibliophilist,” after having literally cited a great many passages from this horrible catechism, says:”My pen refuses to proceed further in this encyclopedia of every baseness, and I am sorry that it has gone so far; but I can only say, that though a mere copyist, I feel as much horror as if I had been touching poison. And yet, nevertheless, it is this horror that gives me courage. In the church of Jesus Christ, agreeably to the order established by the Divine will, that evil is good which leads one from error; and the more prompt the remedy the more it is efficacious. Morality can never be in danger so long as truth raises its voice and makes itself heard.”

Gabriel describes the effect upon him as he read the book:”Full of respect, confidence and faith, I opened its pages. At first, I did not understand it; but at last I did. Struck with shame and horror, and overcome by astonishment, I had hardly strength to close, with trembling hand, this abominable textbook. I immediately came to you, my father, to ask pardon for having involuntarily cast my eyes on its pages, which, by mistake, I supposed you had put into my hands.”

“You may also remember,”said the priest, “that I quieted your scruples, explaining to you that it was necessary that a priest, who was destined to hear all things under the seal of confession, should know all, with the power of appreciating it; that the Society imposed the reading of the compendium as a text-book on you deacons, seminarists and priests, who might be called to the sacred duty of confession.”

“I believed you, my father; the habit of passive obedience was too strong upon me, discipline had so utterly deprived me of all self-examination, that spite of my horror, for which I then reproached myself as for a heavy fault, in remembering your words, I returned with the book into my room. I read it! Oh! my father, what a revelation was there of the excessive refinements of criminal luxury! Then in the vigor of youth, I had been alone upheld by my ignorance, and the assistance of God, against sensual struggles. Oh, that night, that night! in the midst of the deep silence of my solitude, trembling with fright and confusion, I spelt over that catechism of monstrous, unheard-of, unknown debaucheries; in proportion as its obscene pictures of frightful lust were presented to my imagination till then chaste and pure, you know, oh God! that it seemed as if my reason had become weakened; yes, and had entirely gone astray; for although I desired utterly to fly from this infernal book; yet, I know not by what awful, frightful attraction, by what devouring curiosity, I was still held breathless over its infamous pages. I felt as though I should have died from shame and confusion; and yet, in spite of myself, my cheeks were burning and a corrupting warmth circulated through my veins, and these terrible allusions assisted to complete my wanderings; it seemed as though lascivious phantoms were starting from its accursed pages, and I lost my recollection in seeking to avoid their burning embraces.

“The terms in which you speak of this book are highly blameable, said the priest; you were the victim of your own excited imagination, and it is to that alone that you ought to ascribe those fatal impressions, instead of imputing them to a book, excellent and irreproachable for its purpose, and authorized by the church.

“Truly, my father,”replied Gabriel, with the most profound bitterness,”I have no right to complain that my mind, till that time innocent and pure, should henceforth be polluted with deformities that I should never even have dreamt of; for it is not likely that any who could have given themselves over to such horrors would have asked pardon from them of a priest.”These are matters on which you are not competent to judge, angrily replied the Father d Aigrigny.

“Then I will say no more on that subject,” said Gabriel, as he proceeded.

“A long illness succeeded this awful night.”

After it, he went as a missionary to America. It is refreshing to read his description of his enjoyment of freedom:

“From my childhood, I had always either lived in a college or a seminary, in a state of oppression and continual dejection; and from being always accustomed to keep my eyes upon the ground, I had never known what it was to contemplate the heavens, or the splendid beauties of Nature. Oh, what profound, what religious happiness I enjoyed on first suddenly finding myself transported amongst the imposing grandeurs of the ocean, when, during the voyage, I contemplated myself between the sea and sky! Then it seemed as if I had quitted a place of thick and heavy darkness. For the first time for many years, I felt my heart freely beating in my bosom. For the first time, I felt that I was master of my own thoughts; and I then dared to examine my past life, as one who looks from a precipice into the deep and darkened valley beneath him. Then strange doubts came across my mind. I inquired of myself by what right, or to what end, I had been so long a time oppressed and borne down; deprived of the exercise of my free will, of my liberty, of my reason. Since God had endowed me with all these, then I reasoned, that perhaps the ends of that grand, beautiful and holy work to which I had dedicated myself, would one day be developed, and compensate me for my obedience and resignation.

On my arrival at Charleston, S.C., the Superior of the establishment in that town, to whom I had communicated my doubts as to the object of the Society, took upon himself to clear them up. With a fearful candor he unveiled their ends; not perhaps as understood by all the members of the Society, of whom a great many partook of my ignorance, but such as the principals of it had undeviatingly pursued from the foundation of the Order. I became terrified. I read the casuists. Oh, my father! what a new and frightful revelation for me, when at every page of these books, written by the fathers, I read an excuse indeed a justification of robbery, calumny, violation, adultery, perjury, murder, regicide, as follows:”Violation. He who, either by force, menace, fraud, or importunity, seduces a virgin, without promise of marriage, must indemnify the girl, or her relatives, for the wrong that may result from it, by giving her a dowry, by which she may get a husband; or marrying her himself, if he cannot otherwise indemnify her. If, however, the offense remains an absolute secret, the seducer is not bound to make any restitution” This is Romanism.

“Adultery. If any one has a guilty connection with a married woman, not because she is married, but because she is handsome setting aside the circumstances of her being married such connection, according to many authors, does not constitute the sin of adultery, but merely that of fornication.”

After reading this, Gabriel said:”When I thought within myself, that as a priest of the God of charity, of justice, of pardon, I yet belonged to a society whose chiefs propounded such doctrines and boasted of them, I made an oath before God, to break for ever the bonds by which I was attached to it.”

Is it probable, is it possible, that Jesuitism has improved? Is such a school or university a desideratum in this land? Do we need to have American youth doomed to such a discipline? Father Chiniquy declares, that students in this land seek to escape this sea of nastiness. The effect of such teaching is horrible. It undermines and degrades manhood. It is time that this truth was brought home to the consciences of men. They have got to be made to see that Romanism is not a religion, but a plot an adjunct of hell; and that it has nothing whatever to do with heaven.

Now it is admitted, that the most revolting and degrading scene of the confessional is that of the prescribed treatment of females. On the mind of every Roman Catholic the conviction is fastened, that damnation is sure to come to those who go to confession and do not confess every sin they have committed. Further, that if a female appears modest, the confessor is instructed that her modesty must be overcome, or else he is authorized to deny her absolution.

“But,” it has been well asked,”what modesty in a young lady, or any other person, is in danger of being offended, if the priest’s conduct is directed by God’s Word? For then he would think of and practice naught but whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, what soever things are lovely, and whatsoever things are of good report/ It is, however, because of the opposite of those things, especially in things that are pure, that the modesty of the most hardened sinner must at times be shocked in the confessional; of course, we need not be surprised to learn that a young lady can be offended there. Indeed, in looking over a pamphlet, containing lengthy extracts from theological works used in seminaries, not in Ireland, but in the United States, that part of the confessional having reference particularly to females, in single life, in the marriage state, and in widowhood, it is impossible to conceive of any thing more vile, more outrageously offensive and abominable, to any mind not steeped in the lowest depths of sensualized life.”Ought not these facts to be placed within reach of the fathers and mothers whose children are exposed to such perils because the Roman Catholic Church is permitted unmolested to do its hellish work? Approach it and try to write the words, and the hand pauses, the heart sickens, and it seems impossible to proceed.

How husbands can allow their wives to go to confession, fathers their daughters, brothers their sisters; or how an intelligent and thoughtful people can look with favor upon the building up of an institution in which these debasing and polluting utterances are taught, passes comprehension.

The Rev. Pierce Connelly, a domestic chaplain to the Earl of Shrewsbury, in a letter published in the London Times, says:”I have had experience in the confessional, from princes downwards, and out of it, such as perhaps has fallen to the lot of no other living man; and my solemn conviction is, that a celibate priesthood, organized like that of Rome, is in irreconcilable hostility with all good human interests. I have seen clerical inviolability made to mean nothing less than license and impurity. I have read to the simple-minded Cardinal- Prefect of the Propaganda a narrative written to a pious lady friend, by a respected Roman priest, of such enormities of lust in his fellow-priests around him, that the reading of them took away the breath; to be answered, Caro Mio, I know it, I know it all, and more and worse than all; but nothing can be done! I have known a priest practice Ligouri on his client simply as an amateur of wickedness, apparently without conscious malice, just as he would try poison upon dogs and cats; an Iago, without even an imaginary wrong from anybody, {Letters of Marcus, p. 122.} and I have seen priests of mean abilities, of coarse natures, and gross breeding, practice upon pure and highly- gifted women of the upper ranks, married and unmarried, the teachings of their treacherous and impure casuistry, and with a success that seemed more than human. I have seen these priests impose their pretended divine authority, and sustain it by mock miracles, for ends that were simply devilish. I have had poured into my ears what can never be uttered, and what ought not to be believed, but was only too plainly true. And I have seen that all that is most deplorable is not an accident, but a result, and an inevitable result, of the working practical system of the church of Rome, with all its stupendous machinery of mischief. And the system is irrevocable and irremediable.” {Ibid p.122}

Yet this is not all. It is even not the worst. Man is what woman makes him, and the priest unmakes the woman and subverts the solid edifice by the ruin of the foundation. What shall be done about it? Shall the truth be scattered? The need of it is apparent in this and other lands.

The Chairman of the Chili Mission of the Presbyterian church, writes as follows:”My Dear Brother: I have read your book Why Priests Should Wed, and beg to say it is just what is needed. I wish you had the power of reading the secrets of the greatest secret society in the world the Roman Catholic Church, as these secrets are hidden to-day in the United States. I could give you some live facts of the present moment concerning the great Harlot as this immense institution has developed here.

“I will write my request, and then give you a fact or two illustrative of the BEAST you are trying to destroy: 1. Have you any objections to our translating and printing your book in Chili? 2. Would you object to its coming out in Spanish in an unmutilated form? and if so, would you be willing to supply us the suppressed matter so that it could be restored in the translation? Let me add now a fact or two that will illustrate, 1st: Your theme, Why Priests Should Wed; and secondly, The benumbing influence of this horrid system, on not only the conscience, but also on the moral sense of the Romanist, and the manliness and womanliness of the members of this depraved society.

The Sota-Cura, or Vice-Cura, in Parral, ruined, sometime ago, one of the teachers in the public school. The lady lives now in San Carlos, and the child is in Chilan, and the Cura still performs his functions.

“The Principal Cura of Parral says, that it is of no consequence, that he is ugly; give him but two hours with a woman, and he can destroy her. This beast is in full charge of the parish church of Parral, and had been transferred to that church because of complaints against him for seducing women.

“Another cura came one night to a house where two young men were visiting two young ladies. He called the young ladies to sit one each side, and spreading a manto in front of the three, began under the manto to handle the girls. The young men saw him do it, and had not spunk enough to kick the drunken rake out of doors. The mothers do not seem to make much objection to such actions. The mothers know of the unhappy relations of the priests with their daughters, and say nothing.

“In Cauquenes, the other day, a young woman ran into the chancel, just after the priest had consecrated the wine, and was about to drink it. She snatched the chalice from his hands, and in the presence of the congregation shouted, You are a bad man, and not worthy to drink that cup, and at the word she drank the wine herself. The next Sunday she was in her place in the choir and nothing was done to her; though she had done a deed that would have put her in prison. But the priest retired from the church and went somewhere else. The parents of the young woman say, she was justified in this act. The account was published one week ago in El Sur, a paper of Concepcion. It was not long ago that the Bishop of Concepcion was the cause of the ruin of a young woman of high parentage: the facts were known to all Concepcion, but the Bishop still served. The mouths of friends were hushed. The bishop has since died of cholera. A gentleman in La Serena told me of the fact that a servant girl in his house was found in the family-way , and the author of her shame was an official member of the Bishop’s house.

“This gentleman went to the Bishop and had the delinquent discovered and transferred to some other part. Had the child been born alive, it was his intention to make the priest support it.

“When after a long vacancy the present archbishop was called to fill the See, at the installation or consecration, a woman was observed to hold a child of two years up above the crowd, and was heard say to it,”That man [the new archbishop] is your father.” She was followed to her house, and it was discovered that she was indeed a mistress of the high functionary. This account was published, and the address of the one who noted the fact given, yet no notice was taken of it. Not a single Eoman Catholic paper said a word or referred to it; much less uttered an indignant denial, and demanded proof, or the punishment of the slanderer.

“Your book covers a wider ground, and deals also with fundamental questions in such a way that we would see it in the hands of every intelligent Roman ist, and for this reason have written you.

I am,
J. M. ALLIS.
Santiago, Chili, S.A., May 4th, 1888. Casilla 912.

While it may not be wise to do more than has been attempted in”Why Priests Should Wed,” it does seem important that the truth be given to the men and women of this Western world, that they may judge truly the character of Romanism, the life-long foe of morality, of virtue, and of Christianity.

It is idle to dream of the purity of men who are accustomed to mouth words full of vile suggestions. As a man thinketh, so is he.” This had been theory. When the lecture entitled :

“NUNNERIES, PRISONS, OR WORSE,”

was delivered in one of our great cities, a storm of opposition was raised by Rome. The lecture was called ” foul-mouthed” by leading Roman Catholics, and the nuns were spoken of as immaculate and above suspicion. A lady who had been ten years in one of the nunneries of the town, came to a subsequent lecture, and sent a friend to the platform of the crowded hall, who said : “I am authorized by a lady now in this audience, a member of a Congregational church” giving her name, and the locality where she resided ” to say, that she has been ten years in a a convent in this city, and for eight years wore the black veil as a nun ; and she declares that all that has been said, charging incontinency upon priests and nuns, is true, but that the half has not been told.” That was much. This that follows is more. A gentleman occupying a distinguished position in the Christian world, brought the following statement. It seemed incredible, and was not used until it had been attested on oath. With feelings bordering on horror, it was read word for word ; and if after reading this, that is faithfully copied, and the chapter preceding, there are those who claim that Romanism is worthy of regard, should they not be classed with those who gladly “believe a lie that they may be damned ” ?

A young man of seventeen years is walking the deck of an excursion steamer. Two men, dressed as priests, are on the deck. One of them bows to the young man. he returns the salutation. Where upon one of the priests steps up and says : “I am glad, my son, to note your reverence for the fathers of your church.” I said : ” My custom is “to treat with respect any professed teacher of Christian Faith.” He asked me to sit down beside him, and He enquired my name, age, occupation, parentage,, purpose in life, etc. ; and on my telling him that I expected to study law, he gave me much sound and wholesome advice. Finally he asked me if I knew him. I said: “No.” He said he was His Grace the Archbishop of Toronto ; and that the priest who as with him was Father . I expressed my due recognition of the honor of a conversation with His Grace ; whereupon he said, he had taken quite an interest in me, and would like to grant me an absolution for my past sins, if I would confess them to him ; and that he had no doubt he could get the key of the Captain s stateroom for the purpose. I replied that it would be useless, because I had no faith in the efficacy of any such pardoning. He asked me to take off my hat and pray with him ; and the three of us removed our hats, and he offered up a very earnest, brief prayer there upon the deck the place where we were sitting being quite secluded, and we remained sitting during the prayer. After the prayer, he continued talking to me for an hour, giving me excellent advice on my life and habits, especially warning me against the gratification of sensual passions, either by self-abuse or harlotry.

From the steamboat they pass to a parlor-car ; and there, the door being locked, the youth was asked to make himself comfortable on a couch at the side of the Archbishop. He then led the conversation into special lines. For example, he asked me : “If in school I had not often had my passion aroused by the legs of the girls being visible below their short dresses, and if I had not known boys who were seated across the aisle from the girls to deliberately drop pencils or books on the floor, so that, when picking them up, they might look under the skirts of the nearest girl.” This is surprising language for an Archbishop to address to a youth of seventeen. It is but the prelude to the nastiness that follows. This was one of the illustrations upon which he built skilful and forcible arguments against the Protestant public school question.

As a further illustration this time on the line of the open Bible he referred to Luke 2:23 : “Every male that openeth the womb, shall be called holy to the Lord ; ” and he said that he knew of hundreds of instances where young men had twisted that passage into an excuse for immoral connection. And upon this, and other illustrations of a like nature, he erected what he thought an impregnable barrier against the free use of the Bible, apart from priestly guidance.

The Archbishop having attempted to awaken distrust in the mind of the youth in regard to the most pertinent and solid grounds of Protestantism, very quickly developed ” a careful, elaborate and attractive description of the Roman Catholic Church, its universality, the grandeur of its history, its glorious ritual, its magnificent conquests in the past, the sanctity of a priest’s life, the unequaled advantages for study which it offered, the high positions which faithful energy could achieve within its bounds, and particularly did he dilate on the opportunities which there were given for a complete education, a finished course of knowledge.”

He dazzled me with a glorious view of Catholic scholarship, claiming that all truth lay within the reach of a priest, while the wonderful statement which he made of their communion with God seemed to clothe them with a halo of divinity. They were said to be above truth, because they were the companions of God, who was the Author of truth.

His portraiture of the Pope was dazzling. He was the monarch of emperors ; his subjects were numbered by hundreds of millions. He was infallible, and the authorized representation of the Godhead on earth ; and his treasures, whether viewed financially in gold and silver and precious stones, or spiritually in the worship given to him by his subjects in any light, his treasures were infinite ; and this, he said, was possible to me, though, of course, not probable. But he pointed out to me, that in the lawful struggle for ascendancy in the Catholic Church, my ambition could be satiated to its fullest fruition, and the greatest glory of my proudest desires could be more than satisfied; while even if I never became more than a common priest, my power and influence would be far greater than that of the highest judge in the land ; and all these glorious possibilities would be laid open to me then and there, if I would but humbly and penitently become a convert to the truth. I could go straight to Toronto with him, and within twenty-four hours could be safely under the fold of the only and everlasting church of God.

The triune oath required of me, he said, was very simple. Poverty, chastity, and obedience were then described ; and so skilfully was the web laid that he thought my entanglement was complete.

It was at this juncture that I expressed my fear that, with my passionate nature, I could not keep pure the second vow, and that I had a great dislike to any pursuit in life that would quench the lire of my passion. This, I candidly stated to him, was a most serious obstacle ; whereupon he gave me the following explanation of the vow, stating that it followed and was intimately connected with the first vow, and could be only thoroughly understood in that light; and that “when these two vows were properly understood, it was quite consistent with them that the priest and the nun should mutually gratify the sensual desires of the other.”

FIRST ARGUMENT.

(1) All priests and nuns must take the vow of poverty. (2) This vow means, the yielding to the service of the church of God, not only your property, but your body and your mind ; that is to say, your affections and your very thoughts. (3) Therefore, you, as a person, no longer exist; both priest and nun are an inherent part of the church. (4) Hence, physical coition between the two was no more sin than the contact of the opposite organs of an hemaphrodite, or the mingling of the various robes of priest and nun it was simply the contact of various parts of the one organization.

SECOND ARGUMENT.

(1) The Church was the bride of Christ. (2) The priest was the representative or local vicar of Christ. (3) It followed, that every nun, by her marriage with the Church, became a part of the body of Christ s bride. (4) Hence, physical connection between priest and nun is not only the privilege, but becomes the duty, of those connected with the church.

THIRD ARGUMENT.

(1) The Word of God, and especially the epistles of Paul, particularly insist and teach, that every believer in Christ, becomes an organ in the body of Christ. (2) Hence, all members of the true Church of Christ become equal members of the one body. (3) Hence, as stated by Paul, in 1 Cor. 12:21

, ” The head cannot say lo the feet, I have no need of thee.” So neither can the priest or nun. (4) Hence, it follows again, as laid down by Paul in the same chapter, “that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care one for another.” (5) Hence, he concluded, that the coition of priest and nun for mutual comfort, was as natural as the chafing together of the right and left hand in cold weather. The Archbishop was ably seconded in the matter by Father , whose role appeared to be the inserting of complimentary remarks concerning the Archbishop, and extolling his wisdom, learning, zeal, etc.

After this came the suggestion that the young man should leave gun and rod in the passenger coach, and drop his hat out of the window ; which would lead his parents to believe that he had fallen from the train; while the non-discovery of his body would always remain with them as a hope that he was not dead and might ultimately return; while he was to proceed with the Archbishop to the city, where, after being admitted into the Catholic Church, he would be provided with a first-class passage to Rome, and a recommendation to an eminent official there ; from which time onward, all the scholarships of Christendom would be within his grasp, while the only limits to his towering ambition would be the energy and ability which he should display to entitle him to it, and the fullest gratification of all natural desires could be accomplished in a manner perfectly consistent with a holy and sanctified life, the service of Christ and his fellow-men, with the certain guarantee, of eternal life. Such was the Archbishop s scheme. If anything more devilish can be devised, it proves great capacity in that line. The youth was earnestly persuaded not to reject the truth. See him ! He is in the car without a friend. The Archbishop and priest are his keepers. All knelt together in prayer. The prelate prayed for his conversion. A few minutes might have sealed his doom ; when, in the mercy of God, the locomotive s shrill whistle blew for his home station. That sudden shriek brought him back suddenly to reality and decision. One thought of home, of mother, of Bible and Christ, and the temptation was gone. Thanking the Archbishop for his kindness, he sprung to the door, turned the key, retired from the car, and in a moment was upon the platform saved from popery and hell !

Does such a statement throw any light upon the conduct of priests? Is it strange that men thus taught so often fall? ” Oh,” said a young priest to Blanco White, with tears in his eyes, after having for four or five years discharged the duties of his station, ” God only knows what I have suffered during this time ! And if I have fallen, it is not with out fighting. Had I been allowed to choose a wife as it is the law of God, who destines man to marriage, whatever our rules teach to the contrary, I should have been the happiest man in the world ; I should be a good, a holy priest ; while now, I am oh, I am ashamed of myself!” This is really the sad history of all their falls ; for, let us be just, no men are tempted like priests. Their passions are often necessarily aroused. The demon of bad thoughts takes possession of them. Their ministry drives them into such relations with women, into whose most secret thoughts they are obliged to enter, that their virtue receives many shocks. Admit that in the beginning they try to be faithful. They nutter, fall, reform again, go on, fall again, and at length, to finish this horrible struggle, abandon faith, and sink into Atheism ; because of the impossibility of reconciling their faith with conduct so vile, and yet so common to the class. If the statement of the Archbishop contains the truth, what a horrid light it sheds upon the conduct of priests !

A gray-haired mother who had fled from Rome to Christ, came and said : “My granddaughter is being wooed and won by Father . She spoke as if the priest was a lover, and not a minister. “Can priests win hearts? Is that their vocation?”

“They were nominally for the church; but really for themselves,” was the sad reply. They had read “Why Priests Should Wed,” and were startled by its terrible revelations. The young lady accompanied her grandmother to the house of God. Beautiful in face and form, attractive in manner, soft-toned in speech, she seemed fitted to make some man a good wife, and to become the centre of a pleasant home. She had determined to become a nun. The cloister was not in her thought, nor was religion. She was in love with the priest, and thought of passing into the cloister that she might have him, so soon as she became a spiritual sister. Then came Gavazzi’s words of warning to the nun. He said: “The Jesuits, too, have nuns. For almost every order of monks there is a corresponding order of nuns. If monks are useless and dangerous, what are nuns ? They are very gentle-speaking ladies, very delicate ladies; but, are they Scriptural ? No ! Christ never instituted nuns ! He came alike to men and women, and all the human race. Among his followers were humble and devout women, Mary Magdalen and Martha and others, to whom he spoke of things eternal ; but did he ever say to any of them : I wish you to become a nun ? Never ! He said : Come and follow me ; but never, Go to a cloister ! {Gavazzi’s Lectures, pp. 87} And yet nuns swarm in Washington. They ride in carriages ; they walk in procession ; they fatten at the public crib, and are treated by Congressmen as if they were worthy of supreme regard. Their names we need not give, nor describe the great establishment. Do parents understand, in the light of the Archbishop s statement, the character, standing, and habits of these “Sisters” so-called, who with the gratification of every passionate desire are promised eternal life?

It is time the iniquitous character of these institutions were made known. If nuns are what the Archbishop describes them, the mistresses of priests, let it be known, Do parents consider the terrible meaning of the conduct of a priest when he makes love to a girl and obtains her consent to abandon home and friends, and immure herself in a convent, and become in her full maturity, in her ripe beauty, the slavish subject of the priest ? In “Why Priests Should Wed,” the warnings of Wm. Hogan and Maria Monk are given, but the words of the Archbishop, and the argument by which the position is maintained, throw light upon this subject. As educators, nuns are failures. They live under the influence of their father-confessors,

These are generally Jesuits, or Jesuitically educated ; the nun will impart to her pupil the same education she receives from her spiritual director, a poor, bigoted, contemptible, anti- American education. This is the education given by those nunned and cloistered teachers, the willing subject of the priests, and who by example, if not by word, make a protension to virtue a play, if not a by-word and a sham.

Beware for your homes. Nuns are to be found not only in monasteries, but abroad ; they travel in disguise, like Jesuits. They enter homes as servants ; and though often deemed a great blessing in a Protestant family, they are at times just the reverse. They know how to peep through the keyhole, and carry all information they can obtain to the father-confessor. Would you have in your families an adroit, consummate spy? Take a servant educated by nuns, and your wish is gratified. It is beginning to be fashionable to think that hospitals and asylums are sure to be well cared for if given into the charge of Sisters of Charity. Before they were introduced, hospitals and schools were well attended ; and were they now extinct, American institutions would be well cared for ; while what good they do is more than outweighed by the unmitigated evil of the general aim and tendency of monastic institutions.

It would require the genius of a Disraeli to do justice to the many-sided characteristics of fashionable life in Washington. More and more, throng there, during the winter months, the women of fashion and the men of note, who make Saratoga, Newport, and Long Branch places of attraction and repute during the summer. Washington is becoming a great winter resort. People come there, some for politics, some for office, some for patronage, and others for the rich pickings or plums of party favor bestowed by their representatives in the House and Senate, by the men whom they have been delighted to honor with their support at home, and who feel that obligation and interest alike, compel and command them to do for them all in their power to make their sojourn in Washington a delight.

The receptions at the White House, the spreads given by the members of the Cabinet and other officials of high life, foreign and home, furnish abundant entertainments to which entrance is not difficult, and is within the reach of the deserving. In fashionable life, a re many citizens of Washington who understand etiquette, and are leaders and directors of the movements which bring pleasure or pain. Some ambitious relative- of a distinguished official gets her name on the page of the Court paper, and becomes a ruling star. Round her gather lesser lights. Ambitious young men connected with the army or navy, with foreigners of distinction, or attaches of the ministers who represent foreign countries, rival the young Congressman, the son of a senator, or mayhap a President, or the bright and noble array of newspaper men, who hold in their hands the making or unmaking of reputations, the successful writer, orator, or financier, who are there with an eye to business, and are regarded as a great catch at home, and therefore as objects of regard abroad, share in the pleasures of the dance, chat at the supper, and play their part in the saloon of fashion, brilliant with light, and radiant with the confiscated rays flashing from brilliant diamonds worn in profusion by the attractive American women, who are becoming each year sought after by the titled and great of this and other lands. Among these are Jesuits, without the name, dressed in the height of fashion, capable of conversing in any tongue, and so able to bring together the Cuban and the pride of Paris, the German and the sweet-toned Italian ; standing as an intermediate not only between different nationalities, but different sects and classes. They know life. They have influence with the great. They sport in the light of the Red- Robed Cardinal, who keeps his high place as prince of the church, and as ruler in the political world, to an extent little appreciated by the uninitiated. Ever on the watch to bring a Protestant of influence, or of wealth which in Washington creates influence into association with a Roman Catholic of prominence and position, it is not difficult- to see that on this continent Washington opens to Romanism a field of richest possibilities. Beside them, and working with Brothers of the Order, are female Jesuits, as well-trained ; distinguished for skill in diplomacy, in finesse, always ready to leave any ordinary occupation to further the interests of the church.

At their head for years and years, ranked that cultured and famed wife of a great general who wears on her breast the” Golden Rose,” presented by the Pope of Rome. Associating with her are ladies who rank high in Evangelical associations, and who are always ready to accept a second or a subordinate place on boards of hospitals or homes ; where they vote as they are bidden, and help to place power and patronage under the control of that one great organism which works parties, senates, and supreme courts, with an eye not to God’s glory, but the good and growth of the party of Rome. As proof, read a few well-known facts.

It was at a magnificent party, a beautiful girl, on her father’s arm, paused, and shook the hand of a distinguished gentleman whose prospects brightened every hour as the probable nominee for the presidency. He made a passing and complimentary remark, which brought a blush to the cheek, brightness to the eye, and a thrill of joy to the heart. Not far away stood a young man, the son of a Protestant, a student at Princeton, enamored of her beauty and glad to hear her praises spoken by one so highly esteemed. In a little time he was at her side. They were together evening after evening. Every hindrance was removed. Room was given them. Invitation followed invitation to places where pleasure reigned. There were those who saw the game and wished it well. The Jesuits were delighted. The President had placed the church of Rome under great obligations, by having his Secretary of State address a letter to the Italian government, asking that the American College be saved from confiscation. It was done ; and the name of the President, as his own successor, was taken up on the tongue of the press, and rolled like a sweet morsel for months. He deserved what was said of him. He was an honest, true, and good President, and proved that he was an exception to the rule, that a Vice-President succeeding to the presidency must be a traitor to the party who elected him.

It was thought that he could be used as an instrument in furthering a scheme upon which thought, money, and much planning had been bestowed. He, the son of a Baptist minister, had married an Episcopalian, and had been led by his wife into the more fashionable church, and was one of the most devout of worshippers. The Jesuits saw in that step but the beginning that might lead him into the fold of a church in which apostolic succession was a claimed verity, and not a pretence. Along this path thou sands had marched into the embrace of Rome. Why not this cultured man? Up came the happy couple to this polite and clear- sighted man, who, handsome in face, faultless in dress, dignified in mien, and courteous in speech, is the centre of attraction.

As the young and happy couple pass, a friend to the President remarks:”A most desirable match!”

She is a Roman Catholic,” replied the President.

” What of that?” was the outspoken ejaculation, as a shadow of disappointment swept over the faces of the Jesuitical throng;”surely, that would not form an obstacle in the opinion of a gentleman who allowed his heart-love to rule so much of his life as was shown in his devotion to his wife.”

The President’s face flushed, and his eye flashed, as he replied:”It would make a vast difference. Between a girl professing faith in Christ and a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and a Roman Catholic, is a wide remove. Should the young man marry into that home, they will be compelled either to be married in a Roman Catholic church with its attendant display, or an altar must be built in the home, and the bridegroom must consent to having their offspring given up to the church of Rome. This would, in my opinion, be an inseparable barrier to the union.”

A polite acquiescence was given.

In another part of the room was a hurried conversation. That woman distinguished in securing the advancement of any one connected with the Roman Catholic church, from a man who empties ash-barrels to one seeking a Cabinet appointment, spoke warmly and wisely: Sound him. Find out if those are his views. If so, we will have done with him.”

To the girl the words were recited. She would gladly have turned from Rome. She was tired of its empty nummeries, and longed for something better. These men, who know so well the weaknesses of women, knew how to manage her. She soon found herself fenced in to Jesuitical influences, and apart and away from Protestant associations.

A Jesuit took the young man to ride, and there learned that he would stand with his household that he would not surrender to Rome.

The father of the girl, a devout Roman Catholic, believed he could remove the hindrance. The house hold quoted the words of the President in approval. To the President went the Congressman, assured of his power to carry all before him. The son of a Baptist minister, born in the north of Ireland, and knowing Romanism as it is, and hating it because of its deserts, was firm and decided. Archbishop, bishop, priest and Jesuit, tried to persuade, and finally to compel. In vain! Rome had reached a stone wall! It could not go over it. It was difficult to go around it! At this time the President was riding on the high and crested wave of popularity. A second term was an assured fact, in the estimation of the million. His name was on the world’s broad tongue like the sound of the falling of a force. His praises filled the press, and rolled like a tide current over the world. He was honest, capable, industrious, and a mighty manipulator of men. His knowledge of the requirements of high life surpassed all his predecessors. As a club man, he was an authority ; and as a referee in difficult cases, his decisions were marked by sound judgment and fairness, and were not appealed from. To break such a man, seemed like a herculean task ; but the Jesuits said it should be done, if he did not bow to Rome.

The health of the young lady gave way. The Jesuits made the most of it. The father and the magnates of the church grew desperate. There was great commotion in fashionable life. Rome had never been baffled before. Could she be baffled now?

The Congressman, beaten and almost broken, took his daughter to his home, where she died, it is said, with a broken heart. This was as the Jesuits desired. Then came the organizing against the President, and in favor of a man more subtle, more complaisant, more ready to yield.

As was natural, thought turned towards a General of the army, the friend and companion of Grant, and the most popular man in Washington. His tall form ; short, quick, nervous step ; always well dressed, but never gaudily ; a hater of new clothes, and of new ways ; with an extraordinary head, big and full at the top ; with a brain that had been too big for the body, had not the latter been developed into a bundle of iron tissues by the hardest of physical exertions, he was a man to be pointed out as the commanding feature of any gathering. His” great campaigns, in which he generally slept on the ground without a tent, in the earlier part of his military career, gave him a constitution which served him well. His face was rough, and it had a strong expression. He was pat-tongued. Epigrams flew from it like sparks from an anvil. Though nominally a member of the church, he was noted for his profanity. He carried a cigar in his mouth almost as much as Grant. When he smokes he smokes all over, so to speak. He seems to be disgusted with his cigar, and sucks in its nicotine as though it was the hardest thing in the world to get it to draw. He brushes off the ashes with a quick, nervous gesture, and throws away the cigar when it is only half smoked. He uses the weed fully as much as any man in the army.

“The shape of his head was much discussed at the time it was alleged he was a lunatic. This was when he told Simon Cameron and Lorenzo Thomas that it would take 200,000 men to drive the rebels out of Kentucky. These two gentlemen laughed at the idea, and would not accept his advice concerning Kentucky. He then asked to be relieved. He was ordered elsewhere, and another took his place. This was on November 30, 1861 ; and on the same night, the report that he was crazy was sent out by a correspondent of one of the New York papers.

“During the first part of Andrew Jackson’s term he lived in the family of Senator___ , at___ , O___. , a sleepy country-town of perhaps a couple of thousand inhabitants, where the boys loafed about the stores and listened to the older loafers tell stories. His comrades called him * Gump, and one of them says he was among the laziest of them, and that he could always be found at the stores of an evening. 4 He was a different fellow/ says this gentleman, from ___ , who was a great reader, and a sort of plodder. Gump had a great idea of going to West Point, and he talked of it continually. I shall never forget the day his uncle finally got him his appointment. He was so happy he could hardly contain himself, and he almost walked on the air for several days.

“He graduated at the early age of 20, and entered the artillery, serving first in the Florida war, as first- lieutenant during the Mexican war, in California as adjutant-general. Ten years after he graduated he married his patron’s daughter, who was then Secretary of the Interior, and the wedding came off in grand style at Washington. Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Tom Beiiton were all present, as was also the President and his cabinet. He was thirty years old then. His beard was a dingy red, and he had a face bronzed with service in the West. The couple went to New York, Niagara Falls, and then to Washington. He stayed in the army three years after his marriage ; but in 1853 resigned, and went to San Francisco, where he opened a broker’s shop. He afterward had a bank at No. 12 Wall Street, New York City. But neither of these ventures could have paid very well ; for very shortly after, we find he left for Kansas, where his brothers-in-law were practicing at the bar.

“His family are missed, in a social way, for the general was the life of many a dinner table. He lived very nicely here, in a three-story building, on street, very near the White House, Worrnley’s Hotel, and the Riggs. Here he had an office in the basement, where you could find him at odd hours working away. At the War Department he was, perhaps, the most busy man in the great building. He seemed to be always going at lightning speed. In his eyes the department clerk was as good as the long-winded United States senator, and if he were in a good humor, the clerk would be just as well received. If he were in a bad humor and this was by no means uncommon both had better keep away. This quality of the general has tended much to the good of the army. Military men, especially of the lower orders, are inclined to pomp and snobbery. His blunt, off-hand ways, his plain, practical ideas, and his bold way of calling a spade, a spade, has done much to foster common sense among the military men here.

“His habit of sometimes letting his feelings carry him away came near being his ruin in the days following the accession of Andrew Johnson. Johnson, you know, repudiated his agreement with Joe Johnston at the time, though he afterwards practically adopted it. One of the leading war correspondents of the time tells the story. He says:

“Sullen at the repudiation of his agreement with Johnston, angry at the interference of Gen. Halleck with the co-operative movements of himself and ___ , furious at the countermanding of his orders by the Secretary of War, he marched to Washington with his army, breathing vengeance upon Halleck, and hate and contempt upon Stanton. No nation safely before witnessed such a spectacle a victorious general, at the head of 80,000 men devoted to him and jealous of his fame as a part of their own, marching to the capital of the country, with threats against his military superiors breathing from his lips and flowing from his pen. For days he raved around Washington, expressing his contempt for Halleck and Stanton in the strongest terms, and denouncing them as mere non-combatants whom he despised. He wrote to his friends, and through them to the public, comparing Halleck and Stanton to cowardly Falstaffs, seeking to win honor for the deeds he had done, accusing the Secretary of War of suppressing his reports and endeavoring to slander him before the American public in official bulletins. For days his army roamed the streets of the capital with the same freedom with which they had roamed through the fields of war, and no man dared to raise his voice in condemnation of their leader or approval of the superiors who had opposed him. No Republic ever was in such danger before, and yet the danger was hardly suspected.

“This affair, however, blew over, and he never was called to account for his actions. No record was made of the offense against discipline, which in any other country would have cost him, not merely his position, but his reputation, and in many armies his life. Still, in all this he never meditated anything against the Government and never forgot his allegiance.” {Frank G. Carpenter, in Special Correspondence}

The timber out of which to make a President was clearly in this man. The wife being approached was not averse to whatever might give power to the church, and so readily yielded consent. It was believed that the manner in which the father had surrendered his idolized son to the Romish priesthood, was an indication of his readiness to yield compliance to their demands.

He was in St. Louis when the proposition was broached.”It won t do,” replied the great General.”My wife is a Roman Catholic, and most devoted to the interests of the church. That is enough. The country would never give its support to a man who, when elected, would be compelled to see the White House overrun with priests.” That outspoken man was abandoned.

There was another ready. A man born a Roman Catholic, converted to the Protestant faith, professedly, and having united with the Congregational church, and having a wife devoted to Christian work, moving in the first circles, seemed to be fitted, if it could be managed. There was much in his favor. His relatives were all Roman Catholics. His mother died in the church, and he had said that for a”dozen presidencies, he would not say a word against the religion of his mother.” His two sisters were at the head of two convents. His brother was a devout Romanist, and it was said that his father died in that faith. In the town and much in society, was a man sixty years of age, who was noted for wearing on his breast a medal given him by Pio Nono, because he belonged to his Pontifical Guard.

THE JESUITS, MALE AND FEMALE,

Turn to this man as suited to their plan. He is introduced into the family of the senator. He becomes acquainted with the daughter. Barriers are removed. The way is open. Marriage is proposed. The daughter joins the Roman Catholic church, and an altar is built in the home, and the”medal” soldier of Pio Nono marries the daughter of the most magnetic man of the age.

At once his name is taken up. Banners are worked for him.”The dividing of the Irish vote is spoken of as a desirable result. Here is a man, born a Roman Catholic, and becoming a Protestant, and yet supported by Romanists for the Presidency. Is not that a proof that in this land there is no danger from Rome? That Romanists can separate church State, and vote for a man who left them, and yet not so bigoted as to oppose them? It seemed as it the American people were dead to apprehension. The Pope was spoken of as a well-meaning gentleman. Romanists in high positions began to be consulted by politicians. The bargain was made. The goods were not delivered. Never was a more propitious time to act. The guns of Protestantism were still. In all the land, with here and there an exception, those who had fought Romanism had grounded arms. Romanism was a menace, no more. From every altar the nominee was praised, and tickets were given to the faithful to be deposited in the ballot box.

WHY WAS HE NOT ELECTED?

There is but one answer: God was against the sale. At a great reception, which was claimed to be a spontaneous outpouring of the ministry connected with the Evangelical denominations, to offset any fear arising from the statement which was going abroad, that the proposition had been made to the Vicar- Generals of the Archbishop of New York and Brooklyn,”Give me the Roman Catholic vote, and I will do for Romanism what has never been done before”

So the ministry came from far and near. The gentleman expected to deliver the address was called away. The Rev. Dr. Burchard was invited to take his place. He was an old man, given to alliterations. He said, in a low voice, so low that few heard it,” We are Republicans, and don t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.”

A reporter of the Press overheard these words, took them down, sold what he claimed would defeat the Republican and elect the Democratic candidate, and having pocketed his money, gave them wing.

The words were caught up and flashed over the world. Had the nominee said, That is true, all would have been well. Why did he not say it? He could not! Behind him was the altar, the giving away of his child, the bargain, the Jesuit host all about, the demand that he prove himself true to Rome, however false he might be to the principles professed when he turned from Rome and gave himself professedly to Christ. The next day it was printed ; and he said: “For a dozen presidencies, would not say a word against the religion of my mother.” Why not? If the religion of his mother was so bad that he decided he ought to turn from it, it was so bad that it ought to be opposed, no matter who professed it.

Defeat came. Why? One paper called it” bad luck.” The candidate said,” It was because it rained ;” and other excuses were given.

Was it” bad luck,” or God? It is a question which Americans will do well to answer.

On the deck of an ocean steamer, men discuss the probable chances of prominent men for the presidency. Among them is a Jesuit, who keeps his own counsel. Just opposite the Never Sink, as they approach the harbor of New York, the Jesuit asks one who has been foremost in the discussion,” Do you know who selects your President?”

“The people,” was the swift reply.

“No!”

“Who?”

“The Pope of Rome. Everyman who succeeds has to have his endorsement.”

“My friend,”said the politician,” your words remind me of a story. A Quaker friend was in conversation with a neighbor who was addicted to falsehood. One day, when he had told a whopper, he said: Friend A___ , I do not like to call thee a liar, but if the Mayor of Philadelphia should ask me to show him the greatest liar I ever knew, I would go to thee and say, Friend A___, the Mayor wants to see thee. And so, sir, though I would not like to call you a liar, this I will say, never was a man more mistaken. Let it be known whom Rome wants, and the American people will want and have the other man, and the history of our late conflict proves it. Rome may conspire against, and perhaps defeat, but cannot elect. She may hinder, but cannot control.”

“As an illustration, who is more popular than this man? For whom was such a welcome ever prepared? True, Home did her best, and pulled the wires well, and the menials who do her bidding thought to throw the nominee of the party into the shade, and foist this man to the chief place again ; but once more a power they could not control took charge of affairs. Seventy-five thousand people looked and waited ; some of them tossed on the waves grew sick and weary, and he did not come. The play came on with Hamlet left out, and once more the Hand which wrote on the palace-wall,” Mene, mene, tekel, apharsin,” appeared, the plan was marred, and the scheme was ruined.

Will this teach the people that it is safe to be true? Jesuitism is potent, but not all-potent. God Almighty has managed the affairs of this world a good while. As a result, the Pope is a prisoner in the Vatican, and Romanism needs only to be exposed to be expurgated from the plans of politics, and the purpose of this great free nation.

Shall Americans contend for the truth or betray it? This is the question of this hour, and of all hours.

Men are created for God’s glory. God does not waste his time or energies in holding up and blessing those who refuse to glorify him. He gives them up. He lets go of them. If they insist on going to the Devil, to the Devil they go, and make out of it what they can.

It is a glorious privilege to know God. It is the manifest duty of those who know him to be thankful for the knowledge, and to use it wisely and well. Whoever fails to do this, makes a loss. The Huguenots, in their folly and their fall, illustrate this truth. There was a time when those who professed the religion of Jesus Christ were in the majority in France. Then they had an open Bible, a Sabbath sacred to holy uses, the wealth, the culture and the government. They lost all because they did not champion and proclaim the truth God had entrusted to their care.

When Henry IV., in 1598, issued the Edict of Nantes, and acknowledged God, and evidenced his gratitude by giving to Christianity, as taught by the Gospel, a place in the lives, thoughts and plans of men, he enriched France.

When Louis XIV., in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, and gave his country over to the black-hearted villainy and terrible despotic hate of Romanism, to be despoiled and degraded, he brought ruin upon the State, and eternal infamy upon his name.

Then France was taken off the list of God-fearing States, and was enveloped in night, shrouded in superstition, that begets ignorance, poverty and death. In 1537 there were eight hundred and six churches in France. A bright future awaited them. France has known three periods in her religious life. Let us name them:

I. The Period of Repression, 1512 – 1559.

The attempt was made to reform the Papal church. It was in vain. As well might the attempt be made to clean out sin. It is ours to come out from it, and bring others out. This we can do. It is what men are within that makes them. It is what Romanists believe that damns them. The cry should be, “Come out from her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins.” Protestants hoped that error unrebuked would be dispersed by the truth. This is the dream of thousands in America. It is a false dream, built on a false hope.

II. The Period of Organization, 1559-1562.

This was the hour of battle. The Huguenots named as torch-bearers for Christ Jesus. The ministry and nobility revealed courage, and as the churches followed, effective work was done for God.

III. The Period of Resistance, 1559-1662.

This period deserves a book rather than a paragraph. Figures, some fearless and uncompromising, others devilish and malignant, are on the stage. Gaspard de Coligni, Charlotte Laval, Jeanne d’ Albert, mother of Navarre, how grandly they stand forth for God and the right!

Over against them are, Charles IX., Catherine do Medici, Alva, the Duke of Guise and others, whose deeds blacken the page of history. See them at work! ” Bring out the books and burn them,” is the savage demand of the Duke of Guise, as he reins up his horse in front of the barn where 3,000 have gathered to hear Leonard Morel as he preaches Christ.

“In whom do you believe?” is the question asked of the watchman at the door. ” In the Lord Jesus Christ,” is the brave answer. ” Cut him down.” “Dogs, rebels, Huguenots, heretics, “are the appellations thrown at the worshippers of Christ. The watchman is slain. Leonard Morel is struck with a musket. He falls on his knees and prays for his enemies. “Bring out the book!” The Bible is handed him. He opens and looks at the date. “This the Bible? It is 1500 years and more since this book was written. It was printed within a year. Wonderful truth! The Bible is old and yet new! Huguenot was, at the onset, a term of reproach. Afterwards, it became an honor. About the origin of the name there are various legends.

Davila finds a derivation for the name in the fact that they worshipped in cellars near Hugo’s gate. Others declare, the name came from Hugh Capet, from whom they claimed descent. It was not his origin, but his deeds, that made the Huguenot a power.

He has been described as a “soldier with the Testament in his knapsack, the Psalms on his lips, the name of Jehovah on his banner, the conviction of the Divine Presence as his leader” that made him a power.

On the field of battle the vision of liberated France was ever before his eye. His enemies were the enemies of God, who began each new war for the Papal idolatries. He fought them for Christ’s sake, and fired each shot with a prayer, and saw with thanksgiving a routed foe. He rushed to the charge without fear ; he cut right and left with unsparing severity ; he made it his work until the order was given to desist. He held every truce and treaty sacred. He had mercy for the prisoner, the maimed and the dying. He forgave as generously as he fought grievously. He boasted not of his own valor, if he was the conqueror ; he had no despair if he was the vanquished. He murmured not if he must die for Christ and country. He gave his soul to God, expected his pockets to be rifled, his body left for the eagles, and his bones to bleach under a sun that might yet shine upon a liberated kingdom.

“Honest as a Huguenot,” was the proverb coined in his honor and made current through long generations, because of what he was when he was at his best God’s child, fearless for the truth, the foe of Romanism, the champion of liberty, at any cost or sacrifice.

Gaspard d Coligni was the flower grown on the stem of a Huguenot’s faith. He was born Feb. 16, 1517, at Chatillon sur Laing. He came from good stock. His father was a brave soldier and an incorruptible patriot. He trained Gaspard to be brave. There were three boys, who loved each other, Odet, Gaspard and Francis. The star of the Reformation shone in the mother’s heart. The senior, Gaspard, chief marshal of the army, while hastening to relieve a beleaguered town, became overheated and died. He made a will commending wife and children to the king and brother-in-law Montmorency, and died on the ninth day of his illness.

The grief of the fatherless lads found some solace in their mother’s love, and in their affection for each other. Whoever was loved by the one was loved by the other two, and whoever offended one had an affair to settle with the entire three.

The mother of Coligni, in the home of Margaret Navarre, became the governess of Jeanne d Albert, the mother of Henry IV. It is probable that she made much of the friendship of this wonderful woman, who, for diversion, read the Holy Scriptures, saying, “In perusing them, my mind experiences its true and perfect joy.” His uncle was a rough soldier.

Coligm’s conversion to Christ was the foundation of his strength. It was in the castle at Ghent, while a prisoner, that he received a copy of the Scriptures, while on the brink of the grave. Audelot his brother, a prisoner at the same time, was released because he permitted the mass to be said in his cell. Coligni paid his ransom, and retired to his castle at Chatillon. There Charlotte Laval, his good wife, became his teacher. When urged to profess Christ, he replied:

“It is wise to count the cost of being a true Christian.”

“It is wiser to count the cost of not being a true Christian. In the one case, the cost is temporal. In the other, it is eternal. In the one, the body pays it ; but in the other, the soul pays it for ever.”

“You are right,” replied the Admiral, “and if you are ready for the sacrifice, so am I ; ” and from that time he professed the reformed creed. He gave the Scriptures to his servants, forbade profane swearing, engaged pious teachers for his children, and established schools among the poor. One day, being at Vaterille, listening to the word of God, the truth broke in upon his mind. He then saw that the true preparation for the Supper is not in the elements used, but in the person using them ; he must have faith in Christ. It was then he came into the full fellowship of the church.

The influence of this act was felt far and wide. Happy for France if there had been a John Knox at the head of the Reform, a man bold in the face of royalty, scathing upon usurpers, reading the tendency of political schemes, so that he could march abreast of events, the standard-bearer of the truth!

The Reform-movement went on. Churches multiplied. A fourth of the kingdom became identified with the churches of Christ.

The uprising of (he Huguenots called for Coligni. He hesitated. His wife knew the struggle in his soul. She could not sleep. She thought of them enjoying every blessing in the palace, while their brethren were in dungeons, or on the bare fields with the storm beating on them. He urged that war might only increase the number of the sufferers. Your argument leaves your brethren hopeless. It does not show a strong faith in God,” said the good wife. “He has given you the genius of a great Captain. You have confessed the justice of their cause.”

“Lay your hand on your heart, wife, and tell me: Could you receive the news of defeat without a murmur against God, and a reproach upon your husband?”

“I could.” “Are you prepared to see your husband branded as a rebel and dragged to a scaffold, while your children are disgraced and begging their bread of their enemies, or serving them as scullions and slaves? I give you eight days to reflect upon it, and if you are prepared for such reverses, I will march.” “The eight days are already expired,” said the intrepid wife. “Go sir, where duty calls.” He went. We cannot follow him. From camp to cabinet ; from cabinet to camp: now wounded, now defeated, but always undaunted, he went forth, until August 24, 1572, when, on the night of St. Bartholomew, he was murdered while a guest of the king; his body thrown from the window to the ground, had its head severed, and then was placed upon a gibbet ; afterward his body having been dragged about the streets, put over a fire and scorched, and thrown into the river, taken out again as unworthy food for fish, dragged again by boys and lewd fellows of the baser sort, was hung up again on the gallows, feet upward, where it remained for two weeks.

All this, and volumes more, was the background of 1637.

Now, look forward. Dark grows the night because God’s children withhold the light. Bright grows the day whenever the messengers of Christ have the courage of their convictions.

So long as the Huguenots filled out in their lives, and by their proclamation of the truth, the conception which the world still cherishes of them, they prospered.

Henry IV. illustrates, in his life and in his death, the uselessness of cowardice. He had courage on the battlefield, a rough wit, and in some circumstances would have shone as a leader. But in that age he lacked the faith which was essential to victory. He did not see Him who is invisible. His life was not built on Christ, the corner stone. The trial came. He was weighed in the balance and ” Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” was as true of him as of Belshazzar. He was found wanting in steadfastness of purpose. He surrendered to Koine when a lad. He dared not be a Daniel. He trifled when he should have been resolute and firm. Brave and skillful in war, he lost the advantage of his splendid victories by trying to serve both parties. At last, he tore himself treacherously from the faith of his mother, and from all the associations of his early years. On the 25th of July, 1593, he knocked on Sunday morning at the Cathedral of St. Dennis. The door was opened, and upon the bishop demanding his errand, he replied, ” To be admitted into the church of Rome.” He bowed at the altar, and swore allegiance to the Roman faith . He acted a lie . He thought the throne of France worth a mass, and consented, because Rome would not assent to his ruling on any other conditions, to become a godless king. He had asked once before, “Could you confide in the faith of an atheist? And in the day of battle would it add to your courage to think you followed the banner of a perjured apostate ?” Brave words, had he followed them ; but he surrendered, and lost all. The Rome he sought to placate, turned from him with fresh aversion in 1598, when he issued the Edict of Nantes, twenty-six years after the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The essence of the edict was limited toleration. Liberty of conscience was permitted to the Huguenots ; but except in special parts of France, they could not exercise their religion. They were declared eligible to office. Their poor were admitted into the hospitals ; but they were required to keep the Romish festivals and pay tithes. For a time the edict was observed, and under its shelter the Huguenots pursued their way, enjoying a measure of quiet and liberty. Then, had they preached the truth, they might have achieved a victory. But they suppressed it. They lacked the courage which was displayed by Antonio Court, who gathered little crowds about him, and went on until there were thousands listening to his voice.

The History of French Protestantism from the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, by Henry IV., in 1598, to the revocation of the same edict by Louis XIV., in 1685, naturally divides itself into three periods. In the first, extending from that great religious transaction which marks the end of the civil wars of the sixteenth century, to the taking of Rochelle in 1629, the Protestants were at one time by their own fault, and at another by the artifice of the nobles, involved in the troubles which agitated the regency of Maria de Medici ; and in the first years of the majority of Louis XII., beheld themselves deprived of the fortresses or towns yielded to them in pledge for the fulfillment of treaties of their political organization, and of their influence in the State.

Had they resisted this inroad, they could have held Romanism in check. But when the Huguenots allowed a solemn compact to be trifled with, Rome believed her hour had come, and marched boldly on.

God gives everybody a chance. Accept it, and salvation is assured. Reject it, and all is lost.

In the second period (1629-1662), which extends from the taking of Rochelle to the first persecutions of Louis XIV., the Protestants lived as Protestants in America are trying to live. They surrendered their influence as a religious party. Their chiefs pulled down the banner of a protest against the aggressions of Rome and sought for quiet and prosperity and thrift.

They disturbed France no longer, as their ancestors had done, by incessant armed risings, but enriched themselves by their industry.

FOR A TIME THEY PROSPERED.

Deprived of their cautionary fortresses and of their political organizations, gradually excluded from employment at Court and from nearly all civil offices, they turned to agriculture and to manufactures, and amassed fortunes. They redeemed lost provinces from sterility.

The Protestant burgher-class in the towns applied itself to industry and commerce, and displayed a degree of activity and intelligence coupled to integrity such as never have been surpassed in any country. In Guienne it nearly monopolized the wine trade ; in the two governments of Brouoge and Oleron, a dozen Protestant families held a monopoly of the trade in salt and wine which amounted yearly to twelve or fifteen million lives.

Those of Caen, sold to English and Dutch merchants linen and clothes manufactured at Vive, at Falouse, and at Argenton ; thus securing a rich outlet for this branch of national industry. Though bad Catholics, Eomanists were compelled to admit that the Reformed were excellent men of business.

Swamped by a ruinous legislation to which they assented, and tolerated in the midst of a population entirely outnumbering them, which ever regarded them with suspicion, constantly the butt of all calumnies, subjected to the control of imperious laws which compelled them to exercise perpetual constraint upon themselves, they forced public esteem by their austerity of morals and irreproachable loyalty. By the confession of their enemies, they respected law, they obeyed God, loved their fellowmen, and were true to them. They lived as seeing Him who is invisible. “Renowned for their commercial intelligence and activity, they were no less famous for their industry. More devoted to labor than other subjects of the realm, because they could only hope to equal them by surpassing them in the quality of their work, they were still further stimulated and advanced by the principles of their religion.” Those principles forbid their inaction in thought. Compelled to enlighten themselves by diligent study, there came necessarily the superior light, which spread itself over all their actions, and rendered their spirit abler to grasp all ideas the application of which would tend to the advancement of their weal

Besides, the working year of the Protestants contained three hundred and ten days ; because they set aside only the fifty-two Sabbaths and a few solemn holidays, which gave their industry the advantage of one sixth over that of the Catholics, whose working year contained but two hundred and sixty days, in as much as they set apart to rest above one hundred and five days.

They adopted the system of combined labor. They organized their establishments on the principle of the subdivision of labor, directed by skilful directors, who employed thousands of workmen, whom they stimulated by the lure of salaries duly proportioned to their services, thus offering the surest and most ready method of arriving at the most perfect, most abundant, and most economical production. As a result, France possessed the finest manufactories of wool, and shared the rich commerce in broadcloth which belonged to the English, the Hollander, and the Italians.

The invention of the stocking loom increased the number of the manufactories of stockings, of wool, silk, thread, and cotton. The Protestants distinguished themselves in this new art, and propagated it in the district of Sedan and Languedoc. A portion of that province, the upper Gevaudon, a mountainous and sterile region, almost entirely inhabited by the “Reformed” was celebrated for the serges and coddices made. In that region all the peasants had trades. The children spun from the age of four years and upward, and the whole of the family thus found occupation.

It was the Protestants of France who gave the world the best linen cloth. The tanneries of Touraine, the silk factories of Tours and Lyons, were all owned and worked by Protestants.

Nor did the Protestants confine themselves to manufactures and commerce, but entered largely into all the liberal careers. Numbers of the Reformed distinguished themselves as physicians, as advocates, as writers, as well as preachers, and contributed largely to the glory of the age of Louis XIV. The eloquence of the pulpit at this date owed to the Protestants its extraordinary success ; for while with Romanists preaching was but an accessory part of worship, it had become with their adversaries its most important feature.

“They ask only their bellyful of preaching,” said Catherine de Medici, sneeringly, while she was yet vacillating between the two creeds. Having charge to teach the religion of the gospel, culture was essential, then as now. Hence, there shortly arose a rivalry between the two religions, from which the pulpits reaped good results. Because of the power of the pulpit, Bossuet, Massilon, Bourdalue and Fenelon became famed in the Catholic world as preachers more than priests. In all the principal cities of the kingdom, the Protestants maintained flourishing schools of learning. Grand as was this period in many respects, it was wanting in fidelity to the truth. When they knew the truth and had the opportunity, they failed to glorify it, neither were thankful.

The same men who had braved death and torture were found to be unarmed against Court favor. They had not the courage of their convictions. Expediency, rather than principle, ruled them.

In this land a similar state of things exists. Men are silent in regard to the aggressions of Rome, when a proclamation of the truth would overthrow error and cause errorists to flee. The surrender to Rome on the part of politicians was only matched by the conduct of the French when they might have spoken. The consequences of this betrayal can only be described in part.

An edict of the 17th of June, 1681, permitted boys at fourteen, and girls at twelve, to abjure the Protestant religion, and re-enter the bosom of the Romish church.

This law was attended with terrible results. It undermined all parental authority in Protestant families. It is in line with the Romish claim that all sprinkled children are Romanists. It was enough that any one should affirm to the authorities that a child wished to become a Roman Catholic, having joined in prayer, or made the sign of the cross, or kissed the image of the Virgin, to cause his abstraction from the care of his parents, who were forced besides to pay him a pension ; so that the loss of the child was followed by the loss of property.

The synods received an order to accept neither legacies nor donations. The ministers were forbidden to speak in their sermons of the wretchedness of the times, or to attack, directly or indirectly, the Roman Catholic religion. To all this the “Reformed” assented without remonstrance or resistance. They surrendered their liberties, and by so doing were destroyed.

After this, came the systematic attempt for the conversion of the Protestants. Troops were quartered upon them.

In many villages the priests followed the soldiers through the streets, crying, “Courage, gentlemen! it is the intention of the king that these dogs of Huguenots shall be pillaged and sacked.”

The soldiers entered the houses, sword in hand, sometimes crying: “Kill, kill!” to frighten the women and the children. So long as the inhabitants could satisfy their rapacity, they suffered no more than pillage. But when their money was expended, the price of their furniture consumed, and the ornaments and garments of their wives disposed of, the dragoons seized them by the hair to drag them to church; or, if they suffered them to remain in their houses, made use of threats, outrages, and even tortures, to compel them to be converted. They burnt, at slow fires, the feet and hands of some ; they broke the ribs, legs, or arms of others with blows of sticks. Others were cast into damp dungeons, with threats of leaving them there to rot. The soldiers said that everything was permitted to them except murder and rape.

On the 28th of July, 1681, Charles the Second was compelled to sanction a bill which granted the most extensive privileges to those French refugees who should demand an asylum in England. From Holland, and from Germany as well, a cry of indignation arose. Louis XIV. called a halt. The persecutions stopped for a time ; but in 1684 they began again, and then it went from bad to worse.

New tortures were tried. Families were deprived of sleep by the noise of soldiers. The voice of drums, blasphemies, hideous cries, the crash of furniture, and constant shaking, by which they compelled these miserable wretches to stand up at night and keep their eyes open, were some of the means employed to deprive them of sleep. To pinch them, to prick them with sharp instruments, to pull them about, to suspend them with cords, and a hundred other cruelties, were the sport of these executioners, by which their hosts were reduced to such a state that they were glad to promise whatever they wished, to escape these barbarians. The soldiers offered indignities to women. They spat in their faces, they made them lie down on hot coals, and put their heads in heated ovens in which the vapor was enough to suffocate them.

As a result, thousands succumbed. It is a terrible picture, and the sufferings God’s children were compelled to undergo are too horrid to relate.

Is there not a lesson for us? Can we not see the peril in surrendering to such a foe? There was no pity in their hearts. They had no respect for citizenship. Bigotry ruled.

On the 22d of October, Louis XIV. signed at Fontainbleu, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The principal provisions of the revocation edict were the following: The Protestant temples were to be demolished, and the exercise of their religious worship was to cease, as well in private houses as in the castles of the nobles, on pain of confiscation of property and personal arrest. The ministers who should refuse to be converted, were warned to leave the kingdom within fourteen days, on pain of being sent to the galleys.

Protestant schools were to be closed ; the children who were born after the publication of the edicts were to be baptized by the priests of their parishes and brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. A term of four months was granted to refugees wherein to return to France and apostatize ; that time expired, their property was to be confiscated. Protestants were formally prohibited from leaving the kingdom and carrying their fortunes abroad, on pain of the galleys for men, and confiscation of their property and personal arrest for the women. All the provisions of the law against relapsed converts were confirmed.

The “Reformed” who had not changed their religion, were to remain in the kingdom until it should please God to enlighten them.

On the same day that the edict of revocation was registered, the destruction of the temple of Charenton, built by the celebrated architect Jacques Debrosse, and capable of containing 14,000 persons, was commenced. Five days afterward, no trace of the edifice remained. The church at Caen, which had so many times re-echoed to the eloquent voice of Dubas, fell in ruins, to the flourish of trumpets and shouts of joy. At Nimes, Cheyrau was permitted to preach a last discourse. He did so, and appealed to his hearers to persevere in the faith unto death. The temple was torn down and became a heap of ruins. In the midst, could long be remarked a single stone, beneath the overthrown front, bearing this inscription:

“HERE IS THE HOUSE OF GOD, HERE IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN.”

The Protestants who had believed Louis XIV. to be the greatest king of the age, and that he would yet see his mistake, had their eyes opened to the actual condition of affairs when they saw 800 temples destroyed, and learned that troops had been ordered into the North of France to complete the work done in the South.

Protestant servants were denied employment, and noblemen were compelled to employ Roman Catholics. These severities bore fruit. The galleys were filled with prisoners. Everybody that could escape, did so. To London, to Germany, to America, they came in uncounted numbers. France was emptied of its best population.

Over 1,300,000 of the good and well-to-do citizens went forth as exiles. In a celebrated memoir addressed to Louvais, in 1688, Voubon deplores the desertion of 1,000,000 men, the withdrawal of $60,000,000 of money, the ruin of commerce, the enemies fleet increased by 9,000 of the best sailors of the kingdom, and their armies by 600 officers and 12,000 soldiers.

The north of France became depopulated, as well as the south. Of 1998 Protestant families who dwelt in the district of Paris, 1202 emigrated.

The priests celebrated the day of revocation by public thanksgiving. What sorrows followed in that train! A law passed by the constituent assembly of 1790, restored to the descendants, now dispersed over the face of the globe, the title of French citizens, on the simple condition of returning to France and fulfilling the civil duties imposed on all Frenchmen ; but it could not bring back to France the loss which it had sustained. For almost a century the Roman Catholic church had full sway in the whole of France. It possessed all the edifices of worship, all the schools, the press, the government. The Protestants had lost the right of possessing their creed and the right of existing.

Treachery never pays, and wrong-doing secures terrible harvests. After St. Bartholomew came remorse to Charles IX. He lived but twenty-one months. He could not get away from the horrid memory. The man who had boasted on the fatal night that there should not be a single Huguenot left to reproach him with the deed, was waited on at his death-bed by a Huguenot nurse. “Alas, nurse, dear nurse,” he would say to her, ” what blood, what murders! Oh, my God! forgive me. What shall I do? I am lost.” And the nurse would point him to God as the only hope.

Henry IV., after betraying his mother’s and his soul’s highest interests, was smitten by an assassin’s dagger, and died as the fool dieth.

Louis XIY. saw his kingdom impoverished, his commerce gone, his name execrated throughout the world, and lay in his magnificent palace at Versailles dying. He is utterly wretched. The people curse him, and hurl stones and mud at his coffin.

The church of Rome gains nothing but infamy. The Revolution struck with awful justice and rent the fetters of French Protestantism, smiting into the dust the throne which had so long oppressed them.

And so Protestantism is revived. There are about 1,000,000 Protestants. Many of them have acquired a distinguished place in the Church and in the State.

1. France lost the light, because Christians hid it beneath a bushel. They forgot that they were the light, and if they refused to let their light shine they increased the gloom. They enjoyed the truth ; but they did not preach it. The aggressive gospel of Luther and Zwingle was set aside. They turned to money-getting and thrift, and left the affairs of State to others.

John Knox, with his words, spoken and written, drove his enemies into their retreats. By his addresses and sermons he made public opinion, roused the popular heart, and directed the popular will. In France there was no such man. There was too little enlightened opinion. The military spirit died with the moral. It was not the call to arms, no more than the call to repentance. It was not the fight for liberty, because it was not the good fight of faith.

2. Their second great mistake was in proclaiming the possibility of a Romanist being saved while he clings to the errors of Rome.

For this the leaders argued, even as men argue it now. In our churches are ministers and men who claim that the Roman Catholic church stands in association with evangelical churches as a church of Christ. In the discussion of the Freedom of Worship Bill, this position was maintained.

Romanists are treated not as errorists ; but as if, despite their errors, they are Christians. In faith and practice they are Pagans. We are not speaking against them as citizens, but denying that they are Christians, while they are Romanists. They are in peril because tradition is preferred to Scripture, Mary to Jesus, and the decrees of the church to the commands of Christ. They must have the Gospel brought to them, and they must believe it to the saving of their souls, or they must be lost.

“Venerable ministers of the Gospel,” exclaimed Rev. Charles Chiniquy, “Rome is the great danger ahead for the church of Christ, and you do not understand it enough. The atmosphere of light, honesty, truth, and holiness in which you are born, and which you have breathed since your infancy, makes it almost impossible for you to realize the dark mysteries of idolatry, immorality, degrading slavery, hatred of the Word of God, concealed behind the walls of that modern Babylon. It is that ignorance which paves the way for the triumph of Rome. It paralyzes the arm of the church of Christ.”

WHY THIS INDIFFERENCE?

The answer of this man, who was fifty years a priest, is: ” Because modern Protestants have not only forgotten what Rome was, what she is, and what she will forever be, the most irreconcilable and powerful enemy of the gospel of Christ ; but while she is striking Christians to the heart, by cursing their schools and wrenching the Bible from the hands of the children ; while she is battering down and scaling the walls and storming the citadel of their faith, they are recognizing her as a branch of the church of Christ.

IT IS A DELUSION AND A SNARE.

Rome, that shed the blood of our forefathers, that refused to keep faith with heretics, that fired the inquisition, and lit its fires with devilish and malignant joy, is in our midst, attempting to chain our people to the feet of her idols.

Romanists, that murdered Henry IV. , that stabbed Coligni to the heart, that burned a Huss, a Ridley and a Latimer, and that plotted the death of Abraham Lincoln, and attempted to stab Liberty, are here to fight with desperation, and do their utmost to destroy the liberty our fathers fought for, and we have defended.

ROME NEVER COMPROMISES.

Upon the ministry of this hour, a fearful responsibility is devolved. Let them reckon Roman Catholics as a part of the religious world, who can be saved while they adhere to the errors of Rome, and the people will see no cause for alarm, and no reason why efforts should be made to rescue the millions in our midst from the grasp of the destroyer.

Let them proclaim the truth, that Rome hates the Bible, destroys the Sabbath, apologizes for crime, and teaches that a criminal coming to the confessional may, by the act of a priest, become white as a saint, and the people will see a reason for jails and penitentiaries being filled with members in good standing of the Roman Catholic church. They will see that honesty and integrity are impelled by such teaching. Romanism is a lie, coined in hell, and built up as a system through the machinations of Satan. It must be resisted, and Romanists must be warned of their peril, because they who believe in such error are damned. It is our duty to preach the gospel to our prisoners. This may be their only opportunity to hear the truth. Romanism cannot usurp the place of Christianity without destroying the foundations of liberty. The Christians of this land must fearlessly proclaim the truth, if they will save the State.

It was the boast of Napoleon that he made way for the talents. But such talents! Talents wriggling to a height where the lion could scarcely find a foothold, or the eagle a place to perch!

It was, and is, the Bible that opens the way for the talents. Because of this redemption has come, and where it is welcomed, and loved and used, there is prosperity. Life tells. God takes care of his own.

III. A third mistake was made when they consented, for any reason, to be silent concerning the errors of Rome.

This peril confronts us. Pulpits are closed against this. Professors of religion apologize for, it they do not champion, the errors of Rome. While the Huguenot consented to be silent, Rome worked on. The result was seen not only in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but in the state of affairs which made that revocation a possibility.

It is not safe to forget the drift and trend of Romanism. All who keep their eye on public affairs, know that Romanism is organizing for the battle of Armageddon. The Watchman St. Louis boldly says: ” There are indications that before the next half century has passed, the two great bodies into which Christianity is divided will engage in a real conflict, in which the strength of the seminal principle of each communion will be put to a real test.”

“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Someone must fight, if truth shall reign. Americans have great trusts committed to their keeping.

The need of the hour is an awakened church. Luther could not have got on without the Elector of Saxony. John Wycliffe would have been a failure had not the Duke of Lancaster stood by and for him. Pray that some of our mighty laymen, now giving money for colleges and churches, may lay their offerings on this altar, and help us to sow the broad fields of our American life with Gospel seed.

At the battle of Gettysburg, one hundred and fifty cannons poured their leaden and iron hail upon our men. It seemed difficult to live in the galling fire. Our soldiers were burrowing in the ground, hiding behind what they could place before them, when they heard a band of music. At its head rode Hancock, hat off, saying to the men: ” Gentlemen, that cannonade means that our enemies are getting ready to attack us. Be ready. Prove to be men.” Our boys were ready ; and when the battle-wave struck the Rock of Patriotism, it broke, and victory came, in which the South glories now equally with the North.

So shall it be in this fight with Rome. The defeat of Rome is the salvation of the Republic, and the deliverance of Romanists from superstition, that produces the sleep of death. Let us glorify God as God, and work while it is day.

Rome is an old fighter. In the battle now raging for the utter overthrow of the public school system in the United States, Rome is managing her forces and planting her blows in accordance with well-defined plans ; which, having won victories elsewhere, she believes are sure to produce the same results in her present desperate encounter. Thousands in pulpits and in pews, in shops and on farms, think resistance worse than folly. This class are either betraying the youth of America, or are silent while others are doing the infamous work. It is time to call a halt. For more than fifty years, because of this false security which has held the church in the arms of a delusive slumber, and through the cowardice or ambition of party leaders, this nation, with all its unparalleled opportunities and responsibilities has been drifting toward a surrender of the children to the control of the priests of Rome. Rome’s opposition is open and defiant. It has assumed four distinct phases:

1. In 1840, Archbishop Hughes gave this order:”Take the children out of the public schools, as you would take them out of devouring fire ;”that was to get them away from Bible influence. First, denounce the schools because the Bible is read ; then banish the Bible and denounce them as godless is the programme of Rome.

2, The Bible having been removed as a text-book, Rome fought general education, and became the open and avowed champion of illiteracy.

3. In 1884, the Plenary Council ordered the building of parochial schools. The decree was mandatory ; save in cases where a sufficient cause can be shown, satisfactory to the bishop. Neglect of this requirement subjected the offender to the usual penalties of disobedience. This was the beginning of the trouble with Edward McGlynn. Educated in the public schools, he believes in them and fought for them.

4. The children of Roman Catholics have been taken out of the schools, and now they claim the right of giving direction as to how the children of Protestants shall be educated. The inquiry has been raised, If the schools are so bad that Roman Catholic children cannot attend them, are they not too bad for Roman Catholic teachers to teach in them? If Romanists insist on educating their children, ought they not to stop all interference on their part with the educating of children not belonging to them?

Vicar-General Brady, of St. Louis, declares:”We are doing all that we can to prevent our children from going to the public schools. We must educate our own children. They are educated in the public schools merely as animals would be educated. Their souls are not attended to.”

In Monseigneur Segur’s”Plain Talk About Protestantism,”there is this language (p. 98): “The freedom of thinking is simply nonsense. We are no more free to think without rule, than we are to act without one.”Page 105:”We have to believe only what the Pope and the Bishops teach. We have to reject only that which the Pope and the Bishops condemn and reject. Should a point of doctrine appear doubtful, we have only to address ourselves to the Pope and the Bishops to know what to believe. Only from that tribunal, forever living and forever guided by God, emanate true judgment on religious belief, and particularly on the true sense of Scripture.”

The Roman Church, claiming to understand the secrets of God and to have the keys of heaven and hell, and blasphemously presuming that it can control the destinies of men to save eternally or damn forever in a life to come undertakes to bestow for money the joys of the former, and inflict the pains of the latter, on those who refuse credulity and cash. To make this trade prosperous, ignorance is a necessity.”It uses money, mendacity and pretended miracles, to capture and enslave the ignorant. It assails everything tending to enlighten the masses, on whose ignorance it feeds. Italy, Spain, Ireland, Mexico and Lower Canada sufficiently illustrate its terrible work. Human vitality and intelligence have probably been brought to a lower point in Spain than in any other civilized nation on the globe, and the Roman Church is largely, if not solely, responsible for this national degradation and ruin. It seeks to do is most successfully preparing to do is doing slowly for the United States what it has done for Spain. Our free-school system destroyed, political integrity destroyed and parties corrupted, the goal is not far away.”

II. THE CHARACTER OF THE EDUCATION GIVEN DESERVES NOTICE.

The trouble in Ireland today is, that England is dealing with a people who believe that all is right which is done to advance the power of the Church. Hence, there, as here, jurymen utterly ignore the value of their oath where the interests of the Church require it. For this reason alone, the right of”trial by jury”is threatened.

ROMANISM GIVES A LICENSE TO VIOLATE,

in some way or other, every precept of the Decalogue. If men who are Romanists are truthful, honest and upright, it is because they are better than the religion they profess compels them to be.

Rome teaches that the Sabbath may be set aside after hearing mass. Merchandizing and the selling of goods at auction is permitted on the Sabbath. He who performs any servile work on the Lord’s Day or on a festival day, let him do penance three days on bread and water. If any one breaks fasts prescribed by the Church, let him do penance on bread and water twenty days. Three days on bread and water for disobeying their God ; twenty days for disobeying their Church! Absolution is given for stealing small amounts to pay for masses, though the law is, that masses shall be given without pay. The command:”Thou shalt have no other gods before me,”is blotted out of the Bible by papal hands. Children trained in these schools can lie, steal, break the Sabbath, and commit sins of any kind, and obtain absolution from a man no better than the guilty party.

ROMANISM INJURES CITIZENSHIP.

The oath of allegiance, by which the thousands of Romanists have obtained the rights of the ballot, citizenship and office, which, if regarded as obligatory, would bind every one of them to support the principles of Republican Government, is valueless ; because, whenever Roman officials shall see fit to require this oath to be disregarded, every good Romanist, to a man, is bound by his allegiance to the Pope, which he believes more binding than his allegiance to the Government, to disregard it. As proof, we quote from”Abridged Course of Religious Instruction for the Use of Colleges and Schools,”by the Rev. Father F. X. Schouppe, of the Society of Jesus, with the imprimateur of H. E. Cardinal Manning, London Burns and Gates, 1880, p. 203:”The Church can dispense from a promissory oath. This power belongs to the Pope and bishops, who exercise it either themselves or by their delegates.”

Page 278:”The civil laws (of Christendom) are binding in conscience so long as they are conformable to the rights of the Catholic Church.”

This gives a warrant to the false swearing which floods our cities with voters who have passed from their landing in this free country to the courts where they take a false oath, to the polls, where, with another false oath, they swear in their vote, and to the confessional, where their oath is held to be a justifiable,”dispensable”lie for the benefit of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, whenever it shall chance so to regard it, or order him so to regard it. He also is taught,”that the Sacrifice of the Mass remits sins and the punishment due them” (p. 210).”The power to remit sin is judicial. The priests are made judges of the sin and the disposition of the sinner. Their absolution is just as efficacious as would be that of Jesus Christ.”

Educate the youth in this way, and”repeating”at the polls becomes an act of grace, and honest elections become an impossibility. As has been said:”A ship-load of foreign Romanists lands in New York ; indulgence in the lump is by the Cardinal or Archbishop granted, to swear that they have resided here long enough to become citizens ; they go before the court, become naturalized, get their final papers, and at once go to the polls and help elect the Cardinal’s candidate for Mayor. Thus perjured citizens capture polling places and carry elections in the interest of Romanism.”{Romanism, by A. J. Grover, p. 18} It does not stop here.

Dissimulation is lawful, according to Liguori, as is gambling.”Laymen, or even the clergy, do not sin if they play cards principally for the sake of recreation, or for a moderate sum of money. Hence, gambling among priests is extensively practised.

DRUNKENNESS NOT A VICE.

“It is lawful to administer the sacraments to drunkards, if they are in danger of death, and had previously expressed a desire of receiving them.”Hence, the murderer executed in the Tombs October 18th, 1883, cried for whiskey at the last, though he had partaken of the Eucharist. Priests are known to drink to excess. One, in a country town, rode home drunk almost every Sabbath evening after performing vespers in the chapel. All knew it, and it was tolerated because the guilty debauchee was a priest. It was Liguori who said:”Among the priests who live in the world, it is rare, very rare, to find one that is good.”

Alexander Campbell, in his discussion with Archbishop Purcell, read from Liguori the permission for priests to keep nieces, or concubines. Archbishop Purcell denied that Liguori ever taught anything so abominable, and that all who say so are guilty of a flagrant violation of the commandment which says,”Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” The book was brought in, and another read therefrom these words:”A bishop, however poor he may be, cannot appropriate to himself pecuniary fines without the license of the Apostolical See ; but he ought to apply to pious uses that which the Council of Trent has laid upon non-resident clergymen , or upon those clergymen who keep concubines.”Marriage is a mortal sin. Adultery is pardoned.

WHATEVER HURTS ROME IS DECRIED, WHATEVER HELPS ROME IS APPROVED.

“What answer ought a confessor to give when questioned concerning a truth which he knows from sacramental confession only?”

“He ought to answer that he does not know it, and, if it be necessary, to confirm the same with an oath.

“Is it lawful, then, to tell a lie?”

“He is questioned as a man, and answers as a man. As a man he does not know the truth, though he knows it as God.”

*What if a confessor were directly asked whether he knows it through sacramental confession ?”

“He may reply, ‘I know nothing’.”

Is such a religion good enough for the youth of America? It is the true position that the nation has no right to give children into the hands of Roman Catholics ; and that prisoners in our penal institutions ought to be taught and helped by men who believe and teach the Word of God?

ROMAN CATHOLICS SHOULD NOT HAVE CHARGE OF PRISONS.

Jerry McCauley, the river thief, and a most desperate character, went to Sing Sing as a member of the Roman Catholic communion, in full and in good standing, as are the majority of our prisoners in all our penal institutions. It was because Jerry Mc Cauley heard the Gospel and found a Bible in his room that he was converted, came out of the Church of Rome, and became a benefactor to hundreds of thousands.

III. THE STATE HAS NO RIGHT TO RECOGNIZE THE CHURCH.

If the Court of Special Sessions can commit to a Roman Catholic institution children between seven and fourteen years of age, as idle, truant, vicious, or homeless, then the State can put its neck into the yoke Rome has been framing for many years, with the consent of a silent Christianity and a crafty political sentiment. The law says,

The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this State for all mankind.

The Constitution of these United States, in providing for religious liberty, expressly declares that no restraint should be exercised:”that Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”but recognizing the principle introduced to the notice of mankind by Roger Williams, who repudiated toleration, because the right to tolerate implied the right to persecute ; who would not accept as a favor from man what had been given to him as a right by God ; who held that, when God made the eye he conferred the right to look, and when he made the Bible he conferred the right to read it, or have it read.

Gambetta, in France, saw this peril, and warned the State against giving over children to the control of priests to be educated and guided by them.”I am,”said the great French statesman,”for the separation of the schools from the churches. I consider this not only a question of political, but of social order. Let not Catholics, with their claims to exclusiveness, have anything to do with the propagation of necessary knowledge, which it is the State’s duty to see imparted to every citizen.”

Gambetta knew Romanism as we in this free land do not know it. Let us hear, and heed his manly advice.

The parochial school, notwithstanding the disposition of the American people to try and conciliate their Roman Catholic fellow-citizens, is a fact. The decree has gone forth from the Provincial Council, sanctioned by the Pope, that such schools shall be built in every parish. Compromise is a failure. Not only does Rome seek to take her children out of our public schools ; but, under one pretense or another, she seeks to fill these public schools with Roman Catholic teachers. Let us have done with this. Put the Bible back where it belongs. Let it become a text-book for the children of America. Teach them to be good readers of the Scriptures. Said Sir William Jones, who was familiar with Greek, Roman and Oriental literature:”The Bible, independently of its Divine origin, contains more sublimity, purer morality, more impartial history and finer strains of eloquence than can be collected from any other book, in whatever language it may have been written.”John Jay, in an admirable address on”Rome, the Bible and the Republic,”quotes the distinguished Robert Hall as saying:”Wherever the Scriptures are generally read, the standard of morals is raised,”and adds: The indebtedness of this country to the Bible, and its recognition by our Government in other days, are things not to be forgotten ; and it is well to keep permanently before our people this distinguishing feature of our history.”The great body of the original settlers on our newly discovered continent were men whose ancestors had fought for civil and religious freedom on the various battle-fields of the old world. They loved liberty, and loved God ‘s Word. Is it not true that their love of liberty sprung from the influence of the truth upon their hearts? Follow the Bible around the world, and in its trail you find liberty, progress and enlightenment. The Bible ought to be made a textbook in every institution helped by the State, because of what the Bible does for the State.”There never was found,”said Lord Bacon,”in any age of the world, either religion or law that did so highly exalt the public good as the Bible.”If Romanists do not like it, let them dislike it. What they love, hurts liberty. What they hate, helps it. It is our duty to make our schools so good that no ambitious child of the State can afford to be educated elsewhere. I make my appeal to you, not as religionists, but as citizens, Do more than refuse to divide the School Fund. Do this: from this time on, provide for children between seven and fourteen years of age who may be idle, truant, vicious or homeless, better places in which to educate them than the protectories or convents under Romish control. They are children of the State. Give them religious instruction, by giving them access to the Word of God. It is our bounden duty to teach them Christian morality, essential to their education as good citizens. In the words of Ulysses S. Grant:

“Let us labor to add all needful guarantees for the most perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color or religion. Encourage free schools, and resolve that not one dollar in money, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated to the support of any sectarian school. Resolve that either the State, or nation, or both combined, shall support institutions of learning, sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education.”

POPERY IN THE UNITED STATES

is little known. It is hidden. It works in darkness. Such is the courage and faith of the American people that they consent to the existence of Roman Catholics, and to carry out their purposes and plans as they do the existence of Methodists or Baptists, or any religious denomination. They act as if it were ungenerous and unfair to uncover the wiles of Jesuitism, and disclose the perils which threaten the nation because of the doings of Romanism. In Canada, the actions of this desperate foe can be studied in detail. The programme with which the people of the United States is confronted has been carried out. There, Rome is dominant. The harvest of Rome has ripened, and Rome is consolidated.

SEPARATE OR PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS EXIST IN CANADA

Under the sanction of the law. They are sustained by taxation, as are Protestant schools ; and there are many ways in which Roman Catholics are permitted to place Protestants at a disadvantage:

1. Five Roman Catholics can petition for a separate school. The petition being granted, all Roman Catholics within a radius of three miles every way can be compelled to support it. No matter if they prefer the public school, the law compels them to support the Roman Catholic school. All known to be Roman Catholics, and all believed to be Roman Catholics, are taxed, and deliverance from the same can only be obtained by a process of law, which is irritating, if not dangerous.

2. All Protestant teachers are compelled to go through a public examination, and must measure up to a certain grade, or fail in obtaining a school. In Roman Catholic schools, the Christian Brothers and Nuns can be appointed without examination. Today, the teachers of parochial schools are not examined in the United States, and the schools are not inspected ; the youth are surrendered to Rome.

3. For the Protestant schools, books are selected by the Board of Public Education. In Roman Catholic schools, they select their own, and may fill them with treason, with superstition and paganism, and there is none to say them Nay.

4. In the public schools the Bible is read ; not in Roman Catholic schools.

5. The public schools are inspected; not the Roman Catholic.

6. In the election of trustees for public schools, a secret ballot is used. In Roman Catholic school districts, the trustees are elected by their signing their names, and voting Aye or Nay. This is the fight now going on. The laity want the secret ballot, that they may get rid of priestly control. The open ballot is kept, to preserve the control of the priests.

As a result, Roman Catholic children are growing up in ignorance. It is proven in Canada, as in Ireland, or Spain, or Mexico, that Rome hates education.

Doctor Maguire, a Roman Catholic professor of the University of Dublin, and one of the senators of the Royal University of Ireland, has written a pamphlet on

in which he declares”that a large and logical section of the Roman Catholic Church is conscientiously opposed to the spread of education.”He quotes the Dublin Review (vol. xx., p. 192, second series), in which it is contended, that the absence of higher education is a powerful preservative against apostasy,”and tells a story of the Archbishop of Tuam, who closed a school, and when one of the villagers asked how he was to send his children to school, replied:”What do they want with a school? Let them learn their Catechism.”

Cardinal Cullen, in 1870, before the Educational Convention, said:”It is admitted that the Scotch and the Irish are of the same origin, and shows that since the Scotch embraced the Reformed religion they have outrun even the English ; while, wherever the Irish embraced Romanism, they have retrograded.”What a contrast between exclusively Roman Catholic Con-naught and Protestant Ulster!

Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity. In elementary instruction, Protestant States are incomparably more advanced than Roman Catholic, and representative governments are the natural outgrowth of Protestant populations ; while despotic governments are the congenial governments of Roman Catholic populations.

DeLavelieye declares, that”the control of education by the Roman priesthood leads inevitably to illiteracy, with its tendency to degradation, pauper ism and crime.”

The Roman Catholic Review for April, 1871, said: * We do not indeed prize as highly as some of our countrymen appear to do, the ability to read, write and cipher. Some men are born to be leaders, and the rest are born to be led. The best ordered and administered State is that in which the few are well educated and lead, and the many trained to obedience.” Said a priest:”I would as soon administer the sacraments to a dog, as to a Catholic who sent his children to a public school.”

THIS IS ROMANISM.

It ought to be fought ; not for the sake of Protestants alone, but because of the imperiled interests of the children of Roman Catholics. Illiteracy imperils, here and everywhere.

In Canada, one-sixth of the population furnishes more than five-sixths of the crime. Occasional disclosures reveal this peril. When the bill was introduced into the Legislature of New York, pretending to secure freedom of worship, it was proven to have been proposed by a Jesuit, and was introduced by Senator Gibbs ;”because,”as he said in a letter to the New York Evening Post, Oct. 27, 1875,”of certain pledges made by the leading Republicans to the Irish Catholic voters for their support of James G. Elaine.”If in America, with our centuries of training in the principles of Republican government, with our hereditary devotion to the elementary principles of civil and religious freedom, such bargains can be made, and Irish votes can be sold in blocks for the betrayal of the principles of the Constitution, is not time to ask if Popery be not in the way?

The American people are generous to a fault. They have treated Romanists as if they were brothers. They have been slow to believe they were tolerating an enemy. They are waking up. They are seeing the peril threatening liberty. They are getting on their armor, and they will fight the good fight of faith ; and, though a little slow in starting, they will get there all the same ; and will yet have the honor of digging as deep a grave for Romanism as they have furnished for human slavery. They are becoming weary of such sentiments as, that”Too much education would make the poor discontented with their lot, and unsuit them for following the plow, using the spade, hammering iron, or building walls.”It is American to believe in education for the people ; and to thank God that the path opens to the highest positions from the door of a hovel as well as from the door of a palace. In our public schools, the rich and poor are equals. As Macaulay said:

During the last three centuries, to stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor ; while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill and industry into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes, statesmen, philosophers and poets.”

WHAT IS NEXT?

Rome will soon have her children housed in the parochial school buildings. Then will come the refusal to pay taxes. Property will be levied and held up for sale. Who will buy it? They who do so, will run the peril of losing their lives. The scenes of Ireland will be re-enacted in the United States. Then will come the end. The American people will make short work of Romanism, when once they understand its motives, its animus and purpose.

THE REMEDY.

Resist this devil of Romanism and it will flee. Put the Bible back where it belongs ; and make it a reading-book for the youth of America. Adopt the Prussian system, or devise a better, and see to it that the children of the State are given religious instruction ; so that they shall know the chief doctrines of the Bible, the life and teachings of our Lord, the history of the Christian religion in connection with contemporary civil history. Let there be no sectarianism taught, and no antagonism engendered, and then shall our schools become the bulwark and defense of liberty.

The morning cometh ; and with it, and before it, the struggle. In Pennsylvania, and notably in Pittsburg, Romanism is doing its worst. Bless God for a McCrory, a Riddle, and many more brave and eloquent men, who have sounded out the bugle-call to action. There they seek to take possession of the public school buildings for parochial school purposes. The language of Superintendent Higbee furnishes good reading. He says:

“In the case submitted to us, it is stated that the Board of Directors have rented or leased a public school building for the use of a parochial school, where the peculiar dogmas and usages of a particular church, or where only a certain distinct class of children, are admitted. In this case, granting the statement of facts, there is not only an unauthorized violation of trust, but a seeming indifference to what is explicitly forbidden by the constitution of the Commonwealth itself. A school is not sectarian be cause taught by a minister, or priest, or any church official ; but a school controlled or managed in the interest of any particular church organization, up holding its peculiar confession and ecclesiastical practices, and used for any class of pupils exclusive of others, is certainly sectarian. It does not in any sense belong to our system of public schools ; on the contrary, no money raised for the support of the public schools can be used for its support without a direct violation of the constitution. Were school directors permitted to lease our public property thus, at their own will, for the use of parochial schools, the ecclesiastical convictions of the directors could turn our public schools into as many different kinds of church schools as there are different denominations in the Commonwealth.”

If the opinion of the State Superintendent of schools should fail to induce the offending school board to abandon their position, the case will be appealed to the courts.

The home is being stirred. In New York, the imperilled condition of the little ones is coming to the surface. It is found that in New York and Brooklyn, and many of our large cities, Romanists find it convenient to have the children shut out of school privileges. In New York, after counting noses, it is found that there are 20,000 children of school-age in this city for whom no room is provided in the school buildings. These little ones are of the class who most need to be provided for, being the children of poor people, who cannot afford them private instruction, and whose education must necessarily be completed by the time they are fourteen years old. None of the grammar schools are crowded, but in all the primary schools the pupils are huddled together like sheep, and are left always to the care of the least experienced teachers.

The City says, it cannot afford to build school-houses enough to supply the demand, or at least its Board of Education says so. Yet it maintains a free college, with a big faculty, where only twenty out of every class remain to graduate, and pays for a normal school which has 2,000 girl pupils, only one- seventh of whom remain for the four years of the course. These two institutions are the special pets of the Board, and everything else is sacrificed to them. If any of the English nobility are in the town they are taken up to the normal school to see 1,000 bright-faced American girls go through their calisthenic exercises, and are gravely told that this is a specimen of our educational system. They are never taken to the primary schools.

In Boston, another line of attack is being made by the church of Rome. “Swinton’s Outlines of History “has been removed from the Boston schools on the vote of the majority of the School Committee, of whom 13 are Protestants and 11 liberal Roman Catholics. The passage which caused the exclusion of the work is the one relating to the institution of the sale of indulgences. This is the beginning of another grand assault, in a different direction, upon our American free school system. First, it was the Bible that Papists couldn’t tolerate, and miserably weak-kneed, compromising Protestants all over the land were willing to expel the Bible from the schools in order to placate the Papists. But it was soon discovered that it was not the Bible, but the schools, which Roman prelates and priests disliked so much.

Now these men, who cannot tolerate our public school system, begin to find fault with the text-books, claiming that our books on history do not teach what is true. They say, the facts of history concerning the Roman hierarchy are falsified, and the best way to remedy the matter is to bundle the books right out of the schools !

The Evangelical Alliance uttered their protest. Brioe S. Evans, and other patriotic citizens, called a meeting in Faneuil Hall, and uttered their protest, asking that the Swinton’s book be put back. This is their reply:

“The Board has been asked by a petition from members of the Evangelical Alliance, to reverse its decision and restore the book to the list. By reference, this request has been considered by the Committee, and a hearing has been given to the representatives of the Evangelical Alliance. In the judgment of the Committee, no reasons have been presented which should determine the Board to change its action.

The reasons assigned are as follows:

“1. The book . . . has in its favor ten years of public indorsement and use. It has had a long and honorable tenure of our public schools.”

To retain books in the schools on this ground, would be to resist all improvement in the quality of text-books, and deprive the pupils of the benefit of progress in the provision of new matter, and better forms of instruction.

“2. The paragraph and footnote, on account of which the book has been rejected, contain a true statement of history . ”

They do not contain an ample and definite statement of the topic concerning which complaint has been justly made, to the effect that it was incorrectly taught.

“3. The book ejected is upon the expurgatory list of books of a certain religious sect.”

The Committee were not aware of this fact ; it did not enter into the grounds or affect the motives of their action.

Quoted from “Instructions to Catholics,”by Rev. Xavier Donald Macleod. Boston: Murphy Mc Carthy.

“By an indulgence is meant the remission of the temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven. Every sin, however grievous, is remitted through the sacrament of penance, or by an act of perfect contrition, as regards its guilt and the eternal punishment due to it. But the debt of temporal punishment is not always remitted at the same time. The latter is done away with by deep penitence, or by works of satisfaction, e.g., prayers, alms, fasting, etc., or by patient endurance of troubles and adversities sent us by God, or by the satisfaction of our Lord Jesus Christ and the saints, applied to us by the church under certain conditions, which application we call an indulgence.

“An indulgence, then, is not a pardon for sin; because sin must be remitted before an indulgence can be gained. Much less is it a permission to commit sin, . . . for even God himself could not give such permission.

“In order to gain any indulgence whatever, you must be in a state of grace.”

But it is added: i For this Committee of free citizens to put its expurgatorial stamp upon the book for the reasons alleged, is for it to ally itself with that religious sect.”

In the judgment of your Committee, the course of action they have recommended was in the direct line of their steadfast purpose not to ally themselves either with or against any religious sect whatever. The Committee, therefore, recommend the following:

The School Committee have given careful consideration to your petition and to the reasons presented by your representatives as to the grounds on which it is based, and respectfully reply to the same: That they are not able to grant the request. They have found no cause to change their judgment, that the action taken with respect to the “Outlines of the World s History,”in view of their whole responsibility and all the interests committed to their charge, and all the circumstances, was just.

JOHN G. BLAKE, JOSEPH T. DURYEA, JOSEPH D. FALLON.

Fortunate is it for the American people that this fight has been begun in Boston. Public attention had been called to the aggressions of Romanism. In “Why Priests Should Wed”(p 303), attention was directed to a sermon preached by Rev. Joseph T. Duryea, D. D., in the pulpit of the First Baptist church, on Thanksgiving Day, 1887, in which he sought to remove all apprehension or alarm because of the attack made by the Eoinan Catholic church upon our public school system. He said: “I have no religious prejudices.”He further says: “I recognize the beneficent service to humanity of the Roman Catholic church during the dark ages.”Then and there it was shown, that Rome made the ages “dark “by extinguishing every light in her power, and by putting to death millions of the lovers of Christ. The bid for the support of the Roman Catholic church was a success. At a public meeting, in which the pastor of the Congregational church met with Roman Catholics as friends and brothers, he told them of his having bowed down to the Pope of Rome and of having received his blessing. Whether he surrendered to the church, and took the vows of a Jesuit, and continues in the service of the Congregational church that he may do the more harm to Protestantism and more service to Romanism, is not known by the American people. Jesuitism provides for, and pays well for such service a-s the Rev. Joseph T. Duryea, D.D., is now rendering. The Protestants of New England owe it to the future of their youth that his influence be withstood, and his servility to error exposed.

The following petition was drawn up and has been largely signed and sent to this recreant minister:

“WHEREAS, The Rev. Joseph T. Duryea, D.D., lacks either the intelligence necessary to formulate a correct opinion concerning indulgences as taught by popes and practised by priests, or the honesty and bravery to tell the truth, preferring to ally himself with the Roman Catholic Church, the open and avowed enemy of public education, and the declared champion of illiteracy here and throughout the world: We, therefore, whose names are set to this petition, for the sake of imperilled youth, most respectfully ask him to resign his position on the School Board, and give place to a better educated, or a more truth- loving man.”

Let us turn attention to the statement authorized by the Committee in regard to indulgences, and confute it. They say: “By an indulgence is meant, the remission of the temporal punishment due to sins already forgiven.”That is as far from being truth as Romanists, helped by a Congregational minister, can make it. Indulgences were an invention of Urban II. in the eleventh century, as a recompense for those who went in person upon the enterprise of conquering the Holy Land. They were afterwards granted to those who hired a soldier for that purpose ; and in process of time were bestowed on such as gave money for accomplishing any pious work enjoined by the Pope. The dogma is as follows:

“That all good works of the saints, over and above those which were necessary toward their own justification, are deposited, together with the infinite merits of Jesus Christ, in one inexhaustible treasury. The keys of this were committed to St. Peter, and to his successors, the popes, who may open it at pleasure, and by transferring a portion of this super abundant merit to any particular person, for a sum of money, may convey to him either the pardon of his own sins, or a release for any one in whom he is interested from the pains of purgatory.” This is through and through an utter rejection of Christ, in whom our life is hid ; and because we put off anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication, and put on the new man, permitting the word of Christ to dwell in us richly, the Christian looks upon his own righteousness as filthy rags. Christ is all and in all.

He enters towns in procession, companies of priests bearing candles and banners, choristers chanting and ringing bells. At the churches a red cross was set upon the altars, a silk banner floating from it with the papal arms, and a great iron dish at the foot to receive the equivalents for the myriads of years in the penal fire of Tartarus. He came to Wittenberg. Luther’s flock bought indulgences. It was cheaper than going to confession. Luther was compelled to pronounce against them, pope or no pope. This he did ; and declared that no man’s sins could be pardoned by them.

On it went, deepening and widening like a mighty river, sweeping all before it. Then, to the door of the church he nailed the theses against indulgences, on the last day of October, 1517.

There were ninety-five of them. Tetzel replied, or got some one to reply for him, and burned Luther’s books. The students of Wittenberg stood by Luther and made a bonfire of 800 books of Tetzel. The act showed their contempt for indulgences. The pope stood for the lie, and against the brave man telling the truth, and issued a bull against the monk. The Pope always stands for a lie. His feet are planted on a lie. If there were no lie there would be no Pope. The purgatorial theory is built on a lie. Indulgences are linked with it.

was as follows: “May our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon thee, and absolve thee by the merits of his most holy passion. And by his authority, and of his blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and of the most holy pope, granted and committed to me in these parts, do absolve thee, first, from all ecclesiastical censures, in whatever form they have been incurred; then, from all thy sins, transgressions, excesses, how enormous soever they may be, even from such as are reserved for the cognizance of the Holy See, and as far as the keys of the holy church extend. I remit to you all punishment which you deserve in purgatory on that account ; and I restore you to the holy sacraments of the church, to the unity of the faithful, and to that innocence and purity which you possessed at baptism ; so that when you die the gates of punishment shall be shut, and the gates of the paradise of delights shall be opened ; and if you shall not die at present, this grace shall remain in full force when you are at the point of death.”Can any delusion be worse?”

The statements made by the Romanists, with the assent of the Congregational minister, is, that indulgences remit the temporal punishment of sins for given to this they add: “Every sin, however grievous, is remitted through the sacrament of penance, or by an act of perfect contrition, as regards its guilt and the eternal punishment due to it. But the debt of temporal punishment is not always remitted at the same time. The latter is done away with by deep penitence, or by works of satisfaction, e. g. , prayers, alms, fastings, etc., or by patient endurance of troubles and adversities sent us by God, or by the satisfaction of our Lord Jesus Christ and the saints, applied to us by the church under certain conditions, which application we call an indulgence.””An indulgence is not, then, a pardon for sin; because sin must be remitted before an indulgence can be gained. Much less is it a permission to commit sin ; for even God himself could not give such permission.”In order to gain any indulgence what ever, you must be in a state of grace.”So say these deceivers ; and we are told that it does not interest the masses of the community. To this we dissent. Nothing interests them more. We have waded through this long definition, not because there is any truth or honesty in it ; but to show that, even if their statement is based on fact, Swinton’s statement contains an acknowledged truth ; and also to call attention to the truth, that an indulgence, as taught by Rome, is a stupendous lie, calculated to delude, and sure to damn the believer who trusts to this artifice. Indulgences had to do with sins to be committed. According to a book called ” Tax of the Sacred Roman Chancery,”in which are contained the exact sums to be levied for the pardon of each particular sin to be permitted, these are given:

For Procuring s. d. (Editor’s note: I don’t know what this line means. Can anybody help me?)

Abortion	7	6
Simony	10	6
Sacrilege	10	6
Taking a false oath in a criminal case	9	0
Robbery	12	0
Burning a neighbor’s house	12	0
Lying with a mother or a sister	12	0
Murdering a layman	7	0
Defiling a virgin	4	0
Keeping a concubine	10	6
Using violent hands on a clergyman	10	6

In the light of such a statement, taken from Roman Catholic authorities, as much a fact as any other price-list, Roman Catholics claim that an indulgence can only be granted in a state of grace. The fact is, indulgences cannot be granted at all. To say differently, is to belie the truth. Purgatory is only a delusion. Roman Catholic teaching controverts the truth. History simply shows that the Romish lie was born in 1096, that Urban II. was its inventor, and from that period deluded people have believed a lie that they might be damned. In 1300, Boniface issued an indulgence for all that would make a pilgrimage to Rome. A price was put on sins like shopkeepers wares, and remission of sins by means of indulgences for jingling coin. The church, in 1517, was acting on the shameless principle of the Chamberlain of Innocent VIII. who said: “God willeth not the death of a sinner, but that he pay and live.”In one of the pardon-tickets of 1517, there is a figure of a Dominican monk with a cross, crown of thorns, and a burning heart. In the upper corners is a nailed hand. On the front are the words:

“This is the length and breadth of the wounds of Christ
in his holy side. As often as any one kisses it,
he has seven years indulgence.”This has no reference
to sins forgiven, and it is a lie to teach differently.”

“The cross measured seven times makes the height
of Christ in his humanity. He who kisses it is preserved
for some days from sudden death, falling sickness, apoplexy.”

The dealers put up the following notice:

“The red indulgence-cross, with the pope’s arms suspended on it, has the same virtue as the cross of Christ. The pardon makes those who accept it cleaner than baptism, purer even than Adam in a state of innocence in paradise. The dealer in pardons saves more people than Peter. The abuse went on until it became madness.”{Ludwig Hauser, p. 16}

Tetzel sold his indulgences to robbers, thieves and murderers, and claimed that they were as clean as Adam before his fall so soon as the click of the money was heard in the iron box. They tell the story of Tetzel and a robber. He bought an indulgence for a large sum, Which gave him the privilege of committing any sin. The money went into the iron chest. Through a dark forest Tetzel and his chest were going. The robber stopped him, and demanded his money or his life. Tetzel told who he was. “I know you,”said the robber, and pulled out the indulgence. Tetzel read. His sin had found him out. He lost his money ; and the story proves the utter falsity of the claim that indulgences have only to do with sins remitted. This sin was to be committed.

Then came Luther. The Bible chained to the altar, had opened his eyes to the errors of Rome. Tossed by doubt, distressed by sin, he had gone to Rome: there he saw Romanism at its worst. The Bible in Erfurt library taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. Luther now learned that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God. He said to the Pope fearlessly, as was his wont: You are not God’s vicegerent ; you are another s, I think. I take your bull as an emparchmented lie, and burn it. You will do what you see good next ; this is what I do.”It was on the tenth of December, 1520, three years after the beginning of the business, that Luther, with a great concourse of people, took this indignant step of burning the Pope’s decree in the market-place of Wittenberg. Wittenberg looked on with shoutings. The whole world was looking on. This was in 1520. In 1888, Boston is summoned to take up this work, and through remonstrance and argument kindle a lire which shall spread wider and rise higher, until it shall become unquenchable, and envelope all the world.

Say not that these questions of dogma should be left to theological disputants. They belong to the people. They influence life. They shape destiny.

Romanists deceive Romanists by statements which are false as to fact, and designed to be misleading as to inference. When they say, “that in order to gain any indulgence whatever, you must be in a state of grace,” they make a declaration utterly wanting in truth. When Romanists talk about a state of grace they deceive. Romanism ignores a state of grace as Protestants understand it. The Bible teaches that a man passes into a state of grace when he is born again ; when he is regenerated by the power of the Holy Ghost: then he becomes a new creature in Christ Jesus. Romanism ignores all this, and claims that an act of baptism, performed by a man, washes away sin. In other words, Romanism rests her hopes for salvation on baptismal regeneration and the sacraments.

The Word of God teaches, that “whoever confesses with the mouth the Lord Jesus, and believes in the heart that God raised him from the dead, he shall be saved.”Rom. 10:9. When saved, he would not take an indulgence to sin were it offered to him ; and would not use it if he had a million. He hates sin and loves holiness, when redeemed.

All this Luther saw, and learned that religion as it professed to be, and religion as it was embodied in the lives of church dignitaries, priests and friars, were in startling contrast. He knew his peril. John Huss had come to Rome with all imaginable promises and safe conducts. Rome turned her back on them all ; they laid him instantly in a stone dungeon, three feet wide, six feet high, seven feet long, and burnt the true voice out of the world, choked it in smoke and fire. “The elegant pagan Leo X., by this fire-decree,”says Girlylo, “had kindled into noble, just wrath, the bravest heart then living in the world.”Indulgences were farmed out to a bankrupt ; in their sale, there was no more thought of religion than in the sale of lottery tickets.

Both lies are of the devil ; and how a Congregational minister could forgo the privilege of preaching the truth to the deceived, passes comprehension. He ignored his commission. He belied his profession, and betrayed his Lord. Either he knows better than to intimate that, for stating a truth, a book dealing with historic fact ought to be thrown out of the schools, and acts in this manner to curry favor with Romanists, and so ought to be retired from the School Board ; or he does not know the truth, and is unfit for the position. In either event, the way out is his best way. The children need either a more honest, or a more intelligent man to represent their interests. This is not said in a spirit of raillery or pleasantry. We are dealing with momentous issues. God does not suffer us to trifle with the truth. “For it is impossible that those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good Word of God, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance.”(Heb. 6:4,5)

Romanism deals with and in indulgences, in these days of Leo XIII., quite as much as it dealt with them in the clays of Leo X. Romanism knows no improvement. Evolution theories may apply to science and to art, but not to Romanism. What Rome was in the dark ages, she is in this nineteenth century as cruel, as blind, as selfish, as much opposed to education, as full of superstition as at any time in the past.

Sad and melancholy as is the truth, it is here, and evidently here to stay. There is a paper circulated among the young, culled by a priestly name, which carries to the homes of vast numbers of individuals this fearful superstition and falsehood, known as indulgences, fresh from the hand of Leo XIII.

Here is an Agnus Dei, with a little of the earth from the foot of the cross, of which doubtless cart loads have been shipped away, which saves from drowning, etc. Here is a book bought at Dona hue s, published in Barclay street, New York, with the approbation of John Hughes, archbishop, as full of lies as an egg is full of meat, circulated among Romanists. This is the caption:

Scapular of our Lady of Mount Carmel. “As it is considered a mark of distinction by men to have attendants wearing their livery, so does the Blessed Virgin like to see her servants wear her scapular ; it should be a sign of their having devoted them selves to her service, and of their belonging to the family of the mother of God.”(St. Alphonsus Liguori) .

A scapular is a piece of cloth worn on the bosom and on the back to procure indulgences to sin, or indulgences which shall free from the guilt or pain of sin. Now, Romanists are making a distinction between the payment of the debt in purgatory, and an indulgence to sin.

“And yet,”said Archbishop Hughes, “we have spoken only of the scapular of our Blessed Lady of Mount Carmel. There are several others to which likewise many graces and indulgences are attached:

• I. The Scapular of our Blessed Lady of the Seven Dolors, of the Order of the Servants of Mary, founded in Florence, in 1133, by seven men, to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared, and commanded them to wear a black habit in memory of the Seven Dolors.

• II. The Scapular of the Immaculate Conception of the Order of Theatines, or Regular Clerks, which was founded by Peter John Caraffa, who was afterwards Pope, under the name of Paul IV., and died in the year 1559.

• III. The Scapular of The Most Holy Trinity, of the Order of Trinitarians, for the redemption of captives, which was founded in the twelfth century by St. John deMatha and St. Felix de Valois. These religious wear a white habit, with a cross of red and blue on the breast, as shown by an angel to St. John de Matha, and in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Felix de Valois. These three Scapulars, like the Scapular of Mt. Carmel, are composed each of two small pieces of woolen cloth. When together with that of Mount Carmel, all four pieces square, or nearly so, are sewed together, like leaves of a book, and four more pieces exactly similar are sewed in like manner ; then these two parts, four pieces in each, are joined by two bands of tape about eighteen inches long, so that one part falls on the breast, and the other on the back, The largest piece is generally the Scapular of Mt. Carmel, which is of brown color ; the second, which is somewhat smaller, is the Scapular of Our Lady of the Seven Dolors, and is of a black color ; the third is, the Scapular of the Immaculate Conception, and is still smaller and of a blue color. This color, the emblem of resignation to Mary, was also the color of her mantle. The Scapular of the Most Holy Trinity is white, and the smallest of the four, in the middle of which there must be a cross, likewise of wool, one arm of which must be of red, the other blue. All these colors, as well as the cross, must be visible.

The Redemptorist Fathers have the power to give these three Scapulars. The essential requirement for all the indulgences and graces annexed to these three Scapulars is, to receive them from a priest empowered to grant them, and to wear them constantly. If any one loses or wears out the Scapular, he can take another in its stead. Those who, either though carelessness, or even through malice, neglect to wear it, or have laid it aside, can again resume it, and gain all the indulgences as before. The Scapular of the Most Holy Trinity alone is excepted ; according to the declaration of Innocent XI., it must be blessed as often as renewed.

Indulgences are granted to those who wear the scapulars, by Paul V. in 1606, Clement X. in 1673, Clement XI. in 1710, Innocent XI. in 1680, 81, 82.

They teach that they save life. Proof: At the siege of Montpelier, in the year 1682, a soldier named M. de Beauregard, was struck by a musket-ball, which rested on the Scapular and saved his life. Louis XIII., King of France, saw it, and put on a Scapular. Monsieur de Cuge, cornet of a company of horse, was wounded at Tefin, in the year 1636, by a cannon ball, which, passing through the left side, tore his heart to pieces, so that, naturally, he could not live a moment. The Scapular saved him until the priest came ; and so on, and so on.

If Romanists can do the one, they can do both. Besides, whenever indulgences are procured, the besotted run the risk, and plunge deeper into sin because of it.

To say, as does Rev. Dr, Duryea and the Boston School Board, that an indulgence is not & permission to commit sin, is to deceive the people. Said Tetzel: “Draw near, and I will give you letters duly sealed, by which even the sins you shall hereafter desire to commit shall all be forgiven you. I would not exchange my privileges for those of St. Peter in heaven ; for I have saved more souls with my indulgences, than he with his sermons. There is no sin so great that the indulgence cannot reach it let him pay largely, and it shall be forgiven him. Even repentance is not indispensable. Shall such facts be cast out of our school-books, that the generation now coming upon the stage of action may be surrendered to Rome?

In Canada is an indulgence of Pio Nono, offering to all who enlisted in his army indulgences for themselves and their relatives, framed and hung in the homes of the deluded. Here is one that offers 100 days indulgence each time repeated, signed Pius IX., 3d June, 1874. Here is another offering- indulgences to all who will contribute to the building of the University College of Ottawa: the holder of this certificate shall be entitled to share twenty-five masses daily, and in all the prayers and good works of the Rev. Oblate Fathers,

• For ten years, by a contribution of – 25 cents.
• Forever – $200
• A family, for ten years – $100

Thus are men and women deceived. They trust in man, rather than in the efficacy of the atonement by Jesus Christ. This gives them power at sick beds over the wills of the dying, and over the purses of living relatives and friends. From the living they get profit in the sale of indulgences, Agnus Deis, scapularies, masses of every kind, dispensations from fasts, removal of impediments to marriage, miraculous medals, various defences against the devil, grace through the images or relics of patron saints, and other similar devices.

Remember, there is nothing to be gotten from the Roman Catholic church without money. No money, no baptism ; no money, no marriage ; no money, no burial ; no money, nothing.

If Romanists deceive Romanists, it becomes Christians to preach to them the gospel. The mortification and shame which came to us because of one who professes allegiance to Christ, is very hard to bear. Let the shame and disgrace end there. Christians, awake, and put your armor on ! Napoleon in Egypt, close by the pyramids, said: “Twenty centuries behold your actions.”Christian people, look up to the throne. Jesus is there. Look about you, behold the perishing.

Romanists are crowding the broad road to death. Millions of youth are interested in this controversy. Will Americans rise to the level of their great opportunity and do their whole duty? or will they bow down to Rome, and barter away their God-given rights? This is the question of the hour ! How will it be answered? Shall men be taught error, or the truth? Remember, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”Think right, and all will be well. Think wrong and act wrong, and ruin awaits you.

This may yet come to be the question of the hour. If done, it must be accomplished through the combined efforts of the people of the United States. The North and the South, the East and the West, must come up alike to the help of the Lord against the mighty. The need of it is apparent. It is the boast of the Frenchman, that as goes Paris, so goes France. As went Rome, so went Italy. And so it may yet be said, As goes Washington, so will go the great Republic.

Remember, France made Paris bend her neck to the people. Italy thundered at the gates of Rome ; took away the States of the Church from His Holiness the Pope ; tossed overboard, with contempt and ease, the ruler who was said to preserve the equipoise of Europe ; sent him a prisoner to the Vatican ; and went on with the work of making Italy free, as if the tap- root of Papal Rule had not been the growth of centuries. Washington, the centre of political influence and activity, is in the lap of Rome, with the consent of the people. Let there be a protest. Unroof the monster, Jesuitism. Uncover the pollution, the scandal of the confessional. Unlock and throw open the doors of the convents and nunneries, the assignation houses, kept for a so-called celibate priesthood. Expose the conduct of those who have made prostitution flourish at Rome and in all the great cities in which they have control, and Washington will shake off the incubus. The nation will declare for purity, for justice, for emancipation from the shackles of blind and besotted Romanism, and from the thraldom of the black-robed throng, who insult their sick, half-starve their orphans, for whose support they are paid by the State, and maltreat their poor ; because in the heart of Rome love is exchanged for selfish greed. Not always will statesmen bow and cringe to obtain the Roman Catholic vote, which is only powerful because it is always on sale, going to the highest bidder, without regard to principle. It will yet appear that fifty millions of people, blessed with liberty, and in the presence of wonderful opportunity, cannot afford to creep under the black wing of Papal despotism, that vampire that sucked the life-blood out of Spain, out of Mexico, and out of any country where it has been permitted to do its hellish work undisturbed. Christianity is the product of witnessing for the truth. The Papacy is the monument of withholding testimony for God. Error is the servant of the “Prince of the power of the air.” Truth is the helpmeet of God. Witnessing for the truth is to result in the overthrow of every form of error. There are reasons for this faith. Let us enumerate a few of them:

1. God is for the truth. When we say that, the argument assures the people of victory so soon as they are made ready to stand with and for God. By grace, by Providence, by the help of God s true children, in uncounted and in unexpected ways, aid will be brought to those who put on the whole armor of God and stand ready to fight the good fight of faith. The achievements wrought by truth, and for the truth, in other days and on other fields, attest the truth that God works for those who work for him.

DARK DAYS THERE HAVE BEEN.

Here is an illustration. Death, the fire, and the inquisitorial torture of Romish hate, had achieved an apparent victory. The night was dark, because the witnesses were still.

In 1514 the Council met in Rome. Into the Market Place strode a servant of the Church of Rome, and in pride asked, Is there one who protests?” He waited. He listened. The Waldensians were dead in France. In England the Lollards were exterminated. In Italy truth had been slain in the street. ” Not one protests!” It was a terrible charge brought by Rome against Rome. Thousands and tens of thousands passed from the Cross to the stake. They were burned, tortured, hurled over rocks. Rome reveled in barbarity.

“The rack, the fagot, or the hated creed

Were the tender mercies of tyrant Rome;

While, fearless amidst Christ s fold fierce wolves did roam,

And stainless sheep upon her altars bleed.”

In May 1514, the testimony ceased. Three years and a half pass. It is a prophetic period. Look! Up the stair-way climbs Martin Luther on his knees. Hark! A voice sounds down to him. He is tired, sick, hopeless, despondent, a type of all Romanists. ” The just shall live by faith,” passes through the gateway of the conscience to the chamber of the soul. It startles him. It unlocks night. It uncovers the crucified Christ. Clouds depart. He is born again. He is in a new world. He confesses it. He becomes a witness. God helps his own. Everything is made ready for the work. The banner is unfurled. Redeemed men take it and bear it on. The friends of error are powerless, in presence of the testimony of living and brave witnesses.

Think how Zwingle, Luther, Melancthon, William, Prince of Orange, told the truth! They carried their testimony into towns, into churches, and into homes. They told what God did for them. As justification by faith placed them on vantage ground, they called to men in night and gloom to come to the light, and held up to them the reeking cross, which broke the power of the man of sin ” and gave deliverance to captive souls.

TRUTH DISINTEGRATES ROMANISM.

Romanism was born, and found its place of being and its capacity of growth, because of the surrender of the individual conscience to the keeping of a machine.

Every effort put forth by the individual in behalf of the truth is a subtraction from the power which upholds the Papacy, and an addition to the power which is to people the world with hope, and make the desert to bud and blossom as the rose. Hence every movement in favor of individual thinking favors Christianity and opposes Romanism. Every scintillation of truth in behalf of freedom, every word spoken for God and the right, clears the way for humanity, and widens the area of the kingdom of God. There is nothing in Romanism calculated to charm or please the thinking and unfettered intellect. It stultifies reason where it can ; it banishes God’s word as best it may ; that word which is the foundation of the World s jurisprudence, the fountain-source of liberty, and the pillar of flame and cloud, by whose aid the nation has made its march out of the wilderness of trial into the Canaan of possession. Romanism fetters the mind, enslaves the limb, and is the servant of injustice, the parent and source of despotism, and the foe of all that ennobles and exalts humanity. This is coming to be known and felt. Romanists are feeling it quite as much as others. Christ is leading on.

“He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat ;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat ;
O be swift my soul to answer Him! be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born, across the sea,—
With a glory in his bosom that transfuses you and me.
As he die dto make men holy, let us die to make men
free,—
While God is marching on.”

Somebody will catch this inspiration, and become the trumpeter of a great truth. Some one will appear, not only as the scourge of impositions, and the ponderous hammer that shall smite upon the brazen idolatry of the age, but as the upbuilder of holy principles in accordance with the teachings of the Word of God.

It is essential that a dear conception be obtained of the work to be done.

A free Church in a free State was once the battle-cry of the Republic. Rome is organizing an aggressive warfare upon the separation of Church and State. It was the hope of promoting a union of Church and State that made the Red-Robed Cardinal desire the company of a son of a Presbyterian minister, occupying the position of President, in laying the corner stone of the Jesuit college. It is to be proclaimed that the religion of Jesus Christ is to be divorced from the State. This is not because Republicans honor religion less. They believe that the Church of Christ is a divine institution, which has to do with finding out the truth, holding the truth, and spreading the truth.

They believe also in the State ; claim that it is also a divine institution, and has sacred duties, such as guaranteeing to every man safety, and making his person, his property, and his right to think and be. The State must be safety, justice, righteousness. There must be a free Church in a free State, the State subject to justice only, the Church subject to Christ only.

True Americans must see that the very antipodes of the idea just stated is the Romish idea. Rome claims that the Church shall be all, and the State a non-entity, and that the Roman Catholic religion shall be permitted to exclude all other forms of faith. The Pope declares, that it is an error to be reprobated and proscribed, that the Church shall be separate from the State. Americans are to take note of this, and be made ready to antagonize it.

Rome claims that it is ” an error to be reprobated, proscribed, and condemned, to say that, in the case of conflicting laws between the two powers, the civil law ought to prevail, and that the church has not the power of availing herself of force, or any direct or indirect temporal power.” These propositions so clear, so startling bear date Dec. 4th, 1864, of “Errors Condemned,” and were reaffirmed by the late Plenary Council of Baltimore. Truly has it been said: ” There is enough dynamite in these propositions to blow up our entire modern civilization, destroy liberty of conscience, and bring utter ruin upon the purity of the church and the integrity of the State.”

Americans know that in the United States, at the present time, there is a union of Church and State to an extent little dreamed of.

In New Jersey, the State Reform School has been Romanized. The unsectarian teaching, in piety and morals, has been destroyed. The moral and religious training of the Catholic boys is handed over completely to the Romish Church. The same is true of the City of New York, where children arrested are given over to institutions under the control of the religion professed by their parents. As a result, there are 3,000 Roman Catholic youth in the New York Protectory, more lost to Protestantism than if they were born and reared in Rome.

The State thus gives a guarantee to the Roman Catholic Church, that no child of Romish parents shall be permitted to come in contact with the free thought of our American life and with the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not liberty of conscience ; this is coercion of conscience. The American people will see this ; and seeing it, they will correct the legislation that makes it live and thrive under the shadow of the broad ^Egis of our Republic.

Again: Rome seeks to take the children of the State out of the control of the civil power. This is the exact language of the Syllabus: That * the entire direction of public schools in which the youth of Christian States are educated, may and must appertain to the civil power, is an error to be reprobated and proscribed. Issue must here be joined. ”

We want in our land no fractional parts of Americans we want whole men, who are rooted in American ideas. The Baltimore Plenary Council decided, that all Catholic children shall be educated in parochial schools. This education will give us mutilated men and women. The American people must be made to see this, and they will resist the encroachment.

“I wonder,” said Dr. Dollinger of Germany, the Old Catholic, who fought the conferring of the decree of Infallibility upon Pio Nono, ” I wonder if they understand in America what an infallible Pope means? that it means a hand stretched over into the United States, and laid upon every Roman Catholic citizen, and imposing upon him the obligation to set himself up in opposition to the ordinances of your Government whenever the Pope shall pronounce his judgments against these ordinances on moral or religious ground?” Yes, Dr. Dollinger, a great many understand it, and are getting ready to deliver Roman Catholics from their thraldom.

Roman Catholics are getting more money for the support of Romish schools than is given to all the Evangelical churches combined. The New York Independent affirms, that Protestant schools find more difficulty in getting what they ask for than the Romish schools. It affirms that Government interferes less with Romish schools than with Protestant. It affirms that, in the schools wholly supported by the Government, they are rapidly passing into the control of the Roman Catholics, even where all are Protestants, as among the Indians.

A Roman Catholic was kept at the head of the postal service until it was very largely Romanized, with Roman Catholics for postmasters wherever they could be pushed in ; and then he was transferred to the Interior Department to Romanize that ; while the head of the army, a Roman Catholic, gave a Roman Catholic sutler control of every army post, and the nation donates, even against fundamental law, a lot of land at every military post, on which to build a Roman Catholic chapel.

The American people only need to be made acquainted with these facts, and they will antagonize them.

Our fathers clamored for a separation of Church and State. Let their children go on with the work. It has been well said: “If we work to serve the twentieth century, we must save the nineteenth.” We must reconstruct our geography, and permit the Tiber to flow into the Potomac, and not compel the Potomac to flow into the Tiber.

Create a literature that shall point out the vices and corruptions of Romanism.

Popery must be antagonized ; Christ must be championed. This, politicians will come to see. They will insist upon a separation of Church and State ; upon maintaining a public school system, in which all the children of the State shall be educated. The Bible shall be unbound. This made way for Luther, so that when he came they breathed an air which had long been most patiently impregnated with the very essence of innovation. The word of God in the hands of the people is the accusing spirit of the Papacy. In the days of Wicliff, ” the noise of its wings” were faintly heard in England.

Then, men of position, indignant at the impoverishment and disgrace of their country, antagonized the power of Eome. Afterwards men fought it, because of the perversion and abuse of their religious institutions. Hence, when the conflict under Luther began, the leader of it could number potentates among his allies and partizans, till, at last, he may be said to have had

“A kingdom for a stage, princes for actors,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.”

Not so at the present time. Our great men seem to be our greatest cowards. In pulpits, in pressrooms, and on platforms, it is fashionable to be servile. What kings did in Europe who held the stirrup for His Holiness to mount, that presidents and politicians in free America seem ready to do. It is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings to Rome. The Church of Rome is being pandered to by men who will ere long wake up to their shame. What mean these “Roman Catholic Notes” that meet the approval of Roman Catholic officials, except as an indication that the Roman Catholic vote is a thing that may be bargained for. How humiliating the fact! Seven millions of men and women in free America for sale to the highest bidder! For that vote, politicians betray God, turn their backs upon liberty, surrender the dearest rights of freemen to the keeping of their bitterest foe. A distinguished statesman goes to Rome ; enters the American College, so-called, in fact, a college built by Americans to change American youth into Italian priests ; there he referred to the Church of Rome as “that Church which is so widely spread and so profoundly respected.” Where is it “respected” by any one? Had he said, feared, by all in America, and by himself more than all, he had told the truth.

To stand up against Rome at this hour requires high courage. Thousands have it. Millions will yet possess it.

2. God is against Romanism. Prophecy declares it. History brings proof in support of the proposition ; and from no nation so truly as from the story of the life of the Republic of the United States. Romanism is disintegrating, wherever the truth concerning it is told. It resembles an ice-glacier loosened from its Northern home. The current bears it southward. The gulf-stream of liberty catches it and dissolves it. Superstition is being scattered broadcast by the brightness of the Sun of Righteousness.

The overthrow of the Papacy is simply the unfulfilled prophecy of that Being who described its coming and its doom. The same Eye that saw the rise and decline of Mohammedanism, the same Being who gave the command, ” Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates,” (Rev. 9:14), before the Islam horsemen swept forth in their career of conquest ; and that commanded the sixth angel to pour out his vial upon the great river Euphrates when the water was dried up (Rev. 16: 12), and the way was prepared for the kings who are from the rising of the sun, so that Turkey is destroyed, and is a captive enslaved, the sport and plaything of Continental powers ; that foretold the settlement of America when he pointed to the ships of Tarshish on their way to the land of broad rivers, described the character and the occupation of the ” beast ” of prophecy, and portrayed the ” woman” clothed in purple and scarlet and holding in her hand the cup of her fornications and upon her head the writing: Mystery! Babylon the great! The Mother of Harlots and of the abominations of the earth” This the people begin to see. Sound the battle-cry.

THE WORK IS ONLY BEGUN.

The possibility of bearing witness for Christ is within reach of all. It is possible to carry truth within the citadel of the enemy, through the agency of the help employed in our houses and in our places of business.

Never do I think of the millions about us, who want something better than these nummeries to satisfy the cravings of their immortal souls, but I rejoice that the Gospel, as we know it, is the power of God and the wisdom of God, suited to their every need. Tell them of it. There is no mistaking what it will do for them. It will save their souls, and give them a joy and peace they seek elsewhere in vain.

The Holy Spirit works for those who work for God. There are links in the chain of God s providence which enter into the chain that is mighty to the pulling down of the stronghold of error. Children of God, be true. Things of deep interest are pending. Let soul touch soul. Let truth combat error ; and the people of the Lord, beautiful as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, shall be terrible as an army with banners!

The Lord Jehovah reigneth. Let the people rejoice. For from God we obtain the assurance that witnessing for the truth shall result in the taking of Washington out of the lap of Rome, making her the glory of the Nation, and the Light-house of the World ; so that the millions now shrouded in darkness shall awake to the touch of the new-born radiance, and leaving their idols behind, shall walk forth into the new day heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ, to an inheritance incorruptible, and un defiled, and that fadeth not away.

AMEN AND AMEN.

END OF ARTICLE

You can also Download the PDF file from where I got the text. There may be some mistakes both when copying from the PDF file and when the PDF file was first created. The hard copy must have been scanned and the document converted to text by optical recognition software. It’s not always 100% accurate and needs proofreading.

Martin Luther

On October 31, 1517, a little over five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety Five Thesis on the door of a church in Wittenberg Germany. That day was the beginning of the liberation of the minds and souls of the European peoples from the tyranny of the religious system of Rome!

In case you have never heard of the 95 Thesis, Martin Luther wrote them and nailed the document on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517. It’s the document that started the Protestant Reformation! This document was copied, printed, and spread all over Europe. It infuriated Pope Leo X who promptly labeled Luther as a heretic.

I really enjoyed this YouTube documentary about Martin Luther. It seems to be factual and if biased, biased in Luther’s favor!

This is an outstanding series of lectures exposing the Roman Catholic Church as “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” of Revelation 17:5. I got the text from PDF file ROMANISM AND THE REFORMATION and posted it here to make it easier to read. If you still doubt the Roman Catholic Church represents Mystery Babylon, rather that knock the idea, why not read at least the first chapter of what Henry Grattan Guiness had to say?

PREFACE

THE following lectures were delivered, by request, under the auspices of the Protestant Educational Institute, at Exeter Hall, in the spring of this year [1887]. That Institute exists to do a much needed work to keep alive, especially in the hearts of the rising generation, some measure of intelligent sympathy with the Protestant traditions of our country. England’s Protestantism has long been England’s glory, and the direct cause of her unrivaled prosperity and peculiar preeminence among the nations of Europe. That Protestantism is now sustaining a double attack, from without and from within. Yet few seem fully alive to the danger. The late Lord Beaconsfield saw it clearly enough however. “Your empire and your liberties are more in danger at this moment,” he said, “than when Napoleon’s army of observation was encamped at Boulogne.” What would he have said had he lived to see the present position of affairs!

The Reformation of the sixteenth century, which gave birth to Protestantism, was based on Scripture. It gave back to the world the Bible. It taught the Scriptures; it exposed the errors and corruptions of Rome by the use of the sword of the Spirit. It applied THE PROPHECIES, and accepted their practical guidance. Such Reformation work requires to be done afresh. We have suffered prophetic anti-papal truth to be too much forgotten. This generation is dangerously latitudinarian indifferent to truth and error on points on which Scripture is tremendously decided and absolutely clear.

These lectures, simple and popular as they are, will, it is hoped, open many minds to perceive that the Bible gives no uncertain sound as to Romanism, and that those who will be guided by its teachings must shun an apostasy against which the sorest judgments are denounced.

The lectures are given as delivered, with the exception of the first and last, which have been extended and modified. In recasting and enlarging the opening lecture on the Daniel foreview, and the closing one on the Reformation, I have availed myself of the valuable help of my beloved wife, who has for so many years been my fellow laborer both in literary and evangelistic work.

I shall rejoice if these lectures obtain a wide circulation, for they contain, I am sure, truth for the times, truth deeply and increasingly needed, not only for the preservation of the civil and religious liberties of our country and empire, but for the practical guidance of the people of God in these last days.

H. GRATTAN GUINNESS Harley House, Bow, E., June 1st, 1887.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

From the first appearance of these lectures in the form in which they were originally published, I have been urged to produce a cheap popular edition suited for wide-spread distribution. I do so now the more willingly because the need of testimony to Protestant Truth is increasing instead of diminishing. Romanism and Ritualism are making extensive progress year by year, and seriously imperil “The Protestant Religion and Liberties of England.” The duty of diffusing information on the true character and history of “Romanism and the Reformation” is one which presses on God’s faithful people in these days. The apathy of many as to the present crisis only increases the danger, and intensifies the call for clear and cogent teaching suited to counteract the Romeward tendencies of these times. The testimony of Scripture, especially of the “sure word of Prophecy,” should be set forth afresh, as in the days of the Reformation, that those in danger of departing from the faith once delivered to the saints may be warned, and those who have so departed may be delivered. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual, and mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds. Our combat is with error, therefore let us diffuse the Truth. Books and pamphlets bearing on the questions at issue, and taking the side of Truth, should be circulated by the million. Let our readers do what they can in this direction, without delay, committing the result to Him who has promised that His word shall not return to Him void, but shall accomplish the ends for which He has sent it.

H. GRATTAN GUINNESS. HARLEY HOUSE, BOW, LONDON, E. MAY 1ST, 1891.

Fifty years ago the eminent statesman, Sir Robert Peel said, with remarkably clear foresight: “The day is not distant, and it may be very near, when we shall all have to fight the battle of the Reformation over again.”

That day has come. It has been upon us for some time. It has found us unprepared, and as a result the battle is to some extent going against us. More than three centuries of emancipation from the yoke of Rome three hundred years of Bible light and liberty had made us overconfident, and led us to underestimate the power and influence of the deadliest foe, not only of the gospel of God, but also of Protestant England. Britain’s honorable distinction of being the leading witness among the nations for the truth of the gospel and against the errors of Romanism had come to be lightly esteemed among us. Our fathers won this distinction through years of sore struggle and strife; they purchased it with their best blood, and prized it as men prize that which costs them dear. It had cost us nothing, we were born to it; we knew not its value by contrast as they did. In the early part of this century the power of Rome was in these lands a thing of the past, and it seemed to be fast decaying even in other lands. The notion grew up among us that there was no need to fear any revival of that deadly upas tree, which is the blight of all that is great and good, pure and prosperous. The light of true knowledge had for ever dispelled the dark fogs of superstition, so it was supposed; mediaeval tyrannies and cruelties cloaked under a pretense of religion could never again obtain a footing in these lands of light and liberty. We might despise and deride the corruptions and follies of Rome, but as to dreading her influence no. She was too far gone and too feeble to inspire fear, or even watchfulness.

This was all a delusion, and we have been roughly undeceived. The difficult and dangerous crisis through which England is now passing is the direct result of the course of action taken under this delusion, and God only knows what the ultimate consequences may be. A serpent may be scotched, yet not killed; it may retain life enough to turn and inflict on its foe a fatal wound. The ground may be purged from a destructive weed, but the little remnants left behind may sprout and spread so as speedily to pervade the plot anew. It has been thus with Romish influence in Protestant England.

Let facts speak. Fifty years ago there were not five hundred Roman priests in Great Britain; now there are two thousand six hundred. Fifty years ago there were not five hundred chapels; now there are fifteen hundred and seventy-five. Fifty years ago there were no monasteries at all in Britain; now there are two hundred and twenty-five. There were even then sixteen convents, but now there are over four hundred of these barred and bolted and impenetrable prisons, in which fifteen thousand Englishwomen are kept prisoners at the mercy of a celibate clergy, who have power, unless their behests are obeyed, to inflict on these hapless and helpless victims torture under the name of penance. Fifty years ago there were but two colleges in our land for the training of Roman Catholic priests i.e., of men bound by oath to act in England as the agents of a foreign power, the one great object of which is avowed to be the dismemberment of our empire and the ruin of our influence in the world; now there are twenty-nine such schools. And, strangest of all, England, who once abolished monasteries and appropriated to national uses the ill-gotten gains of Rome, is now actually endowing Romanism in her empire to the extent of over a million of money per annum. The exact amount is 1,052,657 pounds.

Results even more serious have arisen from the dropping on the part of evangelical Christianity of its distinctive testimony against Romish doctrine and practice. An apostasy has taken place in the Reformed Church of England itself, and multitudes of its members, uninstructed in the true nature and history of the Church of Rome, and ignorant of the prophetic teachings of Scripture about it, have rejoiced in a return to many of the corruptions of doctrine and practice which their forefathers died to abolish. Our reformed faith is thus endangered both from without and from within, and it can be defended only by a resolute return to the true witness home by saints and martyrs of other days. We must learn afresh from Divine prophecy God’s estimate of the character of the Church of Rome if we would be moved afresh to be witnesses for Christ against this great apostasy. As Protestants, as Christians, as free men, as philanthropists, as those who are acquainted with the teachings of history, we deplore the existing state of things; we regard all these changes as a retrograde movement of the most dangerous character, and we feel constrained to renew the grand old PROTEST to which the world owes its modern acquisitions of liberty, knowledge, peace, and prosperity. We recognize it as a patent and undeniable fact, that the future of our race lies not with Papists, but with Protestants. Its leading nations this day are not Papal Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but Protestant Germany, England, and America. What has made the difference? The nations that embraced the Reformation movement of the sixteenth century have never since ceased to advance in political power, social prosperity, philanthropic enterprise, and general enlightenment; while the nations that refused it and held fast to the corruptions of Rome have as steadily retrograded in all these respects.

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

The present course of lectures is intended to arouse fresh attention to the great controversy between the Church of Rome and evangelical Churches. In this war the Roman army stands on one side, and Protestantism in one unbroken phalanx on the other. The regiments of Rome wear but one scarlet uniform, fly but one Papal flag, and use in their religious ceremonies but one dead language Latin; the Protestant army, on the other hand, consists of many divisions, clad in differing uniforms, flying different flags, and speaking different tongues. But, like the composite hosts of Germany in the struggle with France, they are all the stronger for their voluntary union; they can cordially join in the great struggle. The secondary denominational differences existing between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists are all lost sight of in their common conflict with Rome; and the sole issue is between those who hold to the old gospel of Christ, and those who teach another gospel which is not another.

Our subject in these lectures is Romanism and the Reformation from the standpoint of prophecy: that is, we propose to give you, not any merely human view of the subject, but the Divine view; not the opinions of the lecturer about it, but the teachings of prophets and apostles, the judgment of the only wise God as expressed in His sacred word, in this blessed Divine revelation which sheds its beams on every subject of interest to the people of God. It is a fact, that though the canon of Scripture was closed ages before Romanism began to exist, and fifteen centuries before the Reformation, yet it presents the Divine judgment as to both. The Bible records the past in its histories and the future in its prophecies, which are simply history written beforehand. It expresses moreover moral judgments as to the individuals it describes and the acts which it records, and it similarly expresses moral judgments respecting the individuals and actions which it predicts. It warned the Church against the wiles of Rome Papal, even from the days of Rome Pagan. John, the victim of Nero and Domitian, painted for posterity pictures of the martyrs of the Inquisition, and of the cruelties of tyrants more merciless than the Caesars.

In viewing this question from the standpoint of prophecy, consequently, our object is, not merely to trace the fulfillment of sacred prediction in the broad facts of history, as a proof of the inspiration of Scripture though our lectures must of course do that but it is even more to present the Divine view of the Roman Papal system, to show what infinite reprobation and abhorrence Scripture pours upon it, and what an awful doom it denounces against it. If we know what God thinks of any system, we know what we ought to think of it and how we ought to act towards it. Forewarned is forearmed. Had the youth of the last two or three generations of England been carefully instructed in the Scriptures bearing on this subject, we should not have lived to see our country troubled and in peril of dismemberment through Jesuit intrigues, nor our national Church divided against itself, to its own imminent danger, and one section of it relapsing into the apostasy from which the Reformation had delivered it.

Let me first define distinctly the three terms in our title Romanism, the Reformation, and Prophecy. Let me answer the questions: What is Romanism? What was the Reformation? What is Prophecy?

ROMANISM IS APOSTATE LATIN CHRISTIANITY

Not apostate Christianity merely, but apostate LATIN Christianity. The Greek Church, the Armenian Church, the Coptic Church are all apostate in greater or less degrees, and the Protestant Church itself has no small measure of apostasy in it; but it is of Romanism, or Latin Christianity, alone that we now speak, because it is the great and terrible power of evil so largely predicted by the prophet Daniel and by the Apostle John; it is the special apostasy which bulks most largely in prophecy, and it is the culmination of Christian apostasy. It includes all whose public worship is conducted in Latin and who own allegiance to the Pope of Rome.

Dean Milman’s history of the Church of Rome is called “The History of Latin Christianity.” Archbishop Trench speaks of Gregory the Great as “the last of the Latin Fathers, and the first in the modern sense of the popes,” and says he “did more than any other to set the Church forward on the new lines on which it must travel, to constitute a Latin Christianity with distinctive features of its own, such as broadly separate it from the Greek.”1 Romanism is this Latin Christianity become apostate.

II. The Reformation was A RETURN TO PRIMITIVE OR NON-APOSTATE CHRISTIANITY accomplished between three and four centuries ago in this country, in Germany, and some other countries of Europe. One feature of this great movement was the abandonment of the use of Latin in public worship, and the translation of the Scriptures into living language, so that all nations might read the word of God in their own tongue, and understand for themselves its sacred messages. The names of Luther, Zwingle, Erasmus, Tyndale, Knox, Calvin, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Hooper, and others, are associated with this “Reformation.”

III. And, in the third place, Prophecy is THE DIVINELY GIVEN MIRROR OF THE FUTURE. “Things not seen as yet” are reflected on its surface with more or less distinctness. They may be partially discerned beforehand, and clearly identified when the time of fulfillment comes. Thus the first advent of Christ was shown, though but as in a glass darkly, thousands of years before it took place; and so the tragic episodes of the siege of Jerusalem were presented to the mind of Moses ages before the city was even built. Romanism and the Reformation both lay afar in the distant future when Daniel and John foresaw their history; but their prophetic visions and writings reflect both one and the other with a distinctness and clearness which is the exact equivalent of their magnitude and importance in the history of the Church and of the world.

Bear in mind these three brief definitions:

1. Romanism is apostate Latin Christianity.

2. The Reformation was a return to primitive non-apostate Christianity accomplished three centuries ago.

3. Prophecy is the mirror of the future.

Let us next inquire, What is this Romanism, or Latin Christianity, as distinguished from Greek, or Protestant, or any other form of the faith of Christ? As to its doctrines and practices, we will answer this question later on in our course of lectures, quoting from its own acknowledged standards. For the present we must confine ourselves to a consideration of its history. But before I give you a brief outline of this, I may state that there are three distinct sets of prophecies of the rise, character, deeds, and doom of Romanism. The first is found in the book of Daniel, the second in the epistles of Paul, and the third in the letters and Apocalypse of John; and no one of these three is complete in itself. It is only by combining their separate features that we obtain the perfect portrait. Just as we cannot derive from one gospel a complete life of Christ, but in order to obtain this must take into account the records in the other three: so we cannot from one prophecy gather a correct account of antichrist; we must add to the particulars given in one those supplied by the other two. Some features are given in all three prophecies, just as the death and resurrection of Christ are given in all four gospels. Others are given in only two, and others are peculiar to one. As might be expected from the position and training of the prophet who was a statesman and a governor in Babylon, Daniel’s foreview presents the POLITICAL character and relations of Romanism. The Apostle Paul’s foreview, on the other hand, gives ECCLESIASTICAL character and relations of this power; and John’s prophecies, both in Revelation thirteen and seventeen, present the COMBINATION OF BOTH, the mutual relations of the Latin Church and the Roman State. He uses composite figures, one part of which represents the political aspect of Romanism as a temporal government, and the other its religious aspect as an ecclesiastical system.

In this lecture we deal with Daniel’s political foreview, with his predictions of the great power of evil which was revealed to him as destined to arise in the fourth empire, and which he describes in chapter 7 of his book. Before we consider this prophecy you must allow me briefly to recall a few well-known historical facts, that none can deny or question.

The last twenty-five centuries of human history that is, the story of the leading nations of the earth since the days of Nebuchadnezzar has been divided into two chronologically equal parts, each lasting for about twelve and a half centuries. During the first half of this period four great heathen empires succeeded each other in the rule of the then known earth the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Grecian, and Roman empires. They lasted from the eighth century before Christ to the fifth century of our era, and ended with the fall of the last emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus, A.D. 476. During the second half of this period no one great empire has ever ruled over the whole sphere dominated by these old pagan governments. Power has been more divided, and modern kingdoms have replaced ancient empires. A commonwealth of nations has for the last twelve hundred years existed in the territory once governed by old Rome, and no monarch has ever succeeded in subjecting them all to himself. This makes a broad distinction between ancient and modern times, and the dividing line is the fall of the old Roman empire, the break up of the last form of ancient civilization, the one which preceded our modern Christian civilization.

Rome itself that great and ancient city was founded about the beginning of the long period I have named, and has therefore been in existence for nearly two thousand six hundred years, though for many centuries it had but a local reputation. Gradually it rose to importance, and in the second century before Christ it attained supremacy in the earth. After that it was for about five hundred years the magnificent metropolis of the last and mightiest of the four great empires of antiquity, the seat of its government the very heart and center of the then known world. Nineveh and Babylon had each in its day been great metropolitan cities of wonderful size, wealth, and influence; but the realms they ruled were small compared to those over which Rome in its zenith of power exercised her imperial sway. She was for long ages, in the esteem of all civilized nations as well as in her own, “mistress of the world.” Her proud pre-eminence of position was based on an unequaled degree of military strength and power. It was a rule, not of right, but of might, and it subjected the world to itself. Remains still extant, not only in all parts of Europe, but in Africa and Asia, and above all in Rome itself, sufficiently attest the wide extent of the sway of Rome, the luxury of her princes and people, and the refinements of her civilization. Roman roads, Roman camps, Roman baths, Roman coins, statues, and remains of every kind abound even in our own little isle, some of which have been examined with interest by most of us. Roman laws, Roman literature, and the fundamental relation of the Latin language to the languages of modern Europe afford clearer evidences still of the universal, mighty, and long-enduring influence of the ancient masters of he world.

Up to the beginning of the fourth century of our era Rome was a pagan city, and the emperor was the high priest of its religion. The ruins of its old heathen shrines still adorn the city. The Pantheon, which is now a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs, was formerly a heathen temple dedicated to Cybele and all the gods of the ancient mythology. But in the fourth century of our era heathenism fell prostrate before that faith of Christ which for three centuries Rome had persecuted and sought to exterminate; the religion of Jesus of Nazareth overthrew the religion of Jupiter Olympius, and the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the creed of the world. Rome had become the seat of a Christian bishop before that date, and in the division and decay of the Roman empire which soon followed, this bishop, owing to his metropolitan position, became a person of great importance and the head of Latin Christianity. As other rulers passed away, and as the power of Rome waned before the hordes of Gothic and Vandal invaders, the Christian bishopric, sole survival of the old institutions in Rome, raised its head like a rocky reef in the midst of a wild expanse of roaring billows. It remained when all else failed around it. At first it had itself been a small, weak, new thing under the shadow of a great, mighty, and ancient power. But time brought changes, and gradually it became the stable, strong, and only ancient thing in the midst of the turbulent young Gothic nations into which the fragments of the old Roman dominions slowly crystallized. To these rude and recently evangelized people the Church of Rome was naturally the mother Church, and the Bishop of Rome the chief of Christian bishops. The tendency of the Latin episcopate thus enthroned in the old metropolis of the world, in the midst of ignorant, superstitious, and childlike Gothic nations, was to become first a monarchical, and then an imperial power. This tendency was deep and enduring; it worked for centuries, till at last it produced that singular blasphemous usurpation and tyrannical government which we call the Papacy.

The rise of this power was, like all great growths, gradual and slow. From the middle of the fifth century to the end of the thirteenth i, e. for between eight and nine hundred years it was steadily waxing greater and greater, rising higher and higher, reaching forth its branches more widely, and making more extravagant claims and pretensions. Time would of course fail me to trace the rise of ecclesiastical power in the Middle Ages to the monstrous proportions it assumed in the thirteenth century. After the conversion of Constantine, when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman world, the Church passed rapidly from a state of persecution, poverty, and distress to one of honor, wealth, and ease; and it degenerated as rapidly from its early purity. Covetousness and avarice came in like a flood, and ecclesiastical power became an object of eager ambition, even to ungodly men. The bishop was a wealthy, influential, worldly dignitary, instead of a humble Christian pastor. Opulence poured in upon the priesthood, alike from the fears and the affections of their converts; and their intellectual superiority over the barbarian nations had the effect of increasing still more their ascendancy. The time came when they alone retained any semblance of learning, or could prepare a treaty or write a document, or teach princes to read. By a variety of sordid frauds they contrived to secure to the Church immense wealth and an enormous share of the land. But they recognized their own subjection to the secular power, and respected mutually each other’s independence. Claims to supremacy over other bishops began however before long to be advanced by the bishops of Rome, sometimes on one ground and sometimes on another, but it was long before they were admitted.

Papal authority indeed made no great progress beyond the bounds of Italy until the end of the sixth century. At this period the celebrated Gregory I, a talented, active, and ambitious man, was Bishop of Rome. He stands at the meeting place of ancient and mediaeval history, and his influence had a marked effect on the growth of Latin Christianity. He exalted his own position very highly in his correspondence and intercourse with other bishops and with the sovereigns of western Europe, with whom he was in constant communication. Claims that had previously been only occasionally suggested were now systematically pressed and urged. He dwelt much on the power conferred on the bishops of Rome in the possession of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, which were committed to Peter and his successors. The Gothic nations were too ignorant to unravel the sophistries of this clever and determined priest, and they permitted him to assume a kind of oversight of their ecclesiastical matters.

His successor, Boniface III, carried these pretensions still higher. He was the last of the bishops of Rome and the first of the popes. In his days the claim to supremacy over all other bishops was, not only definitely made, but it was acknowledged by the secular power and confirmed by an imperial edict. The wicked usurper Phocas, to serve his own selfish purposes, conceded to Boniface III in A.D. 607 the headship over all the Churches of Christendom. A pillar is still standing in Rome which was erected in memory of this important concession. This was a tremendous elevation, the first upward step on the ladder that led the bishops of Rome from the humble pastorate of a local Church to the mightiest throne in Europe. But still all that was claimed or granted was simple episcopacy, though of a universal kind; no thought of secular government existed at this period. The matter however did not stop here. This supreme episcopal jurisdiction led to constant interferences of the Roman bishop in the affairs of the various nations of Christendom, and to ever-increasing pretensions to authority in matters secular as well as ecclesiastical, until five hundred years later, in A.D. 1073, Pope Gregory VII took a great stride in advance and established.

He was the first who claimed, as the representative of Deity, to be above all the kings of the world. This proud and self-exalting man strove, and strove successfully, not only to emancipate the spiritual power from all control by the State, not only to secure for it absolute independence, but, further, to subject the secular power of princes to the spiritual power of priests, and thus to establish at Rome in his own person and in the succession of the Roman pontiffs an absolute and supreme ruler of the world. Nor did he propound this new and startling doctrine as a theory only. With daring and audacity he excommunicated the German emperor Henry IV, released his subjects from allegiance to him, and forbade them to obey him as sovereign.2 He actually succeeded in exacting humiliating concessions from the emperor, and yet he subsequently bestowed his kingdom on another. This pope turned the bishopric of Rome into a universal and unlimited monarchy, and the sovereigns of Europe were unable to oppose his unprecedented usurpations. He established also an undisguised and irresistible despotism over the national Churches in other lands, by enacting that no bishop in the Catholic Church should enter on the exercise of his functions until the pope had continued his election, ar law of far-reaching and vast importance, by which perhaps more than by any other means Rome sustained for centuries her temporal power as well as her ecclesiastical influence.

Many of the constant quarrels between our own early English kings and the popes of Rome, as well as many similar feuds on the Continent, arose out of this flagrant usurpation of national rights and invasion of national liberties. It virtually took from the Churches the power to appoint their own bishops, and placed them under a foreign despotism. The clergy of all nations were by this time enslaved to the Papacy, and by obeying its bulls of excommunication and giving effect to its interdicts they placed in the pope’s hand a lever to move the world. During the interdict the churches in a country were all closed, bells silent, the dead unburied; no masses could be performed, no rites except those of baptism and extreme unction celebrated. This state of things was so dreadful to a superstitious age, that monarchs were obliged to yield lest their people should revolt. The result of every such interdict was an increase to the power of the Papacy, and they soon brought all refractory rulers in Europe to terms.

When the maxims of Gregory VII had been acted out for a century, and the power to trample on the necks of kings had come to be regarded by churchmen as an inherent right of the Papacy, the proud spirit of Papal aggression reached its climax. The period of climax may be dated from the pontificate of Innocent III, A.D. 1198. The leading objects which the Roman pontiffs had steadily pursued for centuries seemed at last attained: independent sovereignty, absolute supremacy over the Christian Church, and full control over the princes of Europe.

The historian Hallam says of this man: “He was formidable beyond all his predecessors, perhaps beyond all his successors. On every side the thunder of Rome broke over the heads of princes.”3 He excommunicated Sweno, king of Norway; threatened the king of Hungary to alter the succession; put the kingdom of Castile under an interdict; and when Philip Augustus of France refused at his bidding to take back his repudiated wife, Innocent did not hesitate to punish the whole nation by putting France also under the same dreaded penalty, until her king humbly submitted to the pope’s behest. King John of England and Philip II of Aragon were both constrained to resign their kingdoms and receive them back as spiritual fiefs from the Roman pontiff, who claimed also the right to decide the election of the emperors of Germany by his confirmation or veto. “The noonday of Papal dominion extends from the pontificate of Innocent III inclusively to that of Boniface VIII., or, in other words, throughout the thirteenth century. Rome inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name; she was once more the mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals.” 4

Innocent III claimed also the right to dispense with both civil and canon law when he pleased, and to decide cases by the plenitude of his own inherent power. He dispensed also with the obligation of promises made on oaths, undermining thus the force of contracts and treaties. The military power of the Papacy dates also from this man, as the crusades had left him in possession of an army. Systematic persecution of so-called heretics began also in this pontificate. The corruptions, cruelties, and assumptions of the Papacy had become so intolerable, that protests were making themselves heard in many quarters. It was felt these must be silenced at any cost, and a wholesale slaughter of heretics was commenced with a view to their extermination. The Inquisition was founded, the Albigenses and Waldenses were murderously persecuted, and superstition and tyranny were at their height. From this century Papal persecution of the witnesses for the truth never ceased until the final establishment of Protestantism at the end of the seventeenth century.

In A.D. 1294 Boniface VIII became pope, and by his superior audacity he threw into the shade even Innocent III. He deserves to be designated the most usurping of mankind, as witness his celebrated bull Unam Sanctam In this document the full claims of the Papacy come out. We have noted several ever- increasing stages of Papal assumption already, but now wereach the climax ù the claim which, if it were a true one, would abundantly justify all the rest; we reach the towering pinnacle and topmost peak of human self-exaltation. What was the claim of Boniface VIII? It was that

THE POPE REPRESENTS GOD ON EARTH.

As this claim is the most extraordinary and audacious ever made by mortal man, I will state it, not in my own words, but in the words of the highest Papal authority. In the summary of things concerning the dignity, authority, and infallibility of the pope, set forth by Boniface VIII, are these words: “The pope is of so great dignity and excellence, that he is not merely man, but as if God, and the vicar of God (non simplex homo, sed\par quasi Deus, et Dei vicarius). The pope alone is called most holy…Divine monarch, and supreme emperor, and king of kings..The pope is of so great dignity and power, that he constitutes one and the same tribunal with Christ (faciat unum et idem tribunal cum Christo), so that whatsoever the pope does seems to proceed from the mouth of God (ab ore Deo)..The pope is as God on earth (papa est QUASI DIAS IN TERRA).”

That which was claimed by Boniface VIII in the thirteenth century has been claimed ever since by a succession of popes down to Pius IX and Leo XIII in the nineteenth century. The pope speaks today as the vicar of Christ, as God’s vice-regent. The great ecumenical council of 1870 proclaimed him such, and declared him to be INFALLIBLE! A professor of history in the Roman university, writing on the council of 1870, uses the following language, which strikingly expresses the Papal ideal: “The pope is not a power among men to be venerated like another. But he is a power altogether Divine. He is the propounder and teacher of the law of the Lord in the whole universe; he is the supreme leader of the nations, to guide them in the way of eternal salvation; he is the common father and universal guardian of the whole human species in the name of God. The human species has been perfected in its natural qualities by Divine revelation and by the incarnation of the Word, and has been lifted up into a supernatural order, in which alone it can find its temporal and eternal felicity. The treasures of revelation, the treasures of truth, the treasures of righteousness, the treasures of supernatural graces upon earth, have been deposited by God in the hands of one man, who is the sole dispenser and keeper of them. The life-giving work of the Divine incarnation, work of wisdom, of love, of mercy, is ceaselessly continued in the ceaseless action of one man, thereto ordained by Providence. This man is the pope. This is evidently implied in his designation itself, the vicar of Christ. For if he holds the place of Christ upon earth, that means that he continues the work of Christ in the world, and is in respect of us what Christ would be if He were here below, Himself visibly governing the Church.” 5

Do you hear these words? Do you take them in? Do you grasp the thought which they express? Do you perceive the main idea and central principle of the Papacy? The pope is not simply man, but “as if God” and “the vicar of God,” as God on earth. No wonder the sentence is addressed to every pope on his coronation, “Know thou art the father of princes and kings, and the governor of the world”; no wonder that he is worshipped by cardinals and archbishops and bishops, by priests and monks and nuns innumerable, by all the millions of Catholics throughout the world; no wonder that he has dethroned monarchs and given away kingdoms, dispensed pardons and bestowed indulgences, canonized saints, remitted purgatorial pains, promulgated dogmas, and issued bulls and laws and extravagants, laid empires under interdicts, bestowed benedictions, and uttered anathemas!

Who is like unto him on earth? What are great men, philosophers, statesmen, conquerors, princes, kings, and even emperors, of the earth compared to H IM? Their glory is of the earth, earthy; his is from above, it is Divine! He is the representative of Christ, the Creator and Redeemer, the Lord of all. He is as Christ; he takes the place of Christ. He is as God, as God on earth. This blasphemous notion is the keystone of the entire Papal arch; it is the stupendous axis on which the whole Papal world has rotated for ages, and is rotating at this hour.

But to complete this very brief sketch of the history of Romanism, I may just remind you that the long and checkered decline of Papal dominion may be dated from the pontificate of Boniface VIII, from the end of the thirteenth century. Early in the next century Clement V took the strange and fatal step of removing the seat of Papal government from Rome to Avignon, where it remained for seventy years, greatly to the detriment of its authority and power. There it was to some extent dependent on the court of France, and it also lost the affections of Italy and the prestige of Rome. Then came the great schism which seriously weakened and discredited the Papacy. Rival popes ruled at Rome and Avignon. Corruption and rapacity, demoralization and disaffection rapidly increased, and there supervened that darkest hour of the night which precedes the dawn.

Ere long Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation, arose, and at last came the blessed movement itself, with Martin Luther and the rest of the reformers, which delivered Germany, England, and other lands from the Papal yoke, dividing Christendom into two camps, Romanist and Protestant. Vainly did Rome seek with frantic efforts to arrest or reverse this movement! Hecatombs of martyrs, oceans of blood, centuries of war could not stop it. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Rome boasted that not a single heretic could be found; now Christendom contains a hundred and fifty millions of those whom the Papacy calls heretics, and whom it would exterminate by fire and sword if it could. It did succeed in crushing out the Reformation movement in France, Spain and Italy by awful Inquisition tortures, by bloody massacres, by cruel wars, by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by the deeds of such men as Philip of Spain with his armada, and the Duke of Alva with his cruelties in the Netherlands. Rome recovered some of the ground she lost in the Reformation, and she still exercises spiritual power over a hundred and eighty millions of mankind. Though her temporal power was overthrown for a time in the French Revolution, and to the joy of Italy brought to an end in 1870, her claim to it is in no wise abated, nor her pretension that she has a right to rule the world. The religion of Rome has so disgusted the continental nations, that, knowing nothing better, they have drifted into practical infidelity, and with one consent they have to a large extent despoiled the Church of her revenues, secularized her property and her religious houses, and repudiated her interference in their respective governments.

For the last five hundred years the authority of the Papacy has been declining. “Slowly and silently receding from their claims to temporal power, the pontiffs hardly protect their dilapidated citadel from the revolutionary concussions of modern times, the rapacity of governments, and the growing aversion to ecclesiastical influence..Those who know what Rome has once been are best able to appreciate what she is. Those who have seen the thunderbolt in the hands of the Gregories and the Innocents will hardly be intimidated at the sallies of decrepitude, the impotent dart of Priam amid the crackling ruins of Troy.” So wrote Henry Hallam in the early part of this century; and while the fall of the temporal power has since taken place, and carried to low-water mark that steady ebb tide of Papal influence which he alleges, yet there has been during the last half century a revival of Romish influence in Protestant nations, which Hallam probably did not expect. I must not pause to estimate the causes or the importance of this revival here, but shall have occasion to allude to it again later on.

Let me now propose to you a puzzle. It is to condense into some brief, simple sentences, which could be read in a few minutes, an accurate, comprehensive, graphic summary of the thirteen hundred years of Papal history. Milman’s “History of Latin Christianity” is here on the table. It occupies nine octavo volumes, and would take weeks to read. Ranke’s “History of the Popes” is in three volumes, and does not cover the whole subject. D’Aubigne’s “History of the Reformation” is in five volumes, and takes up only one episode of the long story. The Papacy has existed for thirteen centuries, has had to do with forty or fifty generations of mankind in all the countries of Christendom. Its history is consequently extremely complicated and various. It embraces both secular and ecclesiastical matters, and has more or less to do with all that has happened in Europe since the fall of the old Roman empire. The time is long, the sphere is vast, the story exceedingly complex. I want you to tell it all, in outline at least, in a narrative that you could read in less than five minutes or write in ten. You must bring in every point of importance: the time and circumstances of the origin of the Papacy, its moral character, its political relations, its geographical seat, its self-exalting utterances and acts, its temporal sovereignty, and a comparison of the extent of its dominions with those of the other kingdoms of Europe; its blasphemous pretensions, its cruel and long-continued persecutions of God’s people, the duration of its dominion, its present decay, and the judgments that have overtaken it; and you must moreover add what you think its end is likely to be, and explain the relation of the whole history to the revealed plan of Divine providence.

You must get all this in not in the dry style of an annual Times summary of the events of the year ù but in an interesting, vivid, picturesque style, that will impress the facts on the memory, so that to forget them shall be impossible.

Can you do it? I might safely offer a prize of any amount to the person who can solve this puzzle and write this story as I have described. But hard, even impossible as it would be for you to do this, even if you perfectly knew the history of the last thirteen centuries, how infinitely impossible would it be if that history lay in the unknown and inscrutable future, instead of in the past and present! If no eye had seen, nor ear heard it; if it was an untraversed continent, an unseen world, a matter for the evolution of the ages yet to come ù who then could tell the story at all, much less in brief?. Now this is precisely what the prophet Daniel, by inspiration of the omniscient and eternal God, has done. He told the whole story of the Papacy twenty-five centuries ago. He omitted none of the points I have enumerated, and yet the prophecy only occupies seventeen verses of a chapter which can be read slowly and impressively in less than five minutes. This is because it was written in the only language in which it is possible thus to compress multum in parvo, the ancient language of hieroglyphics. God revealed the future to Daniel by a vision in which he saw, not the events, but the living, moving, speaking hieroglyphics of the events. These Daniel simply describes, and his description of them constitutes the prophecy written in the seventh chapter of his book. Our consideration of this remarkable prediction we must however postpone for the present, as we have already claimed your attention long enough for one lecture.

Allow me to commence this lecture by reading to you Daniel’s description of the divinely designed hieroglyph by which the history of Rome was prefigured. He has previously described the hieroglyphics of the Babylonian, Persian, and Grecian empires, and then he says:

After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns. I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things. I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened. I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake: I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time. I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me. I came near unto one of them that stood by, and asked him the truth of all this. So he told me, and made me know the interpretation of the things. These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth. But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever. Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron, and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with his feet; And of the ten horns that were in his head, and of the other which came up, and before whom three fell; even of that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows. I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them; Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom. Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces. And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings. And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time. But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end. And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

In these verses you have the entire story of the Papacy, and what is more, you have its future as well as its past, the judgment of God as to its moral character and deserts.

And how vivid the coloring, how graphic the picture! I wish I could paint, or, better still, display in action before your eyes, such a dreadful and terrible and exceedingly strong wild beast, with its brazen claws and iron teeth, and ravening, ferocious nature, with its ten horns and its strange, head-like “little horn,” able to see and speak and blaspheme the Almighty, so as at last to bring down destruction on the beast itself! I wish I could let you watch it ù rending and tearing its enemies, breaking their bones in pieces, devouring their flesh, and in wanton, fierce ferocity stamping on and trampling with its brazen-clawed feet what it cannot consume! If you had learned the ABC of the language of hieroglyphics you would at once recognize that such creatures as this are figures of godless empires, kingdoms which are brutal in their ignorance of God, in their absence of self-control, in their bestial instincts; which love bloodshed and are reckless of human agony, selfish, terrible, cruel, mighty. They represent and recall proud military heroes, like Julius Caesar, who trample down all that oppose them; cruel despots, who oppress their fellows; reckless conquerors like Tamerlane and Napoleon, to whom the slaughter of millions of mankind was a matter of no moment. This is the generic signification of all such hieroglyphs.

But we are not left to guess the meaning and application of this particular monster. The symbol has a Divine interpretation. “The fourth beast,” we read, “shall be the fourth kingdom upon the earth.” That, beyond all question, was Rome, as all historians agree ù the fourth and last of the great universal empires of antiquity. The monster represents Rome, her whole existence as a supreme or ruling power, after the fall of the Greek or Macedonian beast before her attacks (197 B.C.). It represents therefore the history of Rome for over 2,000 years in the past, and on into a time still future; for, be it well noted, this beast ravages and rules, and his characteristic little horn blasphemes and boasts, right up to the point when empires like to wild beasts come to an end, and “the Son of man and the saints of the Most High take the kingdom and possess it for ever.”

It is important that we should clearly grasp one great historical fact; i.e. the rule of Rome has never, since it first commenced, ceased to exist, save once, for a very brief period during the Gothic invasions. It has changed in character, as we have seen, but it has continued. Rome ruled the known world at the first advent of Christ, and still rules hundreds of millions of mankind, and will continue so to do right up till the second advent of Christ. So this prophecy teaches; for not until the Son of man takes the dominion of the earth, and establishes a kingdom that shall never pass away, is the monster representing Roman rule destroyed. The rule of Rome, we repeat, has never ceased. It was a secular pagan power for five or six centuries; it has been an ecclesiastical and apostate Christian power ever since, that is to say, for twelve or thirteen centuries. There lay a brief period between these two main stages, during which professing Christian emperors ruled from Rome, followed by an interval when, for a time, it seemed as if the great city had received a fatal blow from her Gothic captors. It seemed so; but it was not so, for the word of God cannot be broken. The rule of Rome revived in a new form, and was as real under the popes of the thirteenth century as it had been under the Caesars of the first. It was as oppressive, cruel, and bloody under Innocent III. as it had been under Nero and Domitian. The reality was the same, though the forms had changed. The Caesars did not persecute the witnesses of Jesus more severely and bitterly than did the popes; Diocletian did not destroy the saints or oppose the gospel more than did the Inquisition of Papal days. Rome is one and the same all through, both locally and morally. One dreadful wild beast represents her, though the symbol, like the history it prefigures, has two parts. There was the undivided stage, and there has been the tenfold stage. The one is Rome pagan, the other Rome Papal; the one is the old empire, the other the modern pontificate; the one is the empire of the Caesars, the other is the Roman Papacy.

I speak broadly, omitting all detail for the present. We shall find more of that when we come by- and-by to John’s later foreview. Daniel’s was a distant view in the days of Belshazzar, too distant altogether for detail. No artist paints the sheep on the hillside if the hill be fifty miles off; he may sketch its bold outline, but he omits minor detail. So Daniel’s distant foreview, dating from 2,500 years ago, shows the two great sections of Roman history ù the undivided military empire, followed by the commonwealth of Papal Christendom, the latter as truly Latin in character as the former; and he shows the end of Rome at the second advent of Christ. But he refrains from encumbering his striking sketch with confusing political details. He does not fail however to delineate fully the moral and religious features of the power ruling from Rome during the second half of the story, the power symbolized by the proud, intelligent, blasphemous, head-like “little horn” of the Roman beast. To this he devotes, on the contrary, the greater part of the prophecy; and I must ask you now carefully to note the various points that prove this horn to be a marvelous prophetic symbol or hieroglyph of the Roman Papacy, fitting it as one of Chubb’s keys fits the lock for which it is made, perfectly and in every part, while it refuses absolutely to adapt itself to any other.

The main points in the nature, character, and actings of this “little horn,” which we must note in order to discover the power intended, are these:

1. Its place: within the body of the fourth empire.

2. The period of its origin: soon after the division of the Roman territory into ten kingdoms.

3. Its nature: different from the other kingdoms, though in some respects like them. It was a horn, but with eyes and mouth. It would be a kingdom like the rest, a monarchy; but its kings would be overseers or bishops and prophets.

4. Its moral character: boastful and blasphemous; great words spoken against the Most High.

5. Its lawlessness: it would claim authority over times and laws.

6. Its opposition to the saints: it would be a persecuting power, and that for so long a period that it would wear out the saints of the Most High, who would be given into its hand for a time.

7. Its duration: “time, times and a half,” or 1260 years.

8. Its doom: it would suffer the loss of its dominion before it was itself destroyed. “They shall take away its dominion, to consume and destroy it to the end.”

Here are eight different and perfectly tangible features. If they all meet in one great reality, if we find them all characterizing one and the same power, can we question that is the power intended? They do all meet in the Roman Papacy, whose history I have just briefly recalled, and we are therefore bold to say it is the great and evil reality predicted. A few words on each of these points, to convince you that this is the case.

1. Its place. No one can question that the Papacy is a Roman, as distinguished from a Greek or an oriental, power. Its seat is the seven-hilled city; its tongue is the Latin language of Caesar and of Pliny and of Tacitus; its Church is the Church of Rome, and is the only Church that is or ever has been named from a city. Others have been named from countries or from men; the Papal Church alone bears the name of a city, and that city is Rome. The Papacy fulfills the first condition therefore.

2. Its time. We have shown that the last Bishop of Rome and the first pope was Boniface III., A.D. 607. Now the western empire of Rome came to an end with the fall of Romulus Augustulus, A.D. 476; that is, 130 years earlier. During that time the ten kingdoms were forming in the body of the old empire, and during that time the simple pastor of the Church was transformed into a pope. The little horn grew up among the ten. The Papacy developed synchronously with the Gothic kingdoms.

3. Its nature. The power symbolized by the little horn is of course a kingdom, like all the other ten; but it is not merely this. It is “diverse,” or different from all the other ruling dynasties with which it is associated. It is a horn of the wild beast, but it has human eyes and a human voice, denoting its pretensions to be a seer, or prophet, and a teacher. It takes the oversight of all the ten, it is an overseer or bishop, and it has “a mouth speaking great things.” Its paramount influence depends, not on its mere material power, for it is small as a kingdom, a “little horn,” but on its religious pretensions. Does not this exactly portray the Papacy? Was it not diverse or different from all the Gothic kingdoms amid which it existed? Was it a mere kingdom? Nay, but a spiritual reign over the hearts and minds as well as the bodies of men a reign established by means, not of material weapons, but of spiritual pretensions. It was founded not on force, but on falsehood and fraud, and the superstitious fears of the half-civilized and ignorant Gothic kingdoms.

The popedom has always been eager to proclaim its own diversity from all other kingdoms. It claims “a princedom more perfect than every human princedom,” surpassing them “as far as the light of the sun exceeds that of the moon.” It arrogates to itself a character as superior to secular kingdoms as man to the irrational beasts. Its laws are made not with the best human wisdom; but auctoritate, scientia, ac plenitudine, with fullness of Divine knowledge and the fullness of apostolic power. Is not the Papacy sufficiently diverse from all the rest of the kingdoms of western Europe to identify it as the little horn? What other ruling monarch of Christendom ever pretended to apostolic authority, or ruled men in the name of God? Does the pope dress in royal robes? Nay, but in priestly garments. Does he wear a crown? Nay, but a triple tiara, to show that he reigns in heaven, earth, and hell? Does he wield a scepter? Nay, but a crosier or crook, to show that he is the good shepherd of the Church. Do his subjects kiss his hand? Nay, but his toe! Verily this power is “diverse” from the rest, both in great things and little. It is small in size, gigantic in its pretensions. It is, or was for centuries, one among many temporal kingdoms in Europe. It is the only one which claims a spiritual authority and universal dominion.

4. Its moral character. The salient feature here is the “mouth speaking very great things.” Great words spoken against the Most High, and “a look more stout than his fellows.” Audacious pride and bold blasphemy must characterize the power that fulfills this point of the symbol.

We ask then, Has the Papacy exhibited this mark also? Time would fail me to quote to you verbatim its great words, its boastful self-glorifications, and its outrageous blasphemies against God! You will find pages of them quoted in my work on “The Approaching End of the Age,” and volumes filled with them exist, for Papal documents consist of little else. The Papal claims are so grotesque in their pride and self- exaltation, that they almost produce a sense of the comic, and that feeling of pitying contempt with which one would watch a frog trying to swell itself to the size of an ox! I must however mention some of the claims contained in these “great words,” which will show you the nature of Papal blasphemies. It is claimed, for instance, that “no laws made contrary to the canons and decrees of Roman prelates have any force,” that “the tribunals of all kings are subject to the priests,” that “no man may act against the discipline of the Roman Church,” that “the Papal decrees or decretal epistles are to be numbered among the canonical Scriptures,” and not only so, but that the Scriptures themselves are to be received only “because a judgment of holy Pope Innocent was published for receiving them.” It is claimed that “emperors ought to obey, and not rule over pontiffs”; that even an awfully wicked pope, who is a “slave of hell,” may not be rebuked by mortal man, because “he is himself to judge all men and to be judged by none,” and “since he was styled God by the pious prince Constantine, it is manifest that God cannot be judged by man”! They claim that no law, not even their own canon laws, can bind the popes; but that just as Christ, being maker of all laws and ordinances, could violate the law of the Sabbath, because He was Lord also of the Sabbath, so popes can dispense with any law, to show they are above all law!

It is claimed that the chair of St. Peter, the see of Rome, is “made the head of the world”; that it is not to be subject to any man, “since by the Divine mouth it is exalted above all.” In the canon laws the Roman pontiff is described as “our Lord God the pope,” and said to be “neither God nor man, but both.” But the climax of assumption, the keystone of the arch of Papal pretension, is probably to be found in the “extravagant” of Boniface VIII., the Unam Sanctam, which runs thus: “All the faithful of Christ by necessity of salvation are subject to the Roman pontiff, who judges all men, but is judged by no one.” “This authority is not human, but rather Divine..Therefore we declare, assert, define, and pronounce, that to be subject to the Roman pontiff is to every human creature altogether necessary for salvation.”

All these claims were incessantly and universally urged all down the centuries by the popes of Rome, and are still advanced, as boldly as ever, in official decretals, bulls, extravagants, decisions of canonists, sentences of judges, books, catechisms, sermons, and treatises of all kinds. There is no mistaking what they amount to. The pope claims Divine inspiration, his words are to be received as the words of God; no laws can bind him, he is supreme over all; the very Scriptures derive their authority from him; implicit obedience to him is the only way of salvation. He is exalted above all, supreme over all nations, kings, emperors, princes, bishops, archbishops, Churches, over all the world; he is as God on earth, and as such to be worshipped and obeyed. Let me quote you from his own lips some of the great words of the little horn. The following language affords a mere sample of thousands of such Papal blasphemies.

The greatness of priesthood began in Melchisedek, was solemnized in Aaron, continued in the children of Aaron, perfected in Christ, represented in Peter, exalted in the universal jurisdiction, and manifested in the pope. So that through this pre-eminence of my priesthood, having all things subject to me, it may seem well verified in me, that was spoken of Christ, “Thou has subdued all things under His feet, sheep and oxen, and all cattle of the field, the birds of heaven, and fish of the sea,” etc.: where it is to be noted that by oxen, Jews and heretics, by cattle of the field, pagans be signified..by sheep and all cattle are meant all Christian men, both great and less, whether they be emperors, princes, prelates, or others; by birds of the air you may understand angels and potentates of heaven, who be all subject to me, in that I am greater than the angels, and that in four things, as afore declared, and have power to bind and loose in heaven, and to give heaven to them that fight in my wars; lastly, by the fishes of the sea, are signified the souls departed, in pain or in purgatory.

All the earth is my diocese, and I am the ordinary of all men, having the authority of the King of all kings upon subjects. I am all in all and above all, so that God Himself and I, the vicar of God, have but one consistory, and I am able to do almost all that God can do. In all things that I list, my will is to stand for reason; for I am able by the law to dispense above the law, and of wrong to make justice in correcting laws and changing them..Wherefore if those things that I do be said not to be done of man, but of God, what can you make me but God? Again, if prelates of the Church be called and counted of Constantine for gods, I then, being above all prelates, seem by this reason to be above all gods. Wherefore no marvel if it be in my power to change time and times, to alter and abrogate laws, to dispense with all things, yea, with the precepts of Christ; for where Christ biddeth Peter put up his sword, and admonishes His disciples not to use any outward force in revenging themselves, do not I, Pope Nicholas, writing to the bishops of France, exhort them to draw out their material swords? And whereas Christ was present Himself at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, do not I, Pope Martin, in my distinction, inhibit the spiritual clergy to be present at marriage feasts, and also to marry? Moreover where Christ biddeth us lend without hope of gain, do not I, Pope Martin, give dispensation for the same? What should I speak of murder, making it to be no murder or homicide to slay them that be excommunicated? Likewise against the law of nature, item against the apostles, also against the canons of the apostles, I can and do dispense; for where they in their canon command a priest for fornication to be deposed, I, through the authority of Sylvester, do alter the rigor of that constitution, considering the minds and bodies also of men to be weaker than they were then.

After that I have now sufficiently declared my power in earth, in heaven, in purgatory, how great it is, and what is the fullness thereof in binding, loosing, commanding, permitting, electing, confirming, disposing, dispensing, doing, and undoing, etc., I will speak now a little of my riches and of my great possessions, that every man may see by my wealth, and abundance of all things, rents, tithes, tributes, my silks, my purple miters, crowns, gold, silver, pearls and gems, lands and lordships. For to me pertaineth first the imperial city of Rome, the palace of Lateran; the kingdom of Sicily is proper to me; Apulia and Capua be mine. Also the kingdom of England and Ireland, be they not, or ought they not to be, tributaries to me? To these I adjoin also, besides other provinces and countries, both in the occident and orient, from the north to the south, these dominions by name. [Here follows a long list.] What should I speak here of my daily revenues, of my firstfruits, annats, palls, indulgences, bulls, confessionals, indults and rescripts, testaments, dispensations, privileges, elections, prebends, religious houses, and such like, which come to no small mass of money?..Whereby what vantage cometh to my coffers it may partly be conjectured..But what should I speak of Germany, which the whole world is my diocese, as my canonists do say, and all men are bound to believe; except they will imagine (as the Manichees do) two beginnings, which is false and heretical? For Moses saith, In the beginning God made heaven and earth; and not, In the beginnings. Wherefore, as I began, so I conclude, commanding, declaring, and pronouncing, to stand upon necessity of salvation, for every human creature to be subject to me (Foxe: “Acts and Monuments,” vol. 4., p. 145).

It is futile to allege that the Papacy does not make these claims and speak these great words against God, but in His name and as His representative. The answer is patent. This prophecy foretells what the power predicted would do, not what it would profess to do. Does the Papacy give God the glory, or does it glorify itself? Facts cannot be set aside by false pretensions. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. The head of a Christian Church would not overtly array himself against Christ; if he does so, it will be under semblance of serving Him.1

The Papacy has abundantly branded on her own brow this particular of the prophecy ù the boastful, blasphemous claim to Divine authority and absolute dominion. It has assumed Divine attributes, and even the very name of God, and on the strength of that name claimed to be above all human judgment.

5. Lawlessness was the next feature we noted in the little horn. We have given above some specimens of the Papal claim to set aside all laws Divine and human.

The pope has also annulled the only surviving law of paradise, confirmed by the words of Christ. The Lord ordained, “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” The pope ordains, “We decide also that, according to the sacred canons, the marriages contracted by priests and deacons be dissolved, and the parties brought to do penance.” The Papacy has further annulled the second commandment, given on the mount by the lips of God ù in theory, by the childish and false distinction between heathen idols and Christian images; and in practice, by hiding it from the people, and blotting it out from the catechisms of general instruction. The pope has further annulled the main laws of the gospel. He forbids the cup to the laity, although the Lord Himself has commanded, “Drink ye all of it.” He forbids the people of Christ, in general, to use the word of God in their own tongue; though Christ Himself has charged them, “Search the Scriptures.” He forbids the laity to reason or converse on the doctrines of the gospel; though St. Peter has commanded them, “Be ye ready to give a reason of the hope that is in you.” The pope, finally, sanctions the invocation of saints and angels: though St. Paul has warned us, “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels”; though St. John has renewed the charge to the disciples of Christ, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols”; and an angel from heaven renews the caution, in his words to the same holy apostle, “See thou do it not, for I am thy fellow servant; worship God” (Birks, “First Two Visions of Daniel,” pp. 258, 259).

6. Systematic and long continued persecution of the saints is one of the most marked features of the little horn of the prophecy. It is predicted that he should “wear out the saints of the Most High.” His first great characteristic is blasphemous opposition to GOD; his next salient feature is oppressive cruelty towards men: and just as Christ allowed His people to suffer ten persecutions under the pagan emperors of Rome, so he allowed His faithful witnesses to be worn out by the cruelties of Papal Rome. “They shall be given into his hand.” The Church has to tread in the footsteps of Christ Himself, who resisted unto blood striving against sin, and was put to death by the power of Rome. She is called to the fellowship of His sufferings; and while they secured the salvation of our race, hers have not been unfruitful, for the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

But we must compare the facts of history with the prediction of prophecy on this point, to see how deeply this mark is engraved on the Papacy as upon no other power that has ever existed in the earth. That the Church of Rome and her Papal head have persecuted largely and long, none can pretend to deny; in fact, so far from denying it, Rome glories in it, and regards it as one of her greatest merits. Other nations have now abandoned as unsound “the bloody tenet of persecution.” Rome retains it still, approves it theoretically, and would carry it out as vigorously as ever practically, if she could. Other powers have persecuted to a small extent and occasionally, in the past, but never systematically and by law throughout ages. All but Rome now hold religious liberty to be an inherent right of man. Rome has, on the other hand, persecuted on principle, and steadily from the seventh century right on to the French Revolution and to some extent almost to the present time. She does so still in the secret recesses of her nunneries and monasteries, under the name of penance. Why else does she require shops for the sale of instruments of bodily torture, such as exist this day in London?

Rome’s contention is, not that she does not persecute, but only that she does not persecute saints. She punishes heretics ù a very different thing. The first would be wicked, the last she esteems laudable. In the Rhemish New Testament there is a note on the words “drunken with the blood of saints,” which runs as follows: “Protestants foolishly expound this of Rome, because heretics are there put to death. But their blood is not called the blood of saints, any more than the blood of thieves or man-killers, or other malefactors; and for the shedding of it no commonwealth shall give account.” This is clear. Rome approves the murder of “heretics,” and fully admits that she practices her principles.

The question therefore becomes this, Are those whom Rome calls “heretics” the same as those whom Daniel calls “saints”? If so, the identification of the Papacy is as complete in this respect as in all the previous points. In order to arrive at an answer to this question, let us take Rome’s own definition of a heretic. The following statements are from authorized documents, laws, and decrees of the Papacy, dating from the time of Pope Pelagius in the sixth century, twelve hundred years ago. “Schism is an evil. Whoever is separated from the apostolic see is doubtless in schism. Do then what we often exhort. Take pains that they who presume to commit this sin be brought into custody..Do not hesitate to compress men of this kind, and if he despise this, let him be crushed by the public powers.” This, it will be observed, makes a want of perfect submission to the pope, even though no false doctrine or evil practice be alleged, a ground for persecution. Pope Damasus, whose election to the pontificate was secured by a hundred and thirty-seven murders, authorizes persecution of those who speak against any of the holy canons, and adds, “It is permitted neither to think nor to speak differently from the Roman Church.” This is one of the canons which it is blasphemy to violate; and he who ventures to differ, even in thought, on any point whatever from the Roman Church is therefore a heretic. Hundreds of decisions on detailed examples of heresy are all summed up in this one. The Roman decrees everywhere supply similar definitions. Whatever is short of absolute, unconditional surrender of all freedom of act or word, or even of thought and conscience, is heresy. Every evangelical Christian in the world is therefore, according to Romanist canons, a heretic, and as such liable to “punishment.” And moreover Rome frankly admits that it is only where she cannot in the nature of things carry out her ecclesiastical discipline that she is justified in refraining from persecution. The Papacy teaches all her adherents that it is a sacred duty to exterminate heresy. From age to age it has sought to crush out all opposition to its own dogmas and corruptions, and Papal edicts for persecution are innumerable. The fourth Lateran Council issued a canon on the subject, which subsequently became an awful instrument of cruelty.

For long ages it was held and taught universally that whoever fell fighting against heretics had merited heaven. Urban II. issued a decree, acted on, alas! to this day in Ireland, that the murder of heretics was excusable. “We do not count them murderers who, burning with the zeal of their Catholic mother against the excommunicate, may happen to have slain some of them.” If not absolutely murdered, heretics might be ill treated ad libitum, according to an ordinance of Gregory IX., who writes to the Archbishop of Milan: “Let those understand themselves to be absolved the debt of fidelity, homage, and all manner of service, who were bound by any compact, however firmly ratified, to those who have fallen into heresy.” Systematic persecution and extermination of heretics among their subjects was constantly enjoined on kings and emperors; such were required solemnly to swear on their coronation that they would, according to their power, faithfully render their service to the pope. If they neglected to do it, the sovereign pontiff would declare the vassals free and give their realms to rigid Papists who would more effectually persecute. If monarchs became heretics themselves, they were to be deposed and anathematized. Thus Pius V. “issued a bull for the damnation and excommunication of Queen Elizabeth and her adherents,” cutting her off from “the unity of the body of Christ,” depriving her of her crown and kingdom, and pronouncing a curse on her and on all who continued to obey her.

The laws of the Papacy on this subject increase in malignity from the beginning down to modern times. Bellarmine argues for the necessity of burning heretics, a practice which Luther had asserted to be contrary to the Spirit of God. He says: “Experience teaches that there is no other remedy; for the Church has proceeded by slow steps, and tried all remedies. First, she only excommunicated. Then she added a fine of money, and afterwards exile. Lastly, she was compelled to come to the punishment of death. For heretics despise excommunication, and say that those lightnings are cold. If you threaten a fine of money, they neither fear God nor regard men, knowing that fools will not be wanting to believe in them, and by whom they may be sustained. If you shut them in prison, or send them into exile, they corrupt those near to them with their words, and those at a distance with their books. Therefore the only remedy is, to send them betimes into their own place.”

Under these bloody maxims those persecutions were carried on, from the eleventh and twelfth centuries almost to the present day, which stand out on the page of history. After a signal of open martyrdom had been given in the canons of Orleans, there followed the extirpation of the Albigenses under the form of a crusade, the establishment of the Inquisition, the cruel attempts to extinguish the Waldenses, the martyrdom of the Lollards, the cruel wars to exterminate the Bohemians, the burning of Huss and Jerome, and multitudes of other confessors, before the Reformation; and afterwards the ferocious cruelties practiced in the Netherlands, the martyrdom of Queen Mary’s reign, the extinction, by fire and sword, of the Reformation in Spain and Italy, by fraud and open persecution in Poland, the massacre of Bartholemew, the persecutions of the Huguenots by the League, the extirpation of the Vaudois, and all the cruelties and perjuries connected with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. These are the more open and conspicuous facts which explain the prophecy, besides the slow and secret murders of the holy tribunal of the Inquisition” (Birks: “First Two Visions of Daniel,” pp. 248,249).

A Romanist writer, who deplored the persecuting policy of his Church ù Professor Rossetti ù writes: It makes the heart of a true Christian bleed to think of this fatal error of the Latin Church, which by persecuting others laid the foundation of her own irreparable ruin. That the opinions held by these so-called heretics were most injurious to the Church of Rome cannot be denied, but the means taken to destroy them were, of all others, the most likely to strengthen them, and render them more deeply rooted. Daniel and St. John foretold that Satan’s delegate would use horrid cruelties, and inundate Babylon with the blood of Christ’s martyrs; and the pope, to prove that he was not that delegate, did use horrid cruelties, and cause Rome to overflow with the purest of Christian blood!

So Sismondi, the historian writes: To maintain unity of belief the Church had recourse to the expedient of burning all those who separated themselves from her; but although for two hundred years the fires were never quenched, still every day saw Romanists abjuring the faith of their fathers and embracing the religion which often guided them to the stake. In vain Gregory IX., in A.D. 1231, put to death every heretic whom he found concealed in Rome. His own letters show that the heretics only increased in numbers.

It must never be forgotten that all Rome’s ordinances against heresy, all its statutes of persecution, remain in its canon law unabrogated, unchanged, and as the Papacy is infallible in its own esteem ù unchangeable, “irreformable.” Its present disuse of persecution practically is the result of the heavy judgments which have, since the Reformation, and especially since the French Revolution, overtaken it. It has now no army and no Inquisition of its own, nor is any single kingdom in Europe willing any longer to act as its executioner. It lacks the power ù it utterly lacks the power ù to persecute directly or indirectly. It can only stir up sedition and revolt in Protestant countries, and thus endeavor to injure and weaken Protestant powers, as it is doing today in Ireland and in the United States. It is too weak politically to defy modern society by reintroducing mediaeval tortures, massacres, religious crusades, and the auto da fe. But it is as willing as ever, and awaits the opportunity only. As a drunkard may retain his vicious appetite when he has no longer the means of gratifying it, so Rome long drunken with the blood of saints ù is restrained from further maddening and debasing draughts of her dreadful beverage by nothing but inability to procure them. The Papacy, by justifying as righteous all the horrible persecutions of the past, attests her readiness to renew them whenever the opportunity may serve.

As I shall have to recur to this subject when treating of St. John’s foreview of Romanism, I will add nothing further on this point. I have said enough to show, that this sixth mark of the little horn attaches most distinctly to the Papacy, and indicates it alone among all the powers that have ever held sway on the Roman earth. It has martyred by millions the saints of God, the best and holiest of men. Its persecuting edicts range over the entire period of its existence; the present pope has endorsed them by his approval of the syllabus of Pius IX., and he threw over them the mantle of infallibility.

7. Its duration. A certain definite period is assigned to the rule of the little horn. That period is expressed in symbolic language, harmonious with the symbolic or hieroglyphic character of the whole prophecy. It is “time, times and a half,” or “1,260 days.” This is a miniature symbol of the empire, and the little horn of the Papacy of Rome. Scripture elsewhere gives us the scale on which it is to be enlarged, “a year for a day.” It means therefore 1,260 years. The political supremacy and the persecuting power of the see of Rome were to last for this period and no longer. We have shown you that the popedom dates from the beginning of the seventh century. Twelve and a half centuries added brings us to the end of the nineteenth century ù in other words, to the days we live in, and in which Rome has ceased to be governed by its popes and has become the capital of the kings of Italy. I have no time to expound this chronological point fully to you this evening. If you wish to study it, you will find it carefully and exactly treated in my recent work, “Light for the Last Days.” But it leads me to the final point in this identification.

8. The doom of the predicted power. What is the end of this symbolic horn? “They shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it to the end.” “The beast was slain, and his body destroyed and given to the burning flame.” This last clause of prophecy is of course not yet fully accomplished, as it is the coming of the Son of man in the clouds of heaven that brings about the final consummation (v. 13). Speculations about the future we leave to futurists, and therefore it might at first sight seem as if we ought to say nothing on this point of the prophecy. But it is not so.

This doom consists clearly of two parts: first, the consuming and destroying to the end; and then the end itself, symbolized by the slaughter of the beast, the committal of his body to the burning flame. Now the first part of this doom is fulfilling, and has been fulfilling ever since the Reformation, and especially ever since the French revolution; though the second part is still future. We ask, Has there not been going on for the last few centuries a process by which the once mighty power of the Papacy has been sensibly consumed ù a weakening process, analogous to consumption in the human frame ù a wasting decay tending to extinction?

It must be borne in mind that this prophecy of Daniel takes up the political aspect of the great antichrist, not his religious character. It views him as a monarch of the Roman world, not as a bishop of the Christian Church. We come to that aspect of his career presently, when we take up Paul’s foreview. Here it is one horn among ten, one kingdom among ten Latin kingdoms, though in some senses ruling over them all. The question is, Has there not been such a decay and diminution of Papal sovereignty, such a wasting and weakening of Papal power, such a loss of revenue, influence, and territory, as may be fairly said to fulfill this prediction?

Now I mentioned some facts at the beginning of this lecture which indicate a very considerable growth of Papal influence in England during the last fifty years. Many so fix their gaze on these facts as to get an impression that Romanism is gaining ground in the world generally. This is very far from being the case, as a glance at the comparative positions of the Papacy in the thirteenth century and the two following ones, with its position now in the nineteenth, will show. Then Rome actually exercised the “dominion” which she can now only claim. Then, with the consent of his barons, the king of England agreed to hold his kingdom as the pope’s feudatory, and to pay him annually one hundred thousand marks as an acknowledgment. Can you imagine Queen Victoria and the lords and commons of England agreeing to that sort of thing now? Then the great and valiant emperor of Germany stood for three winter days and nights barefoot in the courtyard of “His Holiness,” waiting for the honor of an audience, in which he might beg the pope’s pardon for having acted as an independent monarch! Can you imagine the Kaiser Wilhelm, of Berlin, doing that now? Then wherever he pleased the pope could suspend all the observances of religion, even to the burial of the dead and the marriage of the living, in any country with which he was offended. In what kingdom could he do so now? Long after his absolute dominion was gone, the pope had what were called concordats with different nations, in which it was agreed that, in return for the pope’s spiritual support, they would uphold him when the last vestige of his temporal dominion was violently taken away.

Direct political power he now has none, though his position as head of the apostate Roman Church gives him still immense indirect influence. The ten kings as such have entirely shaken off his yoke, and he himself has no longer any sovereign jurisdiction. His territories are taken away, as well as his dominion. The wealth, which was once enormous, is equally gone; the immense landed estates belonging to the convents are, for the most part, confiscated to secular uses. But the greatest fact of all in this connection is the number of those who have rejected his religious pretension. At the Lateran Council, in 1513, after all the so-called heretics had been silenced by fire and sword, an orator, addressing the pope, said, “The whole body of Christendom is now subject to one head, even to thee; no one now opposes, no one now objects.” Today there are about a hundred and fifty million Protestants in the world! Has not the dominion of the Papacy been consumed? Can a few thousand perverts in England weigh much against this stupendous fact, that 150,000,000 of mankind are no more subject to the Pope of Rome than to the Lama of Tibet? When we take into account all the twelve centuries of Papal history, and remember that this emancipation belongs to the last three only, we must admit that the predicted consumption has made considerable progress. The political dominion and the temporal possessions are gone; the Papacy is no longer a kingdom, but only an ecclesiastical power, and, counting the Greek Church, there are far more so- called Christians outside than inside the pale of the apostate Latin Church, of which it is the head.

This feature of the prediction is then as clearly applicable to Romanism as all the rest. Let me inquire, can any one suggest any other power in which all these marks, or the majority of them, meet? They are eight in number, and definite in character. The prophecy lays its finger on the place where we are to find the great enemy ROME; on the point of time in the course of history at which we may expect to see him arise the division of the Roman territory into a commonwealth of kingdoms; it specifies the nature of the power politico-ecclesiastical; its character blasphemously self-exalting, lawless, and persecuting; it measures its duration l,260 years; and specifies its doom ù to have its dominion gradually consumed and taken away, and then to be suddenly destroyed for ever, because of its blasphemous assumptions, by the epiphany in glory of the Son of man, introducing the kingdom of God on earth.

The proof that the Papacy is the power intended is strictly cumulative. If it answered to one of these indications there would be a slight presumption against it; if to several, a strong one; if to the majority, an overwhelming one; while if it answer to all, then the proof that it is the power intended becomes to candid minds irresistible. There is not a single clause in the prophecy that cannot be proved to fit the Roman Papacy exactly, except the last, which is not yet fulfilled.

Rome, which in her pagan phase defiled and destroyed the literal temple of God at Jerusalem, in her Papal days defiled and destroyed the anti-typical spiritual temple of God ù the Christian Church. Was it not worthy of God to warn that Church beforehand of the coming of this dreadful antichristian power, and to cheer her in all the sufferings she would have to endure from its tyranny by a knowledge of the issue of the great and terrible drama? Was it not right that the Roman power, pagan and Papal, should occupy as paramount a place on the page of Scripture as it has actually done on the page of history? The eighteen Christian centuries lay open before the eye of the omniscient God, and no figure stood out so prominently in all their long course as that of the great antichrist. The pen of inspiration sketched him in a few bold, masterly strokes; and there is no mistaking the portrait. In subsequent lectures I shall have much to say to you of the antichristian doctrines and practices of the Papacy. Tonight we have but studied the broad outline drawn in the days of Belshazzar, which forms a broad foundation for what must follow.

Notice, in conclusion, the evidence of inspiration afforded by this wonderful prophecy. Could Daniel foresee the things that were coming on the earth? How should he happen to light on the notion that there would be four universal empires, and four only, and that after the fourth there would arise ù what the world had never seen before a commonwealth often kingdoms? How could he depict so strange and peculiar a power as the Papacy? How could he conceive it? A little, weak kingdom, yet controlling all kingdoms! a human dynasty like any other, yet exalting itself against God, and slaughtering His saints! a power so wicked that heaven itself is moved for its destruction, and the whole Roman earth ruined on its account! Supposing for a moment this was a sketch from imagination: how comes it that history has so wonderfully realized it? The prediction did not produce its own fulfillment, for they who fulfilled it denied its application to themselves. It was not concocted to fit the events, for the events did not begin for a thousand years after it was published. The events were not arranged by men to fit the prophecy, for they extend over forty successive generations. There is no solution of the problem save the true one: “Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”; “He revealeth the deep and secret things: He knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with Him.”

Let me then solemnly charge you, reverence this holy volume, heed its warnings, dread the judgments it denounces, believe its promises, obey its precepts, study its sacred predictions; for be ye very sure it is the inspired word of the only living and true God, who is, as Nebuchadnezzar declared of old, “a God of gods, a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets.”

You will remember that in my last lecture I stated that the three foreviews of Romanism presented in prophecy by Daniel, Paul, and John respectively, have three distinctive characters. Daniel gives mainly its political relations and its broad moral features; Paul presents its ecclesiastical relations and its religious features; and John, by the two compound hieroglyphs which he employs and which we will consider in the next lecture, exhibits the combination of the two aspects a politico-ecclesiastical power. He shows also the changing relations between its contrasted yet united elements during their long joint career, and foretells the distinctive doom of each.

It must never be forgotten that the Roman Papacy was for long ages an absolute, unlimited, tyrannical monarchy, a worldly, secular government. It had its territorial dominions, its provinces, cities, and towns; it had its court, its nobles, its ambassadors, its army, its police, its legislature, its jurisprudence, its laws, its advocates, its prisons, its revenues, its taxes, its exchequer, its mint, its arsenals, its forts, its foreign treaties, and its ambitious, selfish plans and policy, just as much as any mere secular kingdom. But it was also something very different it was the head of the Latin Church; it was a great ecclesiastical power; it was a religion as well as a government. As such it had its dioceses and parishes, its spiritual hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons, its theological schools and colleges and professors, its abbots and deans, its councils and synods and chapters, its monasteries and convents, its orders of mendicant and other friars, its services and sacraments, its creeds and confessions, its doctrines and discipline, and its penances and punishments. Romanism is a comprehensive term, including both these widely different organizations. Both had their center in the seven-hilled city, and both regarded the Roman pontiff as head. Just as in the old pagan times the Caesars themselves had been both emperors and high priests of the national religion, so the popes in mediaeval times were fountainheads of authority both in the kingdom and in the Church. The ecclesiastical position of the emperors was however rather a name than a reality; while that of the popes was most real. They were practically and effectively head in both realms.

From his remote point of view, in the Babylonian era, the statesman-prophet Daniel saw mainly the political status of the Papacy. From his five-hundred-years-later standpoint, under the empire of Rome, the Christian Apostle Paul saw and foretold most clearly the ecclesiastical character of the coming antichrist; and this evening we are to consider this latter foreview of Romanism we are to study it as a Church system. I must ask you at your leisure to study very carefully three or four passages in the writings of the Apostle Paul, especially the third and fourth chapters of his first letter to Timothy, and the second chapter of his second epistle to the Thessalonians. You will see that Paul’s foreview consists of two parts: the first gives a general view of a great apostasy, which would in due time arise in the Church; and the second a carefully drawn portrait of the power in which that apostasy would be headed up. He had even previously predicted the apostasy in his parting address to the elders of the Church at Ephesus, recorded in #Acts 20.

He had told them that there would arise not from the outside world, but from among themselves, the pastors or bishops of the Church “grievous wolves, not sparing the flock.” “Of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples alter them; therefore watch, and remember how I ceased not to warn you.” This was but a brief and passing glance into the dark future; but the momentary glimpse suffices to show the outline of the evils which time was to develop, and which Paul so fully predicted later on. Ten pagan persecutions lay before the Church; but Paul does not predict them. Myriads of Christians were to do literally what he did figuratively, to fight with wild beasts in Roman amphitheaters; but the Apostle’s prophetic gaze rests not on any such spectacle. No! a worse evil by far was to befall the Church: an enemy was to arise in her midst, an apostasy was to originate in her bosom, and eat like a cancer into her vitals. Her own leaders were to mislead her; her very pastors, instead of feeding the flock, would feed on it, and devour it like ravening wolves. Perverse pastors, selfish, mercenary bishops, would draw away disciples after themselves, instead of drawing them to Christ as Paul had done. He had coveted no man’s silver or gold, as he reminds them: but these apostate bishops who should arise would be of a wholly different character, robbing and oppressing the Church as wolves the flock; they would be the direct opposites of the Good Shepherd who gave His life for the sheep, and of the apostolic ministry which follows in His steps.

This first warning prediction of the Apostle Paul was addressed, it is true, especially to the elders or bishops of Ephesus; but in view of all that has happened since, it is easy to see that the Ephesian branch of bishops were at any rate representative, for the words are a prediction of the ecclesiastical corruption that culminated in the Papacy. It strikes the keynote as to the nature of the evil from which the Church was destined to suffer so long and so widely. The pagan persecutions, which threatened to exterminate the early generations of Christians, were harmless to the Church compared to the internal corruption and cruel tyranny introduced by her own bishops later on. Paul’s foreview, from the first, was of an ecclesiastical evil, one arising not from the throne of the emperors but from the bench of bishops, not outside but inside the Church. You will feel the importance of this fact later on in our course more than you can do now; I urge you to take special note of it.

In the picture of the coming apostasy which Paul draws in 1 Timothy he adds many an additional and dark detail. After giving practical precepts for the organization and government of the infant Church, and specifying the qualifications essential in its bishops and deacons (one of which was that they should be married men), and after summing up the faith of Christ in a brief epitome of “the mystery of godliness,” he writes and we may well believe he did so with a heavy heart:

Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

Here we have, not only a prediction that there would be an “apostasy,” or falling away from the faith in the Christian Church, but a description of its origin and character. Its origin was to be satanic; its doctrines were to be doctrines of devils, or demons. It was to assume authority, and to lay down laws and prohibitions. Prominent among these was to be the prohibition of marriage; that is, of the very relationship which the inspired apostle had just previously enjoined on bishops and deacons in the words, “A bishop must be blameless, the husband of one wife;..one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity”; and in the word, “Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.” Marriage, although thus divinely ordained, would be prohibited, and meats, though created to be received with thanksgiving, would be forbidden. Thus the apostasy would be marked by a departure from primitive faith and pure religion, and by the authoritative inculcation in its place of asceticism the substitution of an external religiousness, and self-imposed sacrifices, for true holiness, but a cover for the reverse. Its professors would be hypocrites and liars, men so sinful as to have lost their conscience against sin; “speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their consciences seared with a hot iron.”

This feature of false profession reappears in the corresponding prophecy in 2 Timothy concerning the “last days,” in which the abettors and adherents of the apostasy are described as men “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” These men were not then to be open opponents of godliness, but, on the contrary, they would be great professors. They were to have a form of godliness: but only a form- a form covering no reality; a hollow form, a hypocritical form. Thus the two great Pauline prophecies of the apostasy in “the latter times” and “last days” warn the Church, not against professed irreligionists, but against professed religionists, against covert enemies of the Gospel: men cloaked in the garment of self-denial and superior sanctity; clever imitators of the apostles, like the magicians of Egypt, who withstood Moses, not by denying his miracles, but by counterfeiting them; cunning men, who should “creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts”; and withal educated men, men of letters, “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Mark this well: the men whom Paul described as leaders of the apostasy which he foresaw were not low, ignorant infidels, but learned hypocrites, lying professors of religion, and self-deceived ascetics.

It is in this same strain that he writes also to the Thessalonians. The coming of Christ, he tells them, would not take place before the occurrence of an “apostasy,” or falling away from the faith. This apostasy was to result from the working of what he calls “the mystery of iniquity” a remarkable expression, in direct contrast to the “mystery of godliness,” from which the apostasy is a departure. (Compare 1 Timothy 3:16.) The iniquity in question was hidden. It was a “mystery.” People did not recognize it as iniquity; they were deceived by it. From this “mystery of iniquity” was to spring in due time “the man of sin,” whose coming was to be “after the working of Satan.” The outcome and issue of this Satan-inspired apostasy would be “all deceivableness of unrighteousness,” “lying wonders,” and the belief of lies under the influence of “strong delusion” on the part of those who had “pleasure in unrighteousness.”

All of this is consistent. These Pauline prophecies teach the same thing. They warn the Church against the same danger. They predict the same sort of apostasy; an apostasy marked, not by open hostility to the gospel, not by the denunciation of godliness and the unblushing profession of infidelity or atheism, but by “hypocrisy,” “deceit,” a “form of godliness,” external religiousness, the practice of asceticism, cloaking corruption by a beautiful garment of light covering the form of the very prince of darkness.

But this apostasy was to have a head, and the coming and character of that head are the great subject of Paul’s Thessalonian prophecy. A mistaken apprehension of his first letter to them had led the Thessalonians to expect an immediate advent of Christ, and in his second epistle Paul sets himself to correct this error by further instruction as to the future. He tells them of something that was destined to precede the return of Christ, a great apostasy, which would reach its climax in the manifestation of a certain mighty power of evil; to which he attaches three names, and of which he gives many particulars similar to those which Daniel gave of his “little horn,” such as the place and time of its origin, its nature, sphere, character, conduct, and doom.

The names which the apostle gives to this head of the apostasy in this prophecy are “that man of sin,…the son of perdition,” and “that wicked” or “lawless” one. These expressions might convey to the mind of superficial readers the idea that the predicted head of the apostasy would be an individual. Careful study however shows this to be a false impression an impression for which there is no solid foundation in the passage. The expressions themselves, when analyzed grammatically, are seen to bear another signification quite as well, if not better, and the context demands that they be understood in a dynastic sense. “The man of sin,” like “the man of God,” has a broad, extended meaning. When we read “that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works,” we do not suppose it means any one individual man, although it has the definite article. It indicates a whole class of men of a certain character, a succession of similar individuals. The use of the indefinite article (analogous to the omission of the article in Greek) does indeed limit an expression of the kind. A man of sin could be only one, just as a king of England could mean only an individual. The king, on the other hand, may include a whole dynasty. A king has but the life of an individual, the king never dies. When, in speaking of the Jewish tabernacle in Hebrews, Paul says that into the holiest of all “went the high priest alone once every year,” he includes the entire succession of the high priests of Israel. That a singular expression in a prophecy may find its fulfillment in a plurality of individuals is perfectly clear from John’s words, “As ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even so now there are many antichrists.” 1

Any doubt or ambiguity as to the true force of the expression “the man of sin” is however removed by a consideration of the context of this passage. Grammatically it may mean either an individual or a succession of similar individuals. The context determines that it actually does mean the latter. “The mystery of iniquity,” in which this man of sin was latent, was already working in Paul’s day. The apostasy out of which he was to grow was already in existence. “The mystery of iniquity doth already work.” The man of sin, on the other hand, was to continue till the second advent of Christ, which is still future; for he is destroyed, as it is distinctly stated, only by the brightness of the epiphany. The interval between Paul’s days and those of the still future advent was then to be filled by the great apostasy in either its incipient working as a mystery of iniquity or its open manifestation and great embodiment in the career of “the man of sin and son of perdition.” That career must consequently extend over more than a thousand years, for the process of gestation is certainly briefer than the duration of life. In this case of the man of sin the two together occupy at least eighteen centuries. What proportion of the period can we assign to the hidden, mysterious growth of this power, and what to its wonderfully active and influential life? The life must of course occupy the larger half, to say the least of it, and therefore, as no individual lives on through ages, we may be sure that it is a succession of men, a dynasty of rulers, that is intended by the ambiguous expression. We, students of the nineteenth century, may be sure of this, though the students of early centuries could not.

Paul himself probably supposed that the antichrist he foretold would be an individual, for it is not always given to prophets to understand the messages they are inspired to deliver. “Not unto themselves, but unto us” they minister, as Peter tells us. At any rate, the early Church thought so, as their writings prove. They expected an individual antichrist, who should be followed by an immediate advent of Christ. But it must be remembered that the apostles and the early Church knew nothing of the eighteen centuries of delay which have actually taken place. They could not have guessed or even conceived that well-nigh two thousand years would pass before the second advent. They expected it in their own day. Paul wrote as if he himself would see it: “We who are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord”; and no revelation was given the effect of which would have been to rob the early Church of that sweet and sanctifying hope. On the contrary, the prediction of the apostasy and the antichrist who should head it up are purposely so worded as not to extinguish that hope. Even in Daniel, where chronological limits are assigned to the Roman “little horn,” the expression which conveys them is symbolic, and could be interpreted with certainty only by the fulfillment.

No duration at all is mentioned in this prophecy by Paul, only the two limits. “Already” the apostasy was developing, and it would not be destroyed till the advent. That much was clearly revealed, but not the length of the interval between the starting point in apostolic days in the first century, and the advent, which has not yet in the nineteenth taken place. There was a good reason for the form of the prophecy for the ambiguous use of the singular number. It neither asserted nor excluded a dynastic meaning. Time alone could decide, and time has decided.

Bearing this in mind, let us now look at Paul’s prophetic portrait of the great antichristian power he foresaw and foretold.

It is a strange one, with marked and most peculiar features. He is represented as seated in the temple or house of God; i.e. the Church, “the habitation of God through the Spirit,” God’s dwelling-place a sacred sphere, the most sacred on earth. There in the midst, exalted and enthroned, sits a sinful mortal, an enemy of God, a “man of sin,” engaged in receiving from a multitude of deluded apostate Christians worshipful submission and adoration. Beneath him, like a dark cloud or vapor, out of which he has arisen, is a “mystery of iniquity.” There is a chronological date upon the cloud. Close examination shows inscribed on it the words, “doth already work,” indicating its existence in Paul’s day, eighteen centuries ago. On one side lies a broken arch, covered with Roman sculpture. This arch had at one period blocked the way from the dark under the cloud to the exalted seat occupied by the “man of sin.” In Paul’s day it stood firm, a massive hindrance; but he foresaw that it would be “taken out of the way.” By some mighty stroke it has been rent, and lies in fragments. The barrier has been “taken out of the way.” Through the ruinous gap the mystery of iniquity has come up into the holy place in the form of “all deceivableness of unrighteousness.” Mingled with a vast mass of deceit there are certain leading lies, which are firmly believed, and many “lying wonders.”

The countenance of the “man of sin” is marked by pretended sanctity. There is in it a look of elevation, marred by pride. The features are full of power and intelligence. His head is circled with a crown of a peculiar form, unlike that worn by ordinary kings, and upon it is the title “King of kings and Lord of lords,” implying that he is ruler both of the Church and of the world, because he claims to be as God on earth. His hand is lifted in the attitude of one bestowing divine favors. His semblance is that of benignity and blessing, while the spirit of the man is that of the great adversary. Behind him, half concealed, is a dark figure difficult to make out, with a face full of malignity. There is a gleam of defiance in his eye, and a deadly purpose in his aspect. He too wears a crown, and the name written on it in yellow, sulfurous letters is, “god of this world.” He stands close to the “man of sin,” too close to be seen by the worshipping multitude directing and inspiring all his utterances and all his movements. With extraordinary skill he wields a worldwide power through this chosen agent, a power which has been exercised in various ways for six thousand years, deluding men to their destruction, but which reaches its climax in this combination of satanic craft with ecclesiastical exaltation. By the mouth of the “man of sin” he speaks to the multitude thronging the holy temple, or house of God, in a tone of authority, commanding them to submit to his teachings and guidance, and to abase themselves in his presence. His words are, “Fall down and worship me.” The deluded multitude blindly obeys him, as though his voice was the voice of God! Under the feet of the “man of sin” are two venerable volumes, bearing the titles “Laws Human and Divine.” He is trampling on them both, treading them underfoot! Some in the crowd are pointing to this fact, and stand in a protesting attitude. In the distance there are prophets and apostles looking on. Far above a perfect contrast in every respect to the self-exalting “man of sin” is seen the self-humbling and self- sacrificing Son of God. He too is seated, seated on a radiant throne, from which celestial glory is streaming. His attitude is that of one coming in judgment for the destruction of the “man of sin” and his sinful worshipers. Many of the protesters are looking at him in anticipation of His advent, and seem to have something of His likeness. The face of the man of sin is the face of a false apostle, the dark face of a Judas. Written upon the wall of the temple, in letters of light, just above the proud, false, central figure, is the name “son of perdition.” The man of sin is a Judas a secret enemy while a seeming friend a “familiar friend,” yet a fatal foe who betrays with a kiss and a “hail, master!”

There are several features in this portrait which I must ask you to specially notice. Observe the place occupied by the man of sin the “temple” or house of God. This is not, and cannot be, any Jewish temple. Paul, who uses this expression in his prophetic portrait of Romanism, employs it both in Corinthians and Ephesians with reference to the Christian Church. In the second Epistle to the Corinthians, writing to Gentile Christians, he says, “Ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” In Ephesians he calls the Church “a holy temple,” a “habitation of God through the Spirit”; and he would never have applied it to the Jewish temple, which, with all other Jewish things, he regarded as mere shadows of Christian realities. To Paul emphatically the temple of God was the Church of Christ. This is the temple in which his prophetic eye saw the man of sin seated. It is no question of his bodily location in any structure of wood and stone, but of something far higher. The temple of God is that “spiritual house” in which He dwells. It is built of “living stones,” of true believers. It is here that the man of sin was to usurp the place of God. This is the “mystery,” the dread danger, the deadly evil, predicted by the Apostle. It is no person in a temple of stone, but a power in the Christian Church.

Observe next the character of the man of sin. He is at once an imitation of Christ, and a contrast to Him. He occupies His position, but is totally unlike Him, and opposed to Him. He has usurped His place and His prerogatives; but, so far from truly representing Him, he represents His great enemy. As Christ acts for God, so the man of sin acts for Satan, who indeed produces him for this very purpose. His coming is “after the working of Satan.” Christ and he are antagonistic powers: the power of light, and the power of darkness; the Majesty of heaven, and the might of hell. And as the Son of God humbled Himself, so the “man of sin” exalts himself. There is infinite self- abasement in the one, the Divine nature stooping to humanity; and infinite self-exaltation in the other, the human and satanic assuming to be Divine. Observe here that it is not asserted that the man of sin will say that he is God, but that he will show himself as such. The words are, “He as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” or is Divine, or a Divine being. (apodelknuJnta eanton oti esti Qeov) There is no article here before the name God. The expression indicates that the man of sin would show himself by acts and professions to be possessed of superhuman and Divine dignity, authority, and power.

Observe the position of the man of sin. Notice the word kaqisai, “sitteth,” and connect with it kaqedra, a seat, a word which occurs three times in the New Testament. It is used twice with reference to the seats in the temple of those who sold doves, who turned the house of God into a house of merchandise and den of thieves; and once in the sentence, “the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat.” From kaqedra comes “cathedral,” “the bishop’s seat,” and also the expression ex cathedra, or from his seat, officially. There, in that exalted cathedral position, and claiming to represent God, the man of sin was to act and abide as the pretended vicar, but real antagonist, of Christ, undermining His authority, abolishing His laws, and oppressing His people. Observe the words, “who opposeth.” It is possible effectually to oppose another without being his avowed antagonist; so the professions of the predicted power might be friendly, while his actions would be those of an opponent of the gospel of Christ.

We have said that the principles which were ultimately to produce the man of sin had already begun to operate in Paul’s own day. His words are, “The mystery of iniquity doth already work”; and these principles would continue to work until the full development of the apostasy, and its final destruction at the Second Advent: that is, throughout the eighteen Christian centuries.

The sphere of their operation therefore cannot be the Jewish temple, which was destroyed in the first century, but must needs be the professing Christian Church.

An important point in the prophecy is the existence in apostolic times of a certain restraining power, withholding while it lasted the manifestation of the man of sin. Paul, for good reasons, speaks of it in guarded language, as “he who letteth,” or “that which hinders.” What it was Paul knew, and the Thessalonians knew from him: “Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you?” The early Church – from whom alone we can learn what Paul told them by word of mouth, but refrained from committing to writing has left it on record that the Apostle had told them that this hindering power was the dominion of the Roman Caesars; that while they continued to reign at Rome, the development of the predicted power of evil was impossible. Hence it would seem that ROME would be the seat of the man of sin. During the continuance of the Roman empire there was no opportunity for him to rise; he would only be manifested on its fall. While the Caesars reigned he could not appear, but when they passed away he would succeed them.

Notice particularly that, just as the expression, “he that letteth,” comprehends the line of succession of the Caesars, so the expression, “he that sitteth,” may well comprehend an analogous line or succession of rulers. Both expressions refer to dynasties, and not to individuals.

The distinctive names given by Paul to the great head of the apostasy are expressive of his character. They are the “man of sin,” the “son of perdition,” and “that wicked” (o anomov, the lawless one). First, it was to be to an extraordinary extent sinful itself, and the occasion of sin in others; secondly, it would be like Judas, and share his doom; and, thirdly, it would set at defiance all laws, whether human or Divine. It would be inspired by Satan, and, on account of its evil character and actions, it would be doomed to destruction; it would eventually “go to its own place” the bottomless pit, from whence it emanated. Its doom was to fall in two stages: the Lord Himself would consume it by the spirit of His mouth, and destroy it by the brightness of His epiphany, or advent in power and glory. There would be first a consumption, then a destruction. It would continue until the second coming of Christ a statement which, as you will observe, involves the Lord’s return before the millennium, since there can be no millennium under the reign of the man of sin, nor prior to his utter destruction.

Let us now compare this portrait of the man of sin drawn by the Apostle Paul with the portrait of the self- exalting power foretold by Daniel, which we studied last week. The comparison will demonstrate their identity.

1. Both are Roman. The self-exalting horn or head represented by Daniel is Roman; it belongs to the fourth or Roman empire. So also does Paul ‘s man of sin, for the imperial government seated at Rome needed to be removed in order to make way for its rise and dominion. It was to be the successor of the Caesars at Rome. They have the same geographical seat.

2. They have the same chronological point of origin: both arise on the fall of the old undivided empire of Rome. And they have he same chronological termination: Daniel’s little horn perishes at the coming of the Son of man in glory, and Paul’s man of sin is destroyed at the epiphany.

3. Both exalt themselves against God. Daniel mentions the proud words of the blasphemous little horn, and Paul the audacious deeds of the man of sin, showing himself as Divine.

4. Both begin as small, inconspicuous powers, and develop gradually to very great and influential ones.

5. Both claim to be teachers of men. Daniel’s little horn was to have eyes, as a bishop, or overseer (the meaning of the word bishop, episkopov, is overseer); and that he was to have a mouth, that is, he was to be a teacher; while Paul assigns to the man of sin ecclesiastical eminence, a proud position in the temple of God, or Christian Church.

6. Both are persecutors. Daniel describes the little horn as a persecutor wearing out the saints, and Paul speaks of the man of sin as “opposing,” and calls him the “lawless one.”

To sum up. The two have the same place Rome; the same period from the sixth century to the second coming of the Lord in glory; the same wicked character, the same lawlessness, the same self-exalting defiance of God, the same gradual growth from weakness to dominion, the same episcopal pretensions, the same persecuting character, the same twofold doom.

These resemblances are so important, so numerous, so comprehensive, and exact, as to prove beyond all question that the self-exalting, persecuting power predicted by Daniel and this man of sin foretold by Paul are one and the same power. Even Romanists admit this to be the case, and call the power thus doubly predicted the antichrist.

In the Douay Bible, with notes, issued under Romish authority, and bearing the signatures of Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, the “man of sin” is interpreted as follows: ‘”He sitteth in the temple of God,’ etc. By all these words is described to us the great antichrist,…according to the unquestionable authority and consent of the ancient Fathers.” Rome allows thus that the “little horn” of Daniel and the “man of sin” of Paul foreshow one and the same power, and admits that power to be the antichrist.

So far then for our examination of the prophecies of the Roman antichrist, given, some of them a thousand, and others five hundred years before the actual appearance of the predicted power. Strange and incomprehensible must these prophecies have appeared, both to those who gave them and to those who received them. Little could they imagine the tremendous scale,both geographical and chronological, on which they were to be fulfilled! They understood clearly that an awful apostasy was to intervene between the early Church and the advent; but how far it would extend and how long it would last they knew not, and could not know. A terrible enemy to God and to His Church was to arise, strange as it might seem, in that Church itself; and yet it was to have its seat in Rome, which was in their day the throne of the pagan persecutors of Christianity. How could these things be? Much was revealed, but much was left still utterly mysterious, and which time only could interpret.

Turn now from prophecy to the history, and let the latter interpret the former. We see what was predicted, let us ask what has happened. What are the historical facts? The history of the Christian Church does not record a steady progress in the pathway of truth and holiness, an uninterrupted spread of the kingdom of God on earth. On the contrary, it tells the story of a TREMENDOUS APOSTASY. Even in the first century, as we learn from the New Testament, there set in a departure from the gospel, and a return to certain forms of ritualism, as among the Galatians. In the second and third centuries, antichristian doctrine and antichristian practices, sacramentarianism and sacerdotalism, invaded the Church, and gradually climbed to a commanding position, which they never afterwards abandoned. In the fourth century, with the fall of paganism, began a worldly, imperial Christianity, wholly unlike primitive apostolic Christianity, a sort of Christianized heathenism; and in the fifth and sixth centuries sprang up the Papacy, in whose career the apostasy culminated later on.

The mighty Caesars had fallen; Augustus, Domitian, Hadrian, Diocletian, were gone; even the Constantines and Julians had passed away. The seat of sovereignty had been removed from Rome to Constantinople. Goths and Vandals had overthrown the western empire; the once mighty political structure lay shivered into broken fragments. The imperial government was slain by the Gothic sword. The Caesars were no more, and Rome was an actual desolation. Then slowly on the ruins of old imperial Rome rose another power and another monarchy a monarchy of loftier aspirations and more resistless might, claiming dominion, not alone over the bodies, but over the consciences and souls of men: dominion, not only within the limits of the fallen empire, but throughout the entire world. Higher and higher rose the Papacy, till in the dark ages all Christendom was subject to its sway.

“Under the sacerdotal monarchy of St. Peter,” says Gibbon, “the nations began to resume the practice of seeking on the banks of the Tiber their kings, their laws, and the oracles of their fate.” And this was a voluntary submission. As a kingdom, the Papacy was not at that time in any position to enforce it. Not by military power, but by spiritual and religious pretensions, did the Bishop of Rome attain supremacy in the Church and in the world; it was by his lofty claim to be the vice-regent of Christ, by his assumption that he was as God on earth it was by means of his episcopal position that he attained by degrees supreme power, not in the Church only, but in the world.

The growth of this power to these gigantic proportions was a most singular phenomenon. Tyndale, the Reformer, speaking of it, says: To see how the holy father came up, mark the ensample of the ivy. First it springeth up out of the earth, and then awhile creepeth along by the ground, till it find a great tree. Then it joineth itself beneath, unto the body of the tree, and creepeth up a little and a little, fair and softly. At the beginning, while it is yet thin and small, the burden is not perceived; it seemeth glorious to garnish the tree in winter. But it holdeth fast withal, and ceaseth not to climb up till it be at the top, and even above all. And then it sendeth its branches along by the branches of the tree, and overgroweth all, and waxeth great, heavy, and thick; and it sucketh the moisture so sore out of the tree and his branches, that it choketh and stifleth them. And then the foul, stinking ivy waxeth mighty in the stump of the tree, and becometh a seat and a nest for all unclean birds, and for blind owls, which hawk in the dark, and dare not come to the light.

Even so the Bishop of Rome, now called pope, at the beginning crope along upon the earth, and every man trod on him. As soon as there came a Christian emperor, he joined himself to his feet and kissed them, and crope up a little, with begging now this privilege, now that..And thus, with flattering and feigning and vain superstition, under the name of St. Peter, he crept up, and fastened his roots in the heart of the emperor, and with his sword climbed above all his fellow bishops, and brought them under his feet. And as he subdued them by the emperor’s sword, even so, after they were sworn faithful, he, by their means, climbed up above the emperor, and subdued him also, and made him stoop unto his feet and kiss them.. And thus the pope, the father of all hypocrites, hath with falsehood and guile perverted the order of the world, and turned things upside down.

“All the kings of the West reverence the pope as a God on earth,” said Gregory II., and he spoke truly. Sismondi describes how Pepin and the Franks received him as a divinity. His dogmas were regarded as oracles; his bulls and sentences as the voice of God. “The people think of the pope as the one God that has power over all things in earth and in heaven.” Marcellus, addressing the pope at the Lateran Council, said, “Thou art another God on earth”; and “our Lord God the pope” was an oft accepted title. These are facts, substantial facts of history, which can be proved by countless documents, and which indeed no Romanist will deny. The people rendered and the pope received worship worship due to God alone. At the coronation of Pope Innocent X., Cardinal Colonna, in his own name and that of the clergy of St. Peter’s, addressed the following words to the pope, “kneeling on his knees”: “Most holy and blessed father! head of the Church, ruler of the world, to whom the keys of the kingdom of heaven are committed, whom the angels in heaven revere, and the gates of hell fear, and all the world adores, we specially venerate, worship, and adore thee!” What blasphemous exaltation is here! Have not Paul’s words been fulfilled? Has not this man of sin, sitting in the temple of God, shown himself that he is God, or allowed himself to be treated as Divine, nay, even claimed to be so treated? He allowed himself to be styled “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” because he gave and sold indulgences for sin. He was even more merciful than Christ; for He left souls in purgatory, and the pope took them out! He could command even the angels of heaven, and add saints to the celestial choir, raising dead men to form part of heaven’s hierarchy as “saints,” and causing them henceforth to be worshipped by the Church on earth.

IN ALL THIS THE POPE WAS AS GOD UPON EARTH. It was his to speak and govern as God; it was the world’s to bow down, to believe, and to obey.

See him in his robes of more than kingly royalty, with his crown of more than terrestrial dominion not one, but three, three in one, a triple crown. The proud tiara of the Papacy symbolizes power on earth, in heaven, and in hell; in all three the pope claims to rule. He is far above all kings. He is the vice-regent of God, the regent of the universe! He never rises from his pontifical throne to any person whomsoever, nor uncovers himself before mortal man. He does not even condescend to honor any human being by the least inclination of his head. His nuncios and legates take precedence of the ambassadors of all crowned heads. Cardinals, the chief princes of the Church, adore his holiness upon their bended knees, kissing his right hand, and even his feet! At his coronation they set him on the high altar of St. Peter’s, and adore him as the representative of Deity. He is carried in lofty state on men’s shoulders, beneath a canopy hung with fringe of gold. People, prelates, princes, and cardinals exalt and worship him with the most solemn ceremonies. He is head of the universal Church, arbiter of its rights and privileges. He wears the keys, as the sign of his power to open the gates of heaven to all believers. He holds two swords, as judging in things temporal and spiritual. He is “the sole and supreme judge of men, and can himself be judged of no man.” He is the husband of the Church, and as such wears a ring, indicating her perpetual betrothal to himself. Thousands upon thousands kneel before him; they struggle to get near his person; they stretch forth their hands to obtain his indulgences, and crave his quasi-Divine benediction, that “smoke of smoke,” as Luther called it. The deluded multitude rend the air with acclamations at his approach. In his processions all is gorgeous magnificence. Swiss guards and other attendants form his cortege, in scarlet cloaks, embroidered with gold, with silver maces and rich caparisons, silk housings, red velvets, purples, satins laced with gold, long flowing robes sweeping the ground, some crimson, some black, some white, and caps adorned with precious stones, and helmets glittering in the sun. His litter is lined with scarlet velvet, fringed with gold, and he himself is clothed in a white satin cassock, with rochet, stole, and mozette, all of red velvet if it is winter, or of red satin if it is summer. At his adoration by the canons and clergy of St. Peter’s, he is clothed in a white garment and seated on a throne, and thus attired he “presides in the temple of the Lord.”

Mark these words: he “presides in the temple of the Lord.” I took them from Picart’s description of the Roman ceremonial, a Roman Catholic authority. It is the Romanists themselves who use this significant phrase of the Papal pontiff: he “presides in the temple of the Lord.” Exalted to this position, he is incensed, and the cardinals, one at a time, in solemn, deliberate state and idolatrous submission, kiss his hand, his foot, and even his stomach. He is surrounded by cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots, priests, and princes. Enormous fans of peacock’s feathers are carried on either side of his chair, as used to be done to the pagan monarchs of olden times. He directs the affairs of the greatest empire upon earth, governing by an almost infinite number of men, whom he keeps constantly in subjection to himself, and from whom he demands frequent periodical account. He distributes spiritual gifts, and exalts to the highest preferments, not only on earth, but also in heaven: for is it not his to make bishops and archbishops, to canonize whom he will, and to decree their perpetual memorial and worship in the world?

All power is delivered unto him. He forgives sins; he bestows grace; he cancels punishments, even in purgatory; he restores the lapsed; he excommunicates the rebellious; he can make that which is unlawful, lawful; he cannot err; his sentences are final, his utterances infallible, his decrees irreformable. O dread dominion! O dizzy height! O blasphemous assumption! O sublime, satanic tyranny! who is like unto thee, thou resuscitated Caesar, thou false Christ? Lord of the conscience, thou sittest there as a very deity, QUASI DEUS, as God. Thou sittest supreme, as thine own words are witness, “in the temple of the Lord.”!

Look again at the confessional, where every priest sits as an image of the pope his master, with the sacred consciences of men and women beneath his feet, as though he were a god! For mark, he searches the heart, the very secrets of the soul; he demands the discovery and confession of all its sins; he makes himself master of all its thoughts and intents; he sits in that temple, the temple of the human conscience, which God claims solely for Himself. Oh, awful position! And there he presumes to reign, to decide, to absolve from sin; “Absolvo te,” I absolve thee, is his word. The sinner regards him as holding the place of Jesus Christ. This Romish work is a witness that it is so. This is the Ursuline Manual. Here, in the chapter for the direction of those who go to confession, and every Papist does, are these words, “Confessors should not be viewed in any other light than..as holding the place of Jesus Christ” (p. 177). And again, on p. 182, “When you leave the confessional, do not disturb your mind by examining whether you have been confessed well, or have forgotten any of your sins; but rest assured that, if you have made your confession with sincerity, and the other requisite dispositions, you are, according to the express decisions of the Council of Trent, fully absolved from every sin.” “Who can forgive sins, but God only?” See how the “man of sin” sits in God’s temple, and robs Him of His place and His prerogative!

Look at this other book. It is the volume of the laws and constitution of the Jesuits. Here, on p. 10, the Jesuit is taught that his superior, whoever he may be, must be recognized, reverenced, and submitted to with perfect and complete subjection of act and thought, as occupying the place of Jesus Christ. Thus the priest in the confessional and the superior in the Jesuit order, and the bishop and archbishop and cardinal, all reflect the sacerdotal supremacy of the pope, who sits there in God’s very temple, the temple of conscience and of the Christian Church, as a usurping god quasi Deus, as if God Himself.

But we must pass on from this point, the position assumed by the man of sin in the Church of God, and ask whether Romanism has fulfilled the other predictions of St. Paul as to “lying wonders” and “signs,” or false miracles, and the deceits of unrighteousness. Has she employed these as a means of gaining “power,” deluding her votaries that she might the more effectually enslave them? To exalt the priesthood, and especially its head, the Papal high priest, Rome has spared nothing. She has trampled alike on the intellect and conscience of mankind, and despised the eternal well-being of souls by inducing them to believe lies.

The man of sin was to come with all power and signs and lying wonders, in all deceivableness of unrighteousness. Just as the apostles wrought miracles to confirm the gospel they preached or rather, as the Lord wrought with them and confirmed the word with signs following so Satan would work with antichrist, endorsing his pretensions with false miracles designed to overthrow the gospel. Bishop John Jewell, of Salisbury, wrote in the sixteenth century: Of the first sort of false miracles, we have seen an infinite number in the days of our fathers in the kingdom of antichrist. Then was there an appearance of spirits and visions of angels: our lady came swimming down from heaven; poor souls came creeping and crying out of purgatory, and jetted abroad; and kept stations, casting flakes of fire, and beset highways, and bemoaned their cases, the pains and torments were so bitter.

They sought for help, and cried for good prayers; they cried for dirges, they cried for masses of requiem, for masses of scala coeli, for trentals of masses. Hereof grew portsale of pardons, and hereof grew the province of purgatory, the most gainful country that ever was under the cityof Rome.

But these miracles were no miracles at all; they were devised by subtle varlets and lazy lordanes for a purpose, to get money. Oftentimes the spirit has been taken and laid in the stocks; the angel has been stript; the good lady has been caught; the conveyance of the miracle has appeared; the engines, and sleights, and the cause, and the manner of the working have been confessed.

In those days idols could go on foot; roods could speak; bells could ring alone; images could come down, and light their own candles; dead stocks could sweat, and bestir themselves; they could turn their eyes; they could move their hands; they could open their mouths; they could set bones and knit sinews; they could heal the sick, and raise up the dead.

These miracles were conveyances and subtleties, and indeed no miracles; the trunks by which they spake, the strings and wires with which they moved their faces and hands, all the rest of their treachery, have been disclosed. These are the miracles of which Paul speaks miracles in sight, in appearance, but indeed no miracles.

..It was also arranged that the saints should not have power to work in all places. Some wrought at Canterbury, some at Walsingham, some at York, some at Buxton, some in one place, some in another, some in the towns, some in the fields. Even as Jeremiah said among the Jews, chapter 11, “According to the number of thy cities were thy gods.” Hereof grew pilgrimages and worshipping of images, and kissing of reliques; hereof grew oblations, and enriching of abbeys; every man had his peculiar saint on whom he called; every country was full of chapels, every chapel full of miracles, and every miracle full of lies.

These miracles are wrought by antichrist; they are his tools, wherewith he worketh; they are his weapons, wherewith he prevaileth; they are full of lying, full of deceitfulness, and full of wickedness: so shall antichrist prevail, and rule over the world. By these miracles he shall possess the ears, the eyes, and the hearts of many, and shall draw them after him.” 2

It was alleged that miracles were not only wrought by the saints, but even by the relics of the saints. In Calvin’s tractate on the subject of relics, he proves that the great majority of the relics in use among Romanists are spurious, having been brought forward by imposters, so that every apostle is made to have three or four bodies, and every saint two or three, and that the garments of Christ are almost infinite in number! As His body ascended to heaven, relics of it were not of course available; but spurious relics of everything He ever used or handled have been multiplied ad nauseam. Even the body of Christ has not escaped; the teeth, the hair, and the blood are exhibited in hundreds of places; the manger in which He was laid at His birth, the linen in which He was swaddled, His cradle, the first shirt His mother put on Him, the pillar against which He leant in the temple, the water-pots that were at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, and even the wine that was made in them, the shoes that He used when He was a boy, the table on which He observed the Last Supper, and hundreds of similar things are shown many of them in a number of places to this day. And as to the relics connected with our Lord’s sufferings and death, they are just innumerable. The fragments of the true cross scattered over the globe would, if catalogued, fill a volume. “There is no town, however small, which has not some morsel of it; and this not only in the principal cathedral church of the district, but also in parish churches. There is scarcely an abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places larger fragments exist, as at Paris, Poitiers, and Rome. If all the pieces which could be found were collected into a heap, they would form a good ship load; though the gospel testifies that a single individual was able to carry the real cross. What effrontery then thus to fill the whole world with fragments which it would take more than three hundred men to carry!…In regard to the crown of thorns, it would seem that its twigs had been planted that they might grow again; otherwise I know not how it could have attained such a size..I would never come to an end were I to go one by one over all the absurd articles they have drawn into this service. At Rome is shown the reed which was put into our Savior’s hands has a scepter;..the sponge which was offered to Him containing vinegar mixed with gall. How, I ask, were those things recovered? They were in the hands of the wicked. Did they give them to the apostles that they might preserve them for relics, or did they themselves lock them up that they might preserve them for some future period? What blasphemy to abuse the name of Christ by employing it as a cloak for such driveling fables!”3

Among the images that Rome worships, a certain class are miraculous. The figure on the crucifix of Burgos, in Spain, is said to have a beard which grows perpetually, and there are similar ones in three or four other places. The stupid people believe the fable to be true. Other crucifixes are said to have spoken a whole number. Others shed tears, as for instance one at Treves; and another at Orleans. From others the warm blood flows periodically. Miraculous images of the virgin are even more numerous. As they hold that the body of the virgin ascended to heaven like that of her Son, they cannot pretend to have her bones like those of the saints. Had it been otherwise, they would have given her a body of such size as would fill a thousand coffins. But they have made up for this lack by her hair and her milk. There is no town however small, no monastery or nunnery however insignificant, which does not possess some of this some in small, others in large quantities. As Calvin says: “Had the breasts of the most holy virgin yielded a more copious supply than is given by a cow, and had she continued to nurse during her whole lifetime, she could scarcely have furnished the quantity which is exhibited. I would fain know,” he asks, “how it was collected so as to be preserved until our time. Luke relates the prophecy which Simeon made to the virgin, but he does not say that Simeon asked her to give him some milk.” The fabrication of these relics was a lucrative trade throughout the middle ages; especially were dead bodies invested with sacredness by attaching to them the names of saints and martyrs. Toulouse, for instance, thinks it possesses six bodies of the apostles: James, Andrew, James the Less, Philip, Simeon, and Jude; but duplicates of these bodies are also in St. Peter’s and other churches in Rome. Matthias has also another at Treves; and there are heads and arms of him existing at different places sufficient to make up another body. What shall we say of the spirit that encourages the belief in lies and deceives men in this style? The degradation inflicted on the ignorant and unlearned by these fables is terrible, as any one who watches their effect in Ireland or on the Continent is aware. Whether the miracles of the man of sin be real or pretended, true or false, it matters little. The main point is, they are directed to establish falsehood. “He relies for his success on the effects to be wrought in human minds by wonders and deceits accomplished in the energy of Satan.” He employs wonders and deceits, a pretense to miraculous powers. Romanism has availed herself of such fraudulent practices to an enormous extent, and has profited by them both financially and otherwise.

But lying wonders to impose on the ignorant and superstitious masses were not the only means by which the Papacy attained its power in the middle ages; spurious documents, impostures of another kind, were used to influence the royal, noble, and educated classes. Principal among these were the celebrated decretal epistles, a forgery which produced the most important consequences for the Papacy, though its spurious nature was ultimately detected. Gibbon writes: Before the end of the eighth century, some apostolical scribe, perhaps the notorious Isidore, composed the “decretals” and the “donation of Constantine” the two magic pillars of the spiritual and temporal monarchy of the popes. This memorable donation was introduced to the world by an epistle of Pope Adrian I, who exhorts Charlemagne to imitate the liberality and revive the name of the great Constantine” (Gibbon: “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” chapter 49).

Their effect was enormous in advancing both the temporal power and the ecclesiastical supremacy of the popes. The donation of Constantine founded the one, and the false decretals the other. The latter pretended to be decrees of the early bishops of Rome limiting the independence of all archbishops and bishops by establishing a supreme jurisdiction of the Roman see in all cases, and by forbidding national councils to be held without its consent. “Upon these spurious decretals,” says Mr. Hallam in his “History of the Middle Ages,” “was built the great fabric of Papal supremacy over the different national Churches a fabric which has stood after its foundation crumbled beneath it, for no one has pretended to deny for the last two centuries that the imposture is too palpable for any but the most ignorant ages to credit.”

It is evident then that Romanism has fulfilled this part of the prophecy of the “man of sin,” even him whose coming was to be after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders and all deceivableness of unrighteousness. The power of the popes was built up on frauds and deceits of this character, and has been maintained over all the nations subject to it ever since by pretended miracles, spurious relics, lying wonders, and unrighteous deceits. And all these have been employed to oppose the gospel and establish falsehood.

In considering the ecclesiastical aspect of Romanism, we must never forget that it is the outcome and climax of the predicted apostasy, whose features Paul describes in Timothy. We must close this lecture with a few remarks on the departure from the faith which occupies so prominent a place in that description. Some should “depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats.” The faith must of course here be taken in a broad sense, as including all the doctrines and commandments of the Christian religion. The apostasy was to be marked by a departure from this faith, by the teaching of false doctrines, and the inculcation of anti-scriptural practices. That Popery is completely at variance with the Bible on all the important points of the faith of Christ may be safely asserted, and can be abundantly proved. We can select but a few of the principal points.

1. The Apostle Paul teaches that the Holy Scriptures are able to make us “wise unto salvation,” that they are capable of rendering the man of God “thoroughly furnished”; and James speaks of the engrafted word of God as “able to save the soul.” The true doctrine therefore is that Scripture contains all that is necessary to salvation. What is the doctrine of Romanism on this point? One of the articles of the Council of Trent asserts that, not only should the Old and New Testaments be received with reverence as the word of God, but also “the unwritten traditions which have come down to us, pertaining both to faith and manners, and preserved in the Catholic Church by continual succession.” In considering this decree, and its fatal effects in exalting mere human traditions to the level of Divine revelation, one is reminded of the solemn words which close the Apocalypse: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” Christ taught, on the contrary, that tradition was to be rejected whenever it was opposed to Scripture. “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” “Laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men.” “Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.”

2. Again. The Bible teaches us the duty of reading and searching the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus Himself said, “Search the Scriptures”; but Romanism forbids the general reading of Scripture, asserting that such a use of the word of God in the vulgar tongue causes more harm than good, and that it must never be practiced except by special permission in writing obtained from a priest. If any presume to read it without that, they are not to receive absolution. Booksellers who sell the Bible to any desiring to obtain it are to have penalties inflicted upon them, and no one is to purchase a Bible without special license from their superior. This is extended to receiving a gift of the Bible.

3. The true faith teaches us that every man is bound to judge for himself as to the meaning of Scripture. “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” But the Council of Trent decrees, that “no one confiding in his own judgment shall dare to wrest the sacred Scriptures to his own sense of them contrary to that which is held by holy mother Church, whose right it is to judge of the meaning.” If any one disobeys this decree he is to be punished according to law.

4. Scripture teaches us most abundantly that Christ is the only head of the Church. God gave Him to be the head over all things to the Church, which is His body; but Romanism teaches that the pope is the head of the Church on earth. “The pope is the head of all heads, and the prince, moderator, and pastor of the whole Church of Christ, which is under him,” says Benedict XIV; and the Douay catechism, taught in all Papal schools, says, “He who is not in due connection and subordination to the pope must needs be dead, and cannot be counted a member of the Church.”

5. Scripture teaches us that the wages of sin is death, and “that whoever shall keep the law, and yet offend in one point, is guilty of all.” “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.” But Popery teaches that there are some sins which do not deserve the wrath and curse of God, and that venial sins do not bring spiritual death to the soul.

6. The Bible teaches us that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law, and that we are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. But Popery denounces this doctrine. The Council of Trent asserted that whosoever should affirm that we are justified by the grace and favor of God was to be accursed, and so all those who hold that salvation is not by works, but by grace.

7. Scripture teaches us to confess sin to God only. “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.” “Every one of us shall give account of himself to God.” “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” But Romanism denies this, and says that sacramental confession to a priest is necessary to salvation, and that any one who should denounce the practice of secret confessions as contrary to the institution and command of Christ, and a mere human invention, is to be accursed.

8. Scripture teaches us, again, that God only can forgive sins, and that the minister’s duty is simply to announce His forgiveness. “Repentance and remission of sins” was to be preached in His name among all nations. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.” He commanded us to preach to the people, that “through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.” The Council of Trent asserts, on the contrary, whosoever shall affirm that the priest’s absolution is not a judicial act, but only a ministry to declare that the sins of the penitent are forgiven, or that the confession of the penitent is not necessary in order to obtain absolution from the priest, let him be accursed.

9. Scripture teaches us that no man is perfectly righteous, and certainly that none can do more than his duty to God. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.” “In thy sight shall no man living be justified.” “When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” The Council of Trent, on the contrary, asserts that the good works of the justified man, his fasts, alms, and penances, really deserve increase of grace and eternal life, and that God is willing, on account of His most pious servants, to forgive others. It teaches that a man may do more than is requisite, and may give the overplus of his good works to another.

10. Scripture teaches us that faith in Christ removes sin and its guilt, “that the Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the world,” that by His death Christ put away our sins, that “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” But Romanism teaches that the venial sins of believers have to be expiated by a purgatory after death, and that the prayers of the faithful can help them. The Creed of Pope Pius IV contains the clause: “I constantly hold that there is a purgatory, and that the souls detained therein are helped by the suffrages of the faithful.”

11. Scripture teaches us that “by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified,” that He was once offered to bear the sins of many. But Romanism asserts, on the contrary, that in each of the endlessly repeated masses in its innumerable churches all over the world there is offered to God “a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead.”

12. Scripture, as we have already shown, teaches us that the marriage of the ministers of Christ is a lawful and honorable thing. Peter was a married man; Paul asserts his liberty to marry, and says that a bishop must be the husband of one wife, having his children in subjection with all gravity, and that the deacons also must be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. Romanism, on the other hand, teaches “that the clergy may not marry, and that marriage is to them a pollution.”

13. Scripture says, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.” Barnabas and Paul with horror forbade the crowds to worship them, and the angel similarly forbade John, saying, “See thou do it not.” Romanism enjoins the worship both of angels and saints and their relics. “The saints reigning together with Christ are for us, and their relics are to be venerated.”

14. The Bible again teaches that images are not to be worshipped. “Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them.” “I am the Lord: My glory will I not give to another, neither My praise to graven images.” But Romanism teaches her rotaries to say, “I most firmly assert, that the images of Christ, and of the mother of God ever virgin, and also of the of the other saints, are to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration are to be given to them.”

15. And above all, Scripture teaches us that there is one God, and one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus, neither is there salvation in any other. But Romanism teaches that there are other mediators in abundance besides Jesus Christ, that the Virgin Mary and the saints are such. “The saints reigning together with Christ offer prayers to God for us.”

I must not go further, and contrast Bible and Romish teachings on the subject of the Lord’s supper, extreme unction, and a multitude of other points, but may say, in one word, that there is not a doctrine of the gospel which has not been contradicted or distorted by this system, and that it stands branded before the world beyond all question as fulfilling Paul’s prophecy of the apostasy that it should be characterized by departure from the faith.

Perhaps I cannot give you a better idea of the distinctive teachings of Romanism as to controverted points of doctrine, than by reading to you the Creed of Pope Pius IV. This creed was adopted at the famous Council of Trent, held in the sixteenth century, when the doctrines of the Reformation were already widely diffused through Europe, and joyfully accepted and held by the young Protestant Churches of many lands. The Council of Trent was indeed Rome’s reply to the Reformation. The newly recovered truths of the gospel were in its canons and decrees stigmatized as pestilent heresies, and all who held them accursed; and in opposition to them this creed was prepared and adopted. It commences with the Nicene Creed, which is common to Romanists and Protestants; but to this simple and ancient “form of sound words” it adds twelve new articles which are peculiar to Rome, and contain her definite rejection of the doctrines of Scriptures recovered at the Reformation.

1. I most firmly admit and embrace apostolical and ecclesiastical traditions, and all other constitutions and observances of the same Church.

2. I also admit the sacred Scriptures according to the sense which the holy mother Church has held, and does hold, to whom it belongs to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures; nor will I ever take or interpret them otherwise than according to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.

3. I profess also, that there are truly and properly seven sacraments of the new law, instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and for the salvation of mankind, though all are not necessary for every one; namely, baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders, and matrimony; and that they confer grace; and of these, baptism, confirmation, and orders cannot be reiterated without sacrilege.

4. I also receive and admit the ceremonies of the Catholic Church received and approved in the solemn administration of all the above said sacraments.

5. I receive and embrace all and every one of the things which have been defined and declared in the holy Council of Trent concerning original sin and justification.

6. I profess likewise that in the mass is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead; and that in the most holy sacrifice of the eucharist there is truly, really, and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ; and that there is made a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body and of the whole substance of the wine into the blood, which conversion the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation.

7. I confess also, that under either kind alone, whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament are received.

8. I constantly hold that there is a purgatory, and that the souls detained therein are helped by the suffrages of the faithful.

9. Likewise that the saints reigning together with Christ are to be honored and invocated; that they offer prayers to God for us; and that their relics are to be venerated.

10. I most firmly assert that the images of Christ, and of the mother of God ever virgin, and also of the other saints, are to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration are to be given them.

11. I also affirm that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people.

12. I acknowledge the holy catholic and apostolic Roman Church, the mother and mistress of all Churches; and I promise and swear true obedience to the Roman bishop, the successor of St. Peter, the prince of the apostles and vicar of Jesus Christ.

13. I also profess and undoubtedly receive all other things delivered, defined, and declared by the sacred canons and general councils, and particularly by the holy Council of Trent; and likewise I also condemn, reject, and anathematize all things contrary thereto, and all heresies whatsoever, condemned, rejected, and anathematized by the Church. This true catholic faith, out of which none can be saved, which I now freely profess, and truly hold, I, N., promise, vow, and swear most constantly to hold and profess the same whole and entire, with God’s assistance, to the end of my life; and to procure, as far as lies in my power, that the same shall be held, taught, and preached by all who are under me, or are entrusted to my care, by virtue of my office. So help me God, and these holy gospels of God.

This creed of Pope Plus IV is the authoritative Papal epitome of the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent. The importance of this council “depends upon the considerations, that its records embody the solemn, formal, and official decision of the Church of Rome which claims to be the one, holy, catholic Church of Christ upon all the leading doctrines taught by the reformers; that its decrees upon all doctrinal points are received by all Romanists as possessed of infallible authority; and that every Popish priest is sworn to receive, profess, and maintain everything defined and declared by it.” 4 As an illustration of its reception and maintenance in the present day by the infallible head of the Romish Church, and by the whole conclave of Roman Catholic bishops, I refer you to their action in the comparatively recent Council of the Vatican.

See the almost incredible spectacle of 1870! See those seven hundred bishops of the Church throughout the world gathered in Rome at the high altar of St. Peter’s. See them and hear them! In this Romish book, entitled “The Chair of Peter,” p. 497, is a description of the scene. áááááá “The pope recited in a loud voice the profession of faith, namely the Creed of Nice and Constantinople, together with the definitions of the Council of Trent, called the Creed of Pope Pius IV; alter which it was read aloud from the ambo by the Bishop of Fabriano; ‘then for two whole hours,’ to use the words of one of the prelates present, ‘the cardinals, patriarchs, primates, archbishops, bishops, and other fathers of the council, made their adhesion to the same by tossing the Gospel at the throne of the head of the Church.’ A truly sublime spectacle, those seven hundred bishops from all parts of the earth, the representatives of more than thirty nations, and of two hundred millions of Christians, thus openly making profession of one common faith, in communion with the one and supreme pastor and teacher of all!”

Yes; the Creed of Trent, the canons and decrees of Trent, the Creed of Pius IV, those twelve articles which Rome has added to the ancient Nicene Creed, the sacrifice of the mass, transubstantiation, communion in one kind, the seven sacraments, traditions, Romish interpretation, Popish ceremonies, justification by works, purgatory, invocation of saints, indulgences, the worship of images, the absolute supremacy of the pope as the vicar of Christ, and no salvation out of union and communion with him, and submission to him: they confessed and professed them all, and swore adhesion to them, and kissed the holy Gospels in solemn token thereof before heaven and earth.

O Creed of Pius IV or Impious as he deserves to be called; O doctrines of Trent, “solemn, formal, official” decision of the Church of Rome upon all the great doctrines taught by the Reformers, Rome’s reply to the Reformation, her deliberate final rejection and anathema of its blessed teachings and confessions drawn from the holy word of God; O Creed of Trent and of the impious priest whose word supplants the word of God with fables and blasphemies and lies: thou art the awful decision of apostate Latin Christendom on the controversy of the ages, A DECISION TO WHICH ROME MUST NOW UNCHANGEABLY ADHERE, sealed as infallible, confessed to be irreformable! O momentous fact! O fatal Creed of Trent! thou art a millstone round the neck of the Roman pontiff, the cardinals, the archbishops, the bishops, the priests, the people of the whole Papal Church, a mighty millstone that must sink them in destruction and perdition! There is no shaking thee off. Alas! they have doomed themselves to wear thee; they have wedded and bound themselves to thy deadly lies; they have sealed, have sworn to thee as infallible and irreformable, and condemned themselves to abide by thee forever! It is done. Rome’s last word is spoken. Her fate is fixed, fixed by her own action, her own utterance, her own oath. Individuals may escape, may flee the system; but as a Church it is past recovery, and utterly beyond the reach of reformation. Oh that thousands might escape from it while yet there is time! Oh that they would hear the earnest, the urgent call, “Come out of her, My people”! Oh that they would wake from their blind and abject submission to the tyranny of hypocrites while there is room for repentance!

And now, in conclusion. We have shown briefly but clearly that Romanism is the offspring of a mystery of iniquity which began to work in apostolic times; that it is characterized by hypocrisy, by asceticism, by the prohibition of meats and marriage, by superstition and idolatry, by the worship of relics and images, of saints and angels, by the multiplication of mediators by false miracles, by lying signs and wonders, and by doctrines and decrees antagonistic to the teachings and command of Christ. We have shown that the Papal pontiffs have exalted themselves above all bishops, and above all kings, that they have fabricated new articles of faith and new rules of discipline; that they have altered the terms of salvation; that they have sold the pardon of sins for money, and bartered the priceless gifts of grace for selfish gain; that they have bound their deadly doctrines on the souls of countless millions by monstrous tyrannical threats and denunciations; that they have pertinaciously rejected the light of truth; that they have resolutely and wrathfully resisted those who have rebuked their impiety; that they have thundered against them their bulls and interdicts, their excommunications and anathemas; that they have made war with them, and with the faithful saints of many ages, and prevailed against them, and worn them out with long and cruel persecutions, with infamous and inhuman massacres; that they have waged against them no less than a war of extermination, wielding in this the whole strength and machinery of the resistless Roman empire, as well as the spiritual forces of the apostate Christian Church; that with the mighty working of Satan, with all power, signs, and miracles of falsehood they have OPPOSED CHRIST, have opposed His doctrines, His precepts, His people, and His cause, and in opposing Christ have OPPOSED GOD HIMSELF, and made war with Him who is the Lord of heaven and earth, and have uttered against Him their daring prohibitions and anathemas; that they have enthroned themselves in His holy temple, and trampled on His sacred laws, and trodden down His saints and servants, and arrogated to themselves His place, and power, and prerogatives; and while perpetrating acts of enormous and indescribable wickedness, have blasphemously claimed to be His sole representatives both in the church and in the world, to be inspired by His spirit, to be INFALLIBLE in their teachings and decrees, to be Vice-Christs, to be Vice- Gods in other words, to be AS CHRIST, AND AS GOD HIMSELF VISIBLY REVEALED UPON THE EARTH.

We have further shown that prophets and apostles foresaw and foretold the rise, reign, and doom of such a great apostate power, describing it as a “little horn” of the fourth or Roman empire, possessed of intelligence and oversight, having a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; a power both political and ecclesiastical; a Roman ruler, yet an overseer in the Christian Church; a power arising on the break up of the old Roman empire, and coexisting with the kings of its divided Gothic state; a power inspired by Satan, and prevailing by means of false miracles and lying wonders; a power springing from a “mystery of iniquity” and characterized by all deceivableness of unrighteousness; a lawless, self-exalting power, claiming Divine prerogatives, and receiving from deluded millions the submission and homage which should be rendered to God alone; a power characterized by exceeding personal sinfulness, and by the widespread promotion of sin in others; above all, a persecuting power, a power making war with the saints, and wearing them out, and prevailing against them throughout its long career of proud usurpation and triumphant tyranny.

These inspired words of prophecy and those indisputable facts of history agree. The Roman Papacy is revealed by the far-reaching light of the divinely written word. Its portrait is painted; its mystery is penetrated; its character, its deeds are drawn; its thousand veils and subterfuges are torn away. The unsparing hand of inspiration has stripped it, and left it standing upon the stage of history deformed and naked, a dark emanation from the pit, bloodstained and blasphemous, blindly struggling in the concentrated rays of celestial recognition, amid the premonitory thunders and lightnings of its fast approaching doom.

In the three preceding lectures we considered first the POLITICAL character and relations of Romanism, as prefigured in the prophecies of Daniel; and next its ECCLESIASTICAL character and relations, as predicted in the epistles of Paul.

We have now to consider the combination of these two aspects, or the POLITICO-ECCLESIASTICAL character of Romanism, as presented in the prophecies of John.

The Apocalypse, or “Revelation of Jesus Christ,” is an advance on all other prophecies. It gives the complete story of Christ’s kingdom, exhibiting it both from an external and an internal point of view, and unveiling its political as well as its ecclesiastical history. In its faithful reflection of the future it gives central prominence to the Roman power and apostasy. On this subject it enters into detail, and exhibits the mutual relations of the Latin Church and Roman State, using composite figures for this purpose-figures one part of which represent the political aspect of Romanism as a temporal government, and the other its religious aspect as an ecclesiastical system.

Two great foreviews of Romanism are given in the Apocalypse: that concerning its rise and reign in Revevelation 13, and that relating to its decline and fall in chapters 17-19.

Both of these prophecies are double. The first is the prophecy of “the beast” and the “false prophet”; the second is that of “the beast” and “the harlot.” The false prophet acts for “the beast,” the harlot rides upon “the beast.” In each case there are two powers, perfectly distinct yet closely connected. The “beast” and the “false prophet” can neither be confounded nor separated. Similarly, the “beast” and “harlot” are associated. The beast carries the harlot during all her long career of crime and cruelty, and they both come to their ruin in the same judgment era of the vials of God’s righteous wrath which terminate the present dispensation.

Before considering the interpretation of these wonderful Apocalyptic visions, it will be necessary to devote a few moments to the relation which exists between the prophecies of DANIEL and those of JOHN. We are exhibiting the prophecies of Romanism as a whole, and in order to do this it is necessary to trace the simple yet profound connection between the foreview granted to the Jewish prophet in Babylon in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, and that given to the Christian apostle in Patmos, in the days of Domitian.

The prophecies of Daniel and the book of Revelation may be considered as two parts of a single prophecy; their subject is the same, and their symbols are the same. They reveal the course of cruel, idolatrous Gentile empires, followed by the eternal kingdom of God; and in doing this they employ the same symbols. Daniel revealed the four empires; John the fourth only, for the first three had in his time passed away. Babylon, Persia, Greece had fallen; but Rome was still in the zenith of its greatness, destined to endure for many ages, and to rule, even to our own day, a large section of the human race. To John therefore was shown with considerable fullness, the future of the Roman power. The Apocalypse contains a marvelous foreview of the rise, reign, decline, and fall of the Roman Papacy, of the sufferings and triumphs of the saints of God during its continuance, and their enthronement at its close.

The Roman empire is presented to Daniel and to John under one and the same striking and special symbol, a ten-horned wild beast. Daniel saw the Medo-Persian empire as a two-horned ram, one horn being higher than the other (#Dan 8:3). He saw the Grecian empire as a four-horned goat (#Dan 8:8-20); and he saw the Roman empires as a ten-horned wild beast Thus these three great empires as seen by Daniel were two- horned, four-horned, ten-horned. This is remarkable and easy to be remembered. Now Daniel’s ten-horned beast reappears in the Apocalypse. Here we have an important link between the Old Testament and the New, and a clue to the meaning of the last book of Scripture. Let us try to be clear on this point. The four wild beasts represent Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. The fourth is ten-horned. This ten-horned beast of Daniel reappears in the Apocalypse, the divinely given symbol of the fourth and final earthly empire. You see it in chapters 12,13, and 17 of the book of Revelation. Compare now the passages. First, #Dan 11:7: “I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had ten horns.”

Next, #Rev 12:3: “A great red dragon, having ten horns.”

#Rev 13:1: “I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having ten horns.”

Lastly, #Rev 17:3: “A scarlet-colored beast, having ten horns.”

It is universally admitted that this fourth, or ten-horned beast, represents the Roman empire. The angel himself so interprets it. I want you particularly to notice the fact that we are not left to speculate about the meaning of these symbols; that the all-wise God who selected them, and gave them to us, has condescended to give us their interpretation. All these principal visions are divinely interpreted.

First, as to the vision of the fourfold image there is an inspired interpretation of a most detailed character. You remember the words with which it begins, “This is the dream, and we will tell the interpretation thereof before the king.”

Then in the vision of the four wild beasts, there is the interpretation beginning thus, “So he told me, and made me know the interpretation of the things.” So with the vision of the second and third empires in Daniel 13, there is the interpretation. Daniel says: “I heard a man’s voice..which called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision,” and so forth.

The same method is followed in the Apocalypse. The opening vision of the seven candlesticks is interpreted. You remember the words, “The seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven Churches.” And similarly, the vision of the woman seated on the seven-headed, ten-horned beast, in chapter 17, is interpreted: every part of it is interpreted. Observe the angel’s words: “I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.” Mark in your Bibles, if you will, these four sentences in the angelic interpretation: “The beast which thou sawest.” “The ten horns which thou sawest.” “The waters which thou sawest.” “The woman which thou sawest.”

These four sentences are the key to the Apocalypse. The beast, the horns, the waters, the woman are all interpreted; and their interpretation involves, or carries in it, the interpretation of the Apocalypse. The seven heads of the beast are also interpreted, and so interpreted as to tie down the symbol to the ROMAN empire. For the angel mentions an important note of time; he says of the seven heads, “five are fallen, and ONE IS, and the other is not yet come.” The heads of this beast then, when the vision was revealed, were past, present, and future; five were past, the sixth then existed, the seventh was not yet come. This demonstrates the power in question to be the Roman empire. The then reigning power in John’s day was symbolized by the sixth head of a seven-headed beast. This is certain. And the then reigning power was that of the Caesars of pagan Rome. This is equally certain. Therefore the Roman Caesars were represented by the sixth head of the symbolic beast. Now, to make the assurance doubly sure, mark the closing sentence in the angelic interpretation: “The woman which thou sawest is that city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” Note the words, “which reigneth” (h ecousa basileian), or as it is in Latin, “quae habet regnum super reges terrae”: “and the woman which thou sawest is the great city which has (or holds) the kingdom (or government) over the kings of the earth.” The great city “which reigneth,” not which did reign, nor which shall reign, but “which reigneth”, or was actually reigning then. What great city was reigning then over the kings of the earth? Rome, and none other. Rome then is the power which is signified.

We have now got the KEY to the Apocalypse; we are no longer lost in a crowd of uninterpreted symbols. The beasts of Daniel and John are empires. The ten-horned beast is the Roman power. This beast appears three times in the Apocalypse; it is expounded by the angel. This expounded symbol is the key to the entire prophecy.

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon the heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon that gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme His name, and His tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (#Rev 13:1-8).

The head is the governing power in the body. The heads of this beast represent successive governments. Mark the “deadly wound” inflicted on the last of its seven heads, and the marvelous healing of that wound, or the revival of the slain head or government, then mark the tyrannical and dreadful doings of this revived or eighth head. It becomes a great and terrible enemy of God’s people, a Roman enemy not an early Roman enemy, not a pagan Caesar, not a Nero or a Domitian, but one occupying a later place, a final place; for none succeeds him in that empire, since it is foretold that his destruction will be accomplished at the advent of Christ in His kingdom.

A comparison of this Roman enemy of God’s people described by John with the “little horn” foreshown by Daniel, demonstrates the important fact of their identity. They are one and the same. Observe the following points:

I. The persecuting horn seen by Daniel is a horn of the Roman empire; it is a Roman horn. And the persecuting head seen by John is a head of the Roman beast. In this they are alike. Each is Roman.

II. The persecuting horn grows up in the later, or divided state of the Roman empire; it rises among the ten Gothic horns. The persecuting head seen by John also grows up in the same later state of the Roman empire, for it follows the seven heads, and is the last. The sixth was said by the angel to be in existence in John’s time, and the seventh was to last only a short season, ù be wounded to death, and then revived in a new and final and peculiarly tyrannical and persecuting form. The “little horn” in Daniel belongs to the later ten-horned, or Gothic, period of the Roman empire; and the revived head of the empire seen by John belongs to the same period. You will note this point their period is the same. This is the second mark of their identity.

III. Each has a mouth. Now here is a very distinct and remarkable feature. The other horns and heads were dumb; but this speaks. Of the persecuting Roman horn we read in Darnel, it had “a mouth”; and of the persecuting Roman head we read in John, “there was given to him a mouth.”

IV. In each case this mouth speaks the same things. Of the mouth of the Roman horn Darnel says, in chapter 7, “it spake great things” (#Dan 7:8), “the great words which the horn spake” (#Dan 7:11), “very great things” (#Dan 7:20), “great words against the Most High” (#Dan 7:25). While of the Roman head in the Apocalypse John says:

“There was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies..And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme His name, and His tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven” (#Rev 13:6).

The horn speaks; the head speaks: each speaks great things; each speaks blasphemies. This striking correspondence is a further indication of their identity. Each has (otoma laloun megala) (#Dan 7:8). (otoma laloun megala) (#Rev 13:5).

The expression is exactly the same in the Septuagint translation of Daniel and in the Apocalypse. V. The horn has great dominion. It plucks up three horns; it has “a look more stout than his fellows” (v. 20); it makes war and prevails; its great “dominion” is eventually taken away and destroyed; “they shall take away his dominion” (v. 26). Similarly the head has great dominion; “power was given him over all kindreds and tongues and nations.” The application of these words should not be pressed beyond the sphere to which they belong. In that sphere, for a certain period, the power of the horn or head was to be supreme and universal. In the fact of their dominion they are alike.

VI. Each makes war with the saints: each is terrible as a persecutor of God’s people. Daniel says: “The same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them..He shall wear out the saints of the Most High.. They shall be given into his hand until a time, and times, and the dividing of time.” John says: “It was given unto him to make war with the saints and to overcome them” (#Rev 13:7); “He shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them” (#Rev 11:7).

John describes the method of this warfare, in what way and for what reason the “saints” or “martyrs of Jesus” “should be killed” (#Rev 13:15); and it is of these martyrs the voice from heaven says, “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them” (#Rev 14:13).

In their persecution of the saints Daniel’s “horn” and John’s revived “head” are alike. VII. The duration of each is the same. This too is a noteworthy feature. The duration of the persecuting horn is mystically stated in Daniel as “time, times, and the dividing of time,” or three and a half times (#Dan 7:25). And the duration of the persecuting head in the Apocalypse is stated to be forty-two months.

“Power was given unto him to continue forty and two months” (#Rev 13:5).

And these are the same period. This will appear from a comparison of the seven passages in which this period occurs in Daniel and the Apocalypse; in these it is called 1,260 days, forty-two months, and three and a half times. Now 1,260 days are forty-two months, and forty-two months are three and a half years. What these symbolic periods represent is another question; our point here is their identity. The persecuting horn and persecuting head are exactly the same in their duration. This is another proof of the sameness of the reality they represent.

VIII. They end in the same manner and at the same time. This completes the evidence of their identity. The persecuting horn is slain by the Ancient of days revealed in judgment, and the glory of His kingdom (#Dan 7: 9-11,22). The persecuting head is slain by the “King of kings and Lord of lords” revealed in that judgment in which He treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. The judgment is the same (#Rev 19:11,20). The “little horn” and revived “head” then, are alike in place, time, character, authority, persecuting action, duration, and doom. They arise at the same point, they last the same period; they do the same deeds; they come to their end at the same moment, and by the same revelation of Christ in the glory of His kingdom. They cannot prefigure two powers absolutely alike in all these respects; but one and the same. Even the Church of Rome admits their identity. It teaches that both are symbols of the same great persecuting power.

The way is now clear to consider the interpretation of this prophecy. It is indeed determined already by this very identification. The little horn of Daniel prefigures, as we have proved before, the Papacy of Rome. So then does this revived head. We will examine briefly the evidence which sustains this conclusion; but as we have already sketched the history, we need not dwell at any length on the different points. We will take the prophetic features in the order in which we have already presented them, considering first the facts relating to the rise, and then those concerning the reign, of the power in question.

First then as to its rise. The predicted head rises from the Roman empire. It is therefore Roman. So is the Papacy. We have called the system which owns the pope as head Romanism, because its seat is the seven- hilled city.

Secondly, the predicted persecuting power grows up in the second stage of Roman history. It is the seventh or last head of the old empire revived. Now this is the exact position of the Papacy. The Papacy belongs to the second or Christian stage of the Roman empire. It grew up among its Gothic horns or kingdoms. It was the revival of a power which had been slain. When the pagan empire was overthrown the Papal rose in its place. First the Caesars ruled in Rome, then the popes. The Goths overthrew the Roman empire in the fifth century; Romulus Augustulus abdicated the imperial dignity in A.D. 476. This was the “deadly wound” of the seventh head. From that date the Papacy grew with freedom, grew up among the Gothic horns or kingdoms. Note this feature ù the Papacy belongs to the second or Christian stage of the Roman empire. It was a horn among the Gothic horns. It was a revived head. The power of the Caesars lived again in the universal dominion of the popes.

The Papacy was small at its beginning, but grew to great dominion; it exercised as wide a sway as the Caesars it succeeded; all Europe submitted to its rule; it claimed, and still claims, a power without a rival or a limit. Hallam, as we have already remarked, says of the thirteenth century, the noonday of Papal power: “Rome inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name. She was once more mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals.”1 Remember the proud title taken by the popes, rector orbis ù ruler of the world. In this also the Papacy fulfills the prophecy.

Observe, secondly, that extraordinary feature both in Daniel and the Apocalypse, the mouth of this power. Both the horn, in Daniel, and the head, in John, has a mouth, otoma laloun megala – “a mouth speaking great things.” This feature is marvelously fulfilled in the Papacy. What a mouth has that Latin ruler! What a talker! what a teacher! what a thunderer! How has he boasted himself and magnified himself, and excommunicated and anathematized all who have resisted him! Has the world ever seen his equal in this respect? All the Gothic kings were his humble servants. He was, by his own account, and is, the representative of Christ, of God, ruler of the world, armed with all the powers of Christ in heaven, earth, and hell. He is infallible; his decrees are irreformable. A mouth indeed is his, a mouth speaking great things!

Notice, in the third place, his warring with the saints. In the Apocalypse we read, “It was given to him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them.” I will not do more here than remind you of the fact that, terribly as the saints suffered under the Caesars of pagan Rome, they suffered far more terribly and far longer under Papal Rome. Let the massacres of the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Hussites, the Lollards, the massacres in Holland and the Netherlands, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the massacre in Ireland in 1641, the tortures of the Inquisition, the fires of the stake kindled over and over in every country in Europe ù let these speak and testify to the fulfillment of prophecy. Yes; the Papacy has made war with the saints, and overcome them, and worn them out, and would have totally crushed and annihilated them, but for the sustaining hand and reviving power of God. In its prolonged, cruel, and universal persecution of the saints, the Papacy has fulfilled this solemn prophecy.

Notice, in the fourth place, the predicted duration of this persecuting power. Daniel mysteriously announces its duration as three and a half times; John as forty-two months. The symbolical nature of the prophecy, as well as the vastness of the subject, forbid us to take these times literally. As the beast is symbolic, and its various parts symbolic, so the period of its persecuting head is symbolic. You find this period mentioned seven times over in Daniel and Revelation, and called 1,260 days, forty-two months, and also three and a half “times.” These are, as we have said, the same period. Calculate for yourself, and you will find it so. Now, both in the law and prophets, a day is used as the symbol of a year. Moses, Ezekiel, Daniel use it thus. The seventy weeks of Daniel, or 490 days to Messiah, were fulfilled as 490 years; that is, they were fulfilled on the year-day scale. On this scale the forty-two months, or 1,260 days, are 1,260 years. We ask then, Has the Papacy endured this period? An examination of the facts of history will show that it has. From the era of its rise in the sixth century, at the notable decree of the emperor Justinian, constituting the Bishop of Rome head of all the Churches in Christendom, A.D. 533, 1,260 years extended to 1793, the date of the tremendous Papal overthrow in the French Revolution. Here we have a fact of great importance. Note it well. To this we add the further fact, that from the analogous decree of the emperor Phocas, confirming the headship of the pope over Christendom, in the year 607, 1,260 years extended to 1866-7, the initial date of the recent remarkable overthrow of Papal governments which culminated in the loss of the pope’s temporal power in 1870. In that year the Papacy assumed the highest exaltation to which it could aspire, that of infallibility, and lost the temporal sovereignty, which it had held for more than a thousand years. Thus the predicted period has been fulfilled. What an evidence is this! The Papacy has fulfilled the prophecy, not only in its geographical and historical position, its moral character, its political power, its blasphemous pretensions, its tyrannical career, but in its very chronology, ù in the point of its rise, the period of its duration, the era of its decline, the crisis of its overthrow.

We have already directed your attention to the fact that the Papacy is a complex power, and requires complex symbols for its prefiguration. It is both a secular and an ecclesiastical power; and the ecclesiastical power has arrogated to itself the right to create the secular, or endow it with divine authority, and has also wielded the energies of the secular power in pursuance of its own unholy ends.

Revelation 13 represents both these organizations as “beasts.” The one is represented as a ten- horned, the other as a two-horned beast. The former rises, as does each of the beasts of Daniel, from the sea; the latter rises from the earth. The one springs up in storm, the other in stillness. Striving and warring winds attend the birth of the one; the other grows up quietly from a low, terrestrial origin, like an ivy plant or a noxious, earth-born weed. The ten horns of the one are strong iron kingdoms; the two horns of the other are gentle and lamb-like. The two beasts stand side by side; they act together in everything. The earth-born beast is the “prophet” of the sea-born beast, and he is a “false prophet.” He compels subjection to the secular power, especially to its new head, that head which had been slain and healed. He establishes an idolatrous worship of that head, or a submission to it as Divine in authority. He “exercises” all the power of the ten-horned beast in his warfare against the saints and servants of God. He works false miracles, and accomplishes lying wonders, and even brings down fire upon the earth in imitation of the prophets of the Lord; that is, he causes judgments to descend on those who resist. He uses the instrument of excommunication, a weapon of celestial authority, and wields it with terrible effect. He lays kingdoms under interdicts, and nations under anathemas. He makes idolatry compulsory, delivering to the secular arm all who refuse to render it, that they may be put to death. He prohibits all dealings with so called “heretics,” all traffic and communion with them. He allows none to buy from them, and none to sell to them. He institutes the system which is now called “boycotting,” a system of persecution which was freely wielded by the Popish priesthood in the middle ages, and is still employed, as we know, in certain Papal lands.

How could the mutual relations of the political and ecclesiastical powers in the apostate Roman empire be better represented than by these wonderful symbols? Here are a monarchy and a priesthood in close, nefarious association; the priesthood anoints the monarchy, serves it, uses it. Together they rule, and together they persecute. No symbol can represent everything, no parable can correspond in all respects with the reality it depicts. It is surely enough if the principal features and primary relations are exhibited in the symbol, or reflected by the parable. This is just what is done in the apocalyptic prophecy. Look at the facts. The Papacy has been a political power for more than a thousand years. The popes of Rome have been secular monarchs. They have possessed territories, levied taxes, laid down laws, owned armies, made wars. The Papal monarchy has been for ages an integral part of the Roman empire. The Papacy has also been a sacerdotal power, and is so still. While its temporal government has fallen, its spiritual remains. Further, the Papacy is served by an extensive sacerdotal organization, embracing about a thousand bishops and half a million priests. This organization controls the convictions and actions of two hundred millions of persons, belonging to more than thirty nations. If the best symbol to represent the Roman empire with its rulers be a ten-horned beast, what better symbol to represent the Papal hierarchy than a two-horned beast, whose horns are like those of a lamb, while it has the voice of a dragon? And what better name for that hierarchy could be found than the “false prophet”? Does it not pretend to utter the messages of heaven? And as Moses and Elijah called down the fire of God’s judgments on the enemies of Israel, has not this hierarchy brought down again and again, in the estimation of millions, the judgments of God on those who have resisted its will, whether individuals or nations? Has not this been one of its most tremendous and irresistible weapons? Read the history of the middle ages and of the sixteenth century. What nation in Europe has not been laid from time to time under Papal interdicts, and compelled by these means to submit to the decisions of the Roman pontiff? And has not the priesthood too been the author and instigator of a wholesale system of idolatry and persecution? Has it not employed the power of the State in enforcing idolatry, and cruelly persecuted to death millions of the faithful who would not bow the knee to the modern Baal? In all this, history only too faithfully corresponds to prophecy. Deep calls to deep, and the utterances of inspiration are caught up and echoed by the experience of generations. The voices of the prophets come back in thunder from the course of ages, and the proof that God has spoken reverberates throughout the world.

Having briefly considered John’s prophecy concerning the rise and reign of the Papal power, we have now to glance at his prediction of its fall and overthrow. This you will find in Revelation 17-19. We have not time to read these chapters now; you are doubtless familiar with them, and will do well to study them carefully and thoroughly. They contain the second complex or duplicate prophecy concerning Romanism ù the career and judgment of “Babylon the Great.”

In this prophecy John beholds the ten-horned BEAST representing the Roman empire bearing a mystical WOMEN, dressed in purple and scarlet, decked with gold, precious stones, and pearls; a harlot, and the mother of harlots and abominations, the guilty paramour of kings, the creel persecutor of saints; intoxicated, but not with wine drunken with the blood of the saints and of the martyrs of Jesus. What a vision! what a prophecy!

You remember the angel’s interpretation of this vision: “The woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” We showed that that city was Rome, indisputably Rome. That Babylon the Great means Rome is admitted by Romanists themselves. Cardinal Bellarmine says that “Rome is signified in the Apocalypse by the name of Babylon.” Cardinal Baronius admits that “all persons confess that Rome is denoted by the name of Babylon in the Apocalypse of John.” Bossuet observes that “the features are so marked, that it is easy to decipher Rome under the figure of Babylon” (Rome sous la figure de Babylone). But, while admitting that Babylon the Great, seated on the seven hills, means Rome, Papal interpreters assert that it means heathen Rome, and not Christian Rome ù the Rome of the Caesars, and not that of the popes.

In reply to this, we answer, first, that the name upon the harlot’s brow is “mystery,” and that heathen Rome was no mystery. The true character of heathen Rome was never concealed. On the other hand, Christian Rome is a “mystery”; it is not what it seems. In profession, it is Divine; in character, satanic.

We say, in the second place, that there is a marked and intentional contrast in the Apocalypse between the two cities Babylon and Jerusalem, which is overlooked by the Papal interpretation. Babylon, in the Apocalypse, is a city and a harlot. Jerusalem, in the same book, is a city and a bride. The former is the corrupt associate of earthly kings; the latter, the chaste bride of the heavenly King. But the latter is a Church; the former then is no mere heathen metropolis. The contrast is between Church and Church; the faithful Church and the apostate Church.

In the third place, we point to the fact that the judgment described in Revelation 18, falls upon Babylon when her sins had reached to heaven; that is, in the darkest part of her career. But when Alaric destroyed Rome in AD. 410 that city had improved, it had become Christian; it was purified at that time from its pagan idolatries. Nor had it then sunk into the darkness of the Papacy. It was not in the fifth century that Rome reached the utmost height of her iniquity. The capture of the city by the soldiers of Alaric, when it was neither pagan nor Papal, could not have been the judgment here foretold.

In the fourth place, we point to the fact that the destruction of Babylon foretold in the Apocalypse is total and final; as a great “mill-stone” she is plunged into the deep; there is no recovery. This cannot refer to the mere burning of Rome in A.D. 410, for that event was speedily followed by the complete restoration of the city. When the Babylon of Revelation 18, falls, the smoke of its burning goes up for ever; it is found no more at all.

In the fifth place, we point to the fact that the foretold destruction of Babylon is accomplished by the horns or governments which were previously subject to her rule. We freely admit that the Goths destroyed ancient Rome, but the Goths were not previously subject to Rome. The Gothic nations did not first submit to Rome obediently, and then cast her off, and rend, and trample, and destroy her. All this however these nations did in the case of Papal Rome. For centuries they were subject to her sway; then they cast her off. Look at the French Revolution; see the deeds of France. Look at Italy in 1870. See the Continent today.

In the sixth place, we point to the fact that the foretold destruction of Babylon is immediately to be followed by “the marriage of the Lamb.” This is clearly foretold in Revelation 19. But the capture of Rome by Alaric was not followed by that event. Alaric captured Rome fifteen centuries ago, while the marriage of the Lamb is still future. This utterly excludes the notion that the destruction of Rome by Alaric is the judgment intended, and that Babylon the Great represents pagan Rome. And as Babylon the Great does not represent Rome pagan, it must represent Rome papal; there is no other alternative.

Now, in conclusion, read this wonderful prophecy concerning “Babylon the Great” in the clear and all- revealing light of history. I ask those of you who have read the history of the last eighteen centuries, did not Rome Christian become a harlot? Did not Papal Rome ally itself with the kings of the earth? Did it not glorify itself to be as a queen, and call itself the Mistress of the World? Did it not ride upon the body of the beast, or fourth empire, and govern its actions for centuries? Did not Papal Rome array itself with gold and precious stones and pearls? Is not this its attire still? We appeal to facts. Go to the churches and see. Look at the priests; look at the cardinals; look at the popes; look at the purple robes they wear; look at their scarlet robes; see the encrusted jewels; look at the luxurious palaces in which they live; look at the eleven thousand halls and chambers in the Vatican, and the unbounded wealth and glory gathered there; look at the gorgeous spectacles in St. Peter’s at Rome, casting even the magnificence of royalty into the shade. Go and see these things, or read the testimony of those who have seen them. Shamelessly Rome wears the very raiment, the very hues and colors, portrayed on the pages of inspired prophecy. You may know the harlot by her attire, as certainly as by the name upon her brow.

But to come to the darkest feature. Has not the Church of Rome drunk most abundantly the precious blood of saints and martyrs? We appeal to facts. What of the Albigenses in the thirteenth century? What of the Waldenses from the thirteenth century on to the time of Cromwell and the commonwealth? You have not forgotten Milton’s poem about them, those memorable lines. And what of the persecutions of Protestants in France, those dreadful persecutions mercilessly continued for more than three hundred years? What of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes? What of the fires of Smithfield? What of the terrible Inquisition?

Stay, I will take you to the Inquisition. You shall enter its gloomy portals; you shall walk through its dark passages; you shall stand in its infernal torture chamber; you shall hear the cries of some of its victims; you shall listen to their very words. What agonies have been suffered in these somber vaults, unseen by any human eyes save those of fiendish inquisitors! What cries have been uttered in this dismal place which have never reached the open world in which we live. Locked doors shut them in; stone walls stifled them. No sound escaped, not even that of a faint and distant moan. But now and then a victim found release; one and another have come forth from the torture chamber pale and trembling, maimed and mutilated, to tell the things they experienced when in the hands of the holy inquisitors. We shall call in some of these as witnesses.

This book is Limborch’s “History of the Inquisition.” It tells the story of its origin seven hundred years ago, and of its establishment and progress in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, Holland, and other parts of the world; it describes its ministers and methods, its vicars, assistants, notaries, judges, and other officials; it describes the power of the inquisitors, and their manner of proceeding. It unveils their dread tribunal; opens their blood-stained records; describes their dungeons, the secret tortures they inflicted, the extreme, merciless, unmitigated tortures, and also the public so called “acts of faith,” or burning of heretics. What a record! What a world of tyranny and intolerable anguish compressed into that one wordthe Inquisition! Tyranny over the conscience! Men in the name of Jesus Christ stretching and straining, maiming and mangling their fellow men, to compel them to call light darkness, and darkness light; to call the Gospel of Christ a lie, and the lie of Satan truth; to confess that wrong is right, and acknowledge right is wrong; to bow down to man and worship him as God; to call the teachings of Christ heresy, and the teachings of antichrist Diviner Tremendous was the power of that dread tribunal. In Spain and Portugal it completely crashed the Reformation. No secrets could be withheld from the inquisitors; hundreds of persons were often apprehended in one day, and in consequence of information resulting from their examinations under torture, thousands more were apprehended. Prisons, convents, even private houses, were crowded with victims; the cells of the inquisition were filled and emptied again and again; its torture chamber was a hell. The most excruciating engines were employed to dislocate the limbs of even tender women. Thousands were burned at the stake. The gospel was gagged and crashed, and Christ Himself in the persons of His members subjected to the anguish of a second Golgotha.

Let us look into the chamber of horrors in the Spanish Inquisition. “The place of torture,” says a Spanish historian, quoted by Limborch, p. 217, “the place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors. There is a tribunal erected in it in which the inquisitor, inspector, and secretary sit. When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured brought in, the executioner, who is waiting for him, makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all concealed with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body, when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who thus looks like the very devil.”

The degrees of torture are described by Julius Clams and other writers quoted by Limborch. They were various, and included the following:

1. The being threatened to be tortured. 2. Being carried to the place of torture. 3. The stripping and binding. 4. The being hoisted up on the rack. 5. What they called “squassation.”

This was the torture of the pulley. Besides this there was the torture of the fire, or chafing- dish full of burning charcoal applied to the soles of the feet. Then there was the torture of the rack, and of another instrument called by the Spaniards “escalero”; then that of pouring water into a bag of linen stuffed down the throat; and that of iron dice being forced into the feet by screws; and of canes placed crosswise between the fingers, and so compressed as to produce intolerable pain; then the torture of cords drawn tightly round various parts of the body, cutting through the flesh; and of the machine in which the sufferer was fixed head downwards; and, lastly, the torture of red-hot irons applied to the breasts and sides till they burned to the bone.

Here, on p. 219, is the account of the stripping of victims, men and women, preparatory to torture; the stripping from them of every vestige of clothing by these holy inquisitors, and how they put on them short linen drawers, leaving all the rest of the body naked for the free action of the tormentors. Here, on page 221, is the account by Isaac Orobio of what he suffered when in their hands. It was towards evening, he says, when he was brought to the place of torture in the Inquisition. It was a large, underground room, arched, and the walls covered with black hangings. The candlesticks were fastened to the wall, and the whole room enlightened with candles placed in them. At the end of it there was an enclosed place like a closet, where the inquisitor and notary sat at a table; so that the place seemed to him as the very mansion of death, everything appearing so terrible and awful. Then the inquisitor admonished him to confess the truth before his torments began. When he answered that he had told the truth, the inquisitor gravely protested that since he was so obstinate as to suffer the torture, the holy office would be innocent (what exquisite hypocrisy) if he should even expire in his torments. When he had said this, they put a linen garment over his body, and drew it so very close on each side as almost squeezed him to death.

When he was almost dying, they slackened all at once the sides of the garment, and, after he began to breathe again, the sudden alteration put him to the most grievous anguish and pain. When he had overcome this torture, the same admonition was repeated, that he would confess the truth in order to prevent further torment. As he persisted in his denial, they tied his thumbs so very tight with small cords as made the extremities of them greatly swell, and caused the blood to spurt out from under his nails. After this he was placed with his back against a wall and fixed upon a bench; into the wall were fastened iron pulleys, through which there were ropes drawn and tied round his arms and legs in several places. The executioner, drawing these ropes with great violence, fastened his body with them to the wall, his arms and legs, and especially his fingers and toes, being bound so tightly as to put him to the most exquisite pain, so that it seemed to him just as though he was dissolving in flames. After this a new kind of torture succeeded. There was an instrument like a small ladder, made of two upright pieces of wood and five cross ones sharpened in front. This the torturer placed over against him, and by a single motion struck it with great violence against both his shins, so that he received upon each of them at once five violent strokes, which put him to such intolerable anguish that he fainted away. After this he came to himself, and they inflicted on him a further torture. The torturer tied ropes about Orobio’s wrists, and then put these ropes about his own back, which was covered with leather to prevent his hurting himself; then falling backwards he drew the ropes with all his might till they cut through Orobio’s flesh, even to the very bones. And this torture was repeated twice, the ropes being tied about his arms at the distance of two fingers’ breadth from the former wound, and drawn with the same violence. On this the physician and surgeon were sent for out of the neighboring apartment to ask whether the torture could be continued without danger of death. As there was a prospect of his living through it, the torture was then repeated, after which he was bound up in his own clothes and carried back to his prison. Here, opposite to this recital, is a picture representing these various tortures. After prolonged imprisonment, Orobio was released and banished from the kingdom of Seville.

Before we let fall the curtain upon this awful subject, let us listen for a moment to some of the words of William Lithgow, a Scotsman, who suffered the tortures of the Inquisition in the time of James I. After telling of the diabolical treatment he received, which was very similar to that I have just described, he says, “Now mine eyes did begin to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the dobbling of drumsticks. Oh, strange, inhuman, monster man-manglers!.

. And notwithstanding of my shivering lips in this fiery passion, my vehement groaning, and blood springing from my arms, my broken sinews, yea, and my depending weight on flesh-cutting cords, yet they struck me on the face with cudgels to abate and cease the thundering noise of my wrestling voice. At last, being released from these pinnacles of pain, I was handfast set on the floor with this their ceaseless imploration: ‘Confess, confess, confess in time, or thine inevitable torments ensue.’ Where, finding nothing from me but still innocent, ù Oh! I am innocent. O Jesus, the Lamb of God, have mercy on me, and strengthen me with patience to undergo this barbarous murder ù ‘”

Enough! Here let the curtain drop. I should sicken you were I to pursue the subject further; it is too horrible, too damnable.

Here in this paper I have some of the ashes of the martyrs, some of their burned bones. I have bits of rusted iron and melted lead which I took myself with these hands from the Quemadero in Madrid, the place where they burned the martyrs, not far from the Inquisition. It was in the year 1870 that I visited it, just before the great ecumenical council was held at Rome, by which the pope was proclaimed infallible. I was in Spain that spring, and visited the newly opened Quemadero. I saw the ashes of the martyrs. I carried away with me some relics from that spot, which are now lying upon this table.

Hear me, though in truth I scarcely know how to speak upon this subject. I am almost dumb with horror when I think of it. I have visited the places in Spain, in France, in Italy most deeply stained and dyed with martyr-blood. I have visited the valleys of Piedmont. I have stood in the shadow of the great cathedral of Seville, on the spot where they burned the martyrs, or tore them limb from limb. I have stood breast-deep in the ashes of the martyrs of Madrid. I have read the story of Rome’s deeds. I have waded through many volumes of history and of martyrology. I have visited, either in travel or in thought, scenes too numerous for me to name, where the saints of God have been slaughtered by Papal Rome, that great butcher of bodies and of souls. I cannot tell you what I have seen, what I have read, what I have thought. I cannot tell you what I feel. Oh, it is a bloody tale! I have stood in that valley of Lucerna where dwelt the faithful Waldenses, those ancient Protestants who held to the pure gospel all through the dark ages, that lovely valley with its pine-clad slopes which Rome converted into a slaughter-house. Oh, horrible massacres of gentle, unoffending, noble-minded men! Oh, horrible massacres of tender women and helpless children! Yes, ye hated them, ye hunted them, ye stuck them on spits, ye impaled them, ye hanged them, ye roasted them, ye flayed them, ye cut them in pieces, ye violated them, ye violated the women, ye violated the children, ye forced flints into them, and stakes, and stuffed them with gunpowder, and blew them up, and tore them asunder limb from limb, and tossed them over precipices, and dashed them against the rocks; ye cut them up alive, ye dismembered them; ye racked, mutilated, burned, tortured, mangled, massacred holy men, sainted women, mothers, daughters, tender children, harmless babes, hundreds, thousands, thousands upon thousands; ye sacrificed them in heaps, in hecatombs, turning all Spain, Italy, France, Europe, Christian Europe, into a slaughter-house, a charnel house, an Akeldama. Oh, horrible; too horrible to think of! The sight dims, the heart sickens, the soul is stunned in the presence of the awful spectacle. O harlot, gilded harlot, with brazen brow and brazen heart! red are thy garments, red thine hands. Thy name is written in this book. God has written it. The world has read it. Thou art a murderess, O Rome. Thou art the murderess Babylon ù “Babylon the Great,” drunken, foully drunken; yea, drunken with the sacred blood which thou hast shed in streams and torrents, the blood of saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. Were there naught else by which to recognize thee, O persecuting Church of Rome, this dreadful mark would identify thee. This is thy brand; by this we know thee. Thou art that foretold Babylon. We know thee by thy place. We know thee by thy proud assumptions, by the throne on which thou sittest, by those seven hills, by the beast thou ridest, by the garments thou wearest, by the cup thou bearest, by the name blazoned on thy forehead, by thy kingly paramours; by thy shameless looks, by thy polluted deeds; but oh, chiefly by this, by thy prolonged and dreadful persecution of the saints, by those massacres, by that Inquisition, by the fires of that burning stake. Mark how its ruddy flames ascend; see how its accusing smoke goes up to heaven!

In this sacred prophecy behold thy picture, read thy name; read, ay, read thy written doom. The French revolution broke upon thee; it was a stage in thy judgment, and no more. The beast who carried thee for centuries in abject submission turned against thee, cast thee off, stripped thy garments from thee, rent thee with its horns. It was foretold it would be so. It is fulfilled, but that fulfillment is not the end. It is but the beginning of the end. Tremble, for thy doom is written from of old. The hand upon the wall has written it; the finger of Almighty God has engraved it. Dreadful have been thy sins; dreadful shall be thy punishment. Thou hast burned alive myriads of the members of Christ, thou hast burned them to cinders and to ashes: thy doom is to be burned; thy doom is the appalling flame whose smoke ascends for ever.

I have done. Prophecy has spoken; history has fulfilled its utterance. Rome pagan ran its course; Rome Papal took its place. “Babylon the Great” has risen, has reigned, has fallen; her end is nigh. “Come out of her, My people,” come out of her before the final judgment act in the great drama of the apostasy. “Come out of her,” saith your God, “that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” FOR AS A MILLSTONE CAST BY A MIGHTY ANGEL INTO THE SOUNDING DEEP, SHE SHALL WITH VIOLENCE BE THROWN DOWN, AND SHALL BE FOUND NO MORE FOR EVER.

ROMANISM foretold. Such has been our subject in the four previous lectures the Scripture prophecy, and the Papal history. That a deep and widespread apostasy has taken place in the Christian Church; that this apostasy has produced paganized forms of Christianity, the chief of which is that of the Romish Church; that the apostasy of the Romish Church has culminated in the Papacy; that the Papacy has lasted through long centuries, and lords it still over half Christendom; that it has persecuted the faithful unto blood, striving for the destruction of the gospel of God as if it were deadly heresy, and for the extermination of the saints of God as of accursed heretics; that it would have been completely triumphant still but for the glorious Reformation, which burst its bonds, emancipated the enslaved consciences of millions, and created a new departure in the convictions and actions of the world such are the facts with which history presents us. They are broad, unquestionable facts, which are so notorious as to be beyond all controversy, so long lasting as to fulfill the records of a thousand years.

And that this great apostasy was foretold; that it was foretold ages before its accomplishment by Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles; that Daniel dwelling in Babylon foretold it, and John, the exile in Patmos, and Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles; that these men, surrounded as they were by ancient heathenism, and knowing nothing by the evidence of their senses or by observation of the complete corruption of Christianity which has since darkened the world, as a long and awful eclipse of the Sun of righteousness that these men, prophets and apostles, living in antecedent times, should have predicted the extraordinary events which have come to pass, and should have painted them in vivid colors on the venerable pages of the writings they have left us; and that those predictions have for eighteen centuries confronted apostate Christendom with their accusations, and reflected as in a faithful mirror the entire history of its ways: this is the profound prophetic truth we have endeavored to elucidate.

We have now to study THE INTERPRETATION AND USE of these marvelous prophecies by the Christian Church. How has the Christian Church understood and employed them? Of what practical benefit have these prophecies been to her during the last eighteen centuries? It is evident that they were written for her guidance, protection, and sanctification. The prophecies of Paul and John are addressed to Christian Churches. The voice of inspiration expressly invites the whole Church to study them, and the Church has obeyed this command. She has read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested the “sure word of prophecy.”

What moral effect has it had upon her? To what extent has it guided her footsteps and sustained her hopes? If these prophecies have proved to be a mighty power in her history; if they have preserved the faith of the Church in times of general apostasy; if they have given birth to great reformation movements; if they have inspired confessors, and supported martyrs at the stake; if they have broken the chains of priestcraft, superstition, and tyranny, and produced at last a return on the part of many millions of men to a pure, primitive Christianity they have answered their purpose, and justified their position in the sacred Scriptures of truth. Nor may we lightly esteem that interpretation which has produced such results. Had the prophecies been misinterpreted, applied otherwise than according to the mind of the spirit, we cannot believe that they would have been thus productive of blessed consequences. The fact that, understood and applied as they were by the reformers, they have produced spiritual and eternal good to myriads of mankind is a proof that they were rightly applied, for “by their fruits ye shall know them” is true, not only of teachers, but of their teachings. Protestantism, with all its untold blessings, is the fruit of the historic system of interpretation.

On the other hand, all that leads us to expect that the sufferers under antichristian tyranny would correctly interpret the prophetic word written for their guidance and support prompts also the expectation that their persecutors would as surely wrongly interpret it. As apostate Jews wrongly interpreted the prophecies of the Old Testament, so we should expect apostate Christians wrongly to interpret those of the New. In our study of the last eighteen centuries of interpretation we shall not expect to find the true interpretation therefore among the apostates, but among the faithful; not among the persecutors, but among the persecuted; not among those who have waged war against the gospel of Christ, but among those who have confessed its pure teachings, and sealed that confession with their blood.

We shall not be surprised to find antagonistic schools of prophetic interpretation, but, on the contrary, we shall expect such; and we shall expect the apostates and persecutors to belong to one school, and the faithful confessors and martyrs to another. If an officer of justice arrest a man because he perceives that he answers exactly to a description of a notorious criminal published by the Government as a help to his identification, is it likely that the man himself will admit that the description fits him? He will of course deny the correspondence, but his denial will carry no weight. On turning to the history of prophetic interpretation this is precisely what we find. With many varieties as to detail we find there have existed, and still exist, two great opposite schools of interpretation, the Papal and the Protestant, or the futurist and the historical. The latter regards the prophecies of Daniel, Paul, and John as fully and faithfully setting forth the entire course of Christian history; the former as dealing chiefly with a future fragment of time at its close.

The former, or futurist, system of interpreting the prophecies is now held, strange to say, by many Protestants, but it was first invented by the Jesuit Ribera, at the end of the sixteenth century, to relieve the Papacy from the terrible stigma cast upon it by the Protestant interpretation. This interpretation was so evidently the true and intended one, that the adherents of the Papacy felt its edge must, at any cost, be turned or blunted. If the Papacy were the predicted antichrist, as Protestants asserted, there was an end of the question, and separation from it became an imperative duty.

There were only two alternatives. If the antichrist were not a present power, he must be either a past or a future one. Some writers asserted that the predictions pointed back to Nero. This did not take into account the obvious fact that the antichristian power predicted was to succeed the fall of the Caesars, and develop among the Gothic nations. The other alternative became therefore the popular one with Papists. Antichrist was future, so Ribera and Bossuet and others taught. An individual man was intended, not a dynasty, the duration of his power would not be for twelve and a half centuries, but only three and a half years; he would be an open foe to Christ, not a false friend; he would be a Jew, and sit in the Jewish temple.

Speculation about the future took the place of study of the past and present, and careful comparison of the facts of history with the predictions of prophecy. This related, so it was asserted, not to the main course of the history of the Church, but only to the few closing years of her history. The Papal head of the Church of Rome was not the power delineated by Daniel and St. John. Accurately as it answered to the description, it was not the criminal indicated. It must be allowed to go free, and the detective must look out for another man, who was sure to turn up by and by. The historic interpretation was of course rejected with intense and bitter scorn by the Church it denounced as Babylon and the power it branded as antichrist, and it is still opposed by all who in any way uphold them.

It is held by many that the historic school of interpretation is represented only by a small modern section of the Church. We shall show that it has existed from the beginning, and includes the larger part of the greatest and best teachers of the Church for 1800 years. We shall show that the Fathers of the Church belonged to it, that the confessors, reformers, and martyrs belonged to it. and that it has included a vast multitude of erudite expositors of later times. We shall show that all these have held to the central truth that prophecy faithfully mirrors the Church’s history as a whole, and not merely a commencing or closing fragment of that history.

It is held by many that the futurist school of interpretation is represented chiefly by certain Protestant commentators and teachers, who deny that the prophecy of the “man of sin” relates to the Pope of Rome.

We shall show that the futurist school of interpretation, on the contrary, is chiefly represented by teachers belonging to the Church of Rome; that the popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests of that apostate Church are all futurists, and that the futurist interpretation is one of the chief pillars of Romanism.

Two interpretations of prophecy are before us, the historic and the futurist.

The historical school of interpretation regards these prophecies as reflecting the history of the fourth or Roman empire, in all its most important aspects, from first to last, including especially the dark apostasy which has long prevailed in Christendom, the testimony and sufferings of God’s faithful people amid this apostasy, and the ultimate triumph of their cause.

On the other hand, the futurist school of interpretation regards these prophecies as dealing almost exclusively with the distant future of the consummation; regards them as dealing chiefly, not with what has been for the last eighteen hundred years, but with what will be in some final spasm at the close. The war against the saints waged by the Roman “little horn” of the prophecies of Daniel, the proud usurpations of the “man of sin,” and his antagonism to the cause of true religion, foretold by Paul, the blasphemous pretensions and persecuting deeds of the revived head of the Roman empire set forth in the prophecies of John all these are regarded by this futurist school as relating to a brief future period, immediately preceding the second advent. The futurist school denies the application of these important practical prophecies to the conflicts of the Church during the last eighteen centuries. It robs the Church of their practical guidance all through that period. This is the position taken by the Church of Rome, this is the position taken by the popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and other great teachers of that apostate Church. This is the prophetic interpretation they have embodied in a thousand forms, and insisted upon with dogmatic authority. This has been the interpretation of proud Papal usurpers, of cruel persecutors, of merciless tyrants, of the Romanist enemies of the gospel and of the saints and servants of God.

We shall find, on the other hand, as we study the subject, that the historic interpretation of prophecy, the interpretation which condemns Rome, and which Rome consequently condemns, grew up gradually with the progress of events and the development of the apostasy of Latin Christianity; that it slowly modified its details under the illuminating influence of actual facts, but that it retained its principles unaltered from age to age; that it was defended by a multitude of earnest students and faithful expositors; and that it shaped the history of heroic struggles and of glorious revivals of spiritual life and testimony.

This is the interpretation whose history during fifteen centuries we propose to review this evening.

We shall divide these fifteen centuries into three periods:

I. The period extending from apostolic times to the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century.

II. The period extending from the fall of the Roman empire and rise of the Papacy in the fifth century to its exaltation under the pontificate of Gregory VII (or Hildebrand), the founder of the Papal theocracy in the eleventh century.

III. The period from Gregory VII to the Reformation.

First, then, let us glance at the history of prophetic interpretation in the interval extending from apostolic times to the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century. This was the period of the so-called Fathers of the Christian Church. A multitude of their writings remain to us, containing, not only almost countless references to the prophecies in question, but complete commentaries on Daniel and the Apocalypse. It is boldly claimed by many that the Fathers of the first five centuries held the futurist interpretation of these books. We deny the correctness of this position, and assert that the Fathers of the first five centuries belonged to the historical school of interpretation. It was impossible for them, owing to the early position which they occupied, rightly to anticipate the manner and scale of the fulfillment of these wondrous prophecies; but as far as their circumstances permitted they correctly grasped their general significance, and adhered to that interpretation which regards prophecy as foretelling the whole course of the Church’s warfare from the first century to the Second Advent.

It is impossible at this time to do more than present a brief summary of the view of the Fathers on this subject, and to name and refer you to their works.

1. The Fathers interpreted the four wild beasts of prophecy as representing the four empires, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Here we have the foundation of the historical interpretation of prophecy. Take as an instance the words of Hippolytus on the great image and four wild beasts of Daniel: “The golden head of the image,” he says, “is identical with the lioness, by which the Babylonians were represented; the shoulders and the arms of silver are the same with the bear, by which the Persians and Medes are meant; the belly and thighs of brass are the leopard, by which the Greeks who ruled from Alexander onwards are intended; the legs of iron are the dreadful and terrible beast, by which the Romans who hold the empire now are meant; the toes of clay and iron are the ten horns which are to be; the one other little horn springing up in their midst is the antichrist; the stone that smites the image and breaks it in pieces, and that filled the whole earth, is Christ, who comes from heaven and brings judgment on the world.”1 This statement is remarkable for its clearness, correctness, and condensation, and expresses the view held still by the historic school.

Hippolytus says, in the treatise on “Christ and Antichrist”: “Rejoice, blessed Daniel, thou hast not been in error; all these things have come to pass” (p. 19). “Already the iron rules; already it subdues and breaks all in pieces; already it brings all the unwilling into subjection; already we see these things ourselves. Now we glorify God, being instructed by thee.” (p. 20).

2. The Fathers held that the ten-horned beasts of Daniel and John are the same. As an instance, Irenaeus, in his book “Against Heresies,” chapter 26, says: “John, in the Apocalypse,..teaches us what the ten horns shall be which were seen by Daniel.”

3. The Fathers held the historic interpretation of the Apocalypse. As Elliott says, none of the Fathers “entertained the idea of the apocalyptic prophecy overleaping the chronological interval, were it less or greater, antecedent to the consummation, and plunging at once into the times of the consummation.”2 Here, for example, is the commentary of Victorinus on the Apocalypse of John, written towards the end of the third century. This is the earliest commentary extant on the Apocalypse as a whole. In this, the going forth of the white horse under the first seal, is interpreted as the victories of the gospel in the first century. This view, you will observe, involves the historical interpretation of the entire book of Revelation. Victorinus interprets the woman clothed with the sun, having the moon under her feet, and wearing a crown of twelve stars on her head, and travailing in her pains, as “the ancient Church of fathers, prophets, saints, and apostles”; in other words, the Judaeo-Christian body of saints. He could not, of course, point to fulfillments which were at his early date still future, but he recognizes the principle.

4. The Fathers held that the little horn of Daniel, the man of sin foretold by Paul, and the revived head of the Roman empire predicted by John, represent one and the same power; and they held that power to be the antichrist. For example, Origen, in his famous book, “Against Celsus,” thus expresses himself (bk. 6., chapter 46.). After quoting nearly the whole of Paul’s prophecy about the man of sin in 2 Thessalonians, which he interprets of the antichrist, he says: “Since Celsus rejects the statements concerning antichrist, as it is termed, having neither read what is said of him in the book of Daniel, nor in the writings of Paul, nor what the Savior in the gospels has predicted about his coming, we must make a few remarks on this subject..Paul speaks of him who is called antichrist, describing, though with a certain reserve, both the manner and time and cause of his coming..The prophecy also regarding antichrist is stated in the book of Daniel, and is fitted to make an intelligent and candid reader admire the words as truly divine and prophetic; for in them are mentioned the things relating to the coming kingdom, beginning with the times of Daniel, and continuing to the destruction of the world.”

Jerome, in his commentary on the book of Daniel (chapter 7), says, with reference to the little horn which has a mouth speaking great things, that “it is the man of sin, the son of perdition, who dares to sit in the temple of God, making himself as God.”3

5. The Fathers held that the Roman empire was the “let,” or hindrance, referred to by Paul in 2 Thessalonians, which kept back the manifestation of the “man of sin.” This point is of great importance. Paul distinctly tells us that he knew, and that the Thessalonians knew, what that hindrance was, and that it was then in existence. The early Church, through the writings of the Fathers, tells us what it knew upon the subject, and with remarkable unanimity affirms that this “let,” or hindrance, was the Roman empire as governed by the Caesars; that while the Caesars held imperial power, it was impossible for the predicted antichrist to arise, and that on the fall of the Caesars he would arise. Here we have a point on which Paul affirms the existence of knowledge in the Christian Church. The early Church knew, he says, what this hindrance was. The early Church tells us what it did know upon the subject, and no one in these days can be in a position to contradict its testimony as to what Paul had, by word of mouth only, told the Thessalonians. It is a point on which ancient tradition alone can have any authority. Modern speculation is positively impertinent on such a subject.4

What then was the view of the early Church? Look at the words of Tertullian. Quoting Thessalonians, he says: “Now ye know what detaineth that he might be revealed in his time, for the mystery of iniquity doth already work; only he who now hinders must hinder until he be taken out of the way. What obstacle is there but the Roman state; the falling away of which, by being scattered into ten kingdoms, shall introduce antichrist..that the beast antichrist, with his false prophet, may wage war on the Church of God?”5

In his magnificent “Apology,” addressed to the rulers of the Roman empire, Tertullian says that the Christian Church not himself, mark, but the Christian Church prayed for the emperors, and for the stability of the empire of Rome, because they knew “that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth in fact, the very end of all things, threatening dreadful woes was ONLY RETARDED by the continued existence of the Roman empire. ” 6

Read the words of Chrysostom in his “Commentary on 2 Thessalonians”: “One may first naturally inquire what is that which withholdeth, and after that would know why Paul expresses this so obscurely. . ‘he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.’ That is, when the Roman empire is taken out of the way, then he shall come; and naturally, for as long as the fear of this empire lasts, no one will readily exalt himself; but when that is dissolved, he will attack the anarchy, and endeavor to seize upon the government both of men and of God. For as the kingdoms before this were destroyed, that of the Medes by the Babylonians, that of the Babylonians by the Persians, that of the Persians by the Macedonians, that of the Macedonians by the Romans, so will this be by antichrist, and he by Christ.”

Then, accounting for Paul’s reserve in alluding to this point he adds: “Because he says this of the Roman empire, he naturally only glanced at it and spoke covertly, for he did not wish to bring upon himself superfluous enmities and useless dangers. For if he had said that, after a little while, the Roman empire would be dissolved, they would now immediately have even overwhelmed him as a pestilent person, and all the faithful as living and warring to this end.” 7

From Irenaeus, who lived close to apostolic times, down to Chrysostom and Jerome, the Fathers taught that the power withholding the manifestation of the “man of sin” was the Roman empire as governed by the Caesars. The Fathers therefore belong to the historic, and not to the futurist school of interpretation; for futurists imagine that the hindrance to the manifestation of the man of sin is still in existence, though the Caesars have long since passed away.

6. The Fathers held that the fall of the Roman empire was imminent, and therefore the manifestation of antichrist close at hand Justin Martyr, for example, one of the earliest of the Fathers, in his “Dialogue with Trypho,” chapter 22, says: “He whom Daniel foretells would have dominion for ‘time and times and a half ‘ is already even at the door, about to speak his blasphemous and daring things against the Most High.”

Cyprian, in his “Exhortation to Martyrdom,” says: “Since..the hateful time of antichrist is already beginning to draw near, I would collect from the sacred Scriptures some exhortations for preparing and strengthening the minds of the brethren, whereby I might animate the soldiers of Christ for the heavenly and spiritual contest.” 8

7. The Fathers held that the “man of sin” or antichrist, would be a ruler or head of the Roman empire. A striking illustration of this is the interpretation by Irenaeus and Hippolytus of the mysterious number 666, the number of the revived beast, or antichrist. Irenaeus gives as its interpretation the word Latinos. He says: “Latinos is the number 666, and it is a very probable (solution), this being the name of the last kingdom, for the LATINS are they who at present bear rule. ” 9

Hippolytus gives the same solution in his treatise on “Christ and Antichrist.”

8. The Fathers held that the Babylon of the Apocalypse means Rome. On this point they were all agreed and their unanimity is an important seal on the correctness of this interpretation. Tertullian, for example, in his answer to the Jews, says:

“Babylon, in our own John, is a figure of the city Rome, as being equally great and proud of her sway, and triumphant over the saints” (chapter 9.). Victorinus, who wrote the earliest commentary on the Apocalypse extant, says, on Revelation 17: “The seven heads are the seven hills on which the woman sitteth that is, the city of Rome.”

Hippolytus says: “Tell me, blessed John, apostle and disciple of the Lord, what didst thou see and hear concerning Babylon? Arise and speak, for it sent thee also into banishment.”10 You notice here the view that Rome which banished the Apostle John is the Babylon of the Apocalypse.

Augustine says, “Rome, the second Babylon, and the daughter of the first, to which it pleased God to subject the whole world, and bring it all under one sovereignty, was now founded.”11 In chapter 28, he calls Rome “the western Babylon.” In chapter 41 he says: “It has not been in vain that this city has received the mysterious name of Babylon; for Babylon is interpreted confusion, as we have said elsewhere.”

It is clear from these quotations that the Fathers did not interpret the Babylon of the Apocalypse as meaning either the literal Babylon on the Euphrates, or some great city in France or England, but as meaning Rome. And this is still the interpretation of the historic school, though for the last 800 years events have proved Babylon to represent Rome, not in its pagan, but in its Papal form.

It should be noted that none of the Fathers held the futurist gap theory, the theory that the book of Revelation overleaps nearly eighteen centuries of Christian history, plunging at once into the distant future, and devoting itself entirely to predicting the events of the last few years of this dispensation. As to the subject of antichrist, there was a universal agreement among them concerning the general idea of the prophecy, while there were differences as to details, these differences arising chiefly from the notion that the antichrist would be in some way Jewish as well as Roman. It is true they thought that the antichrist would be an individual man. Their early position sufficiently accounts for this. They had no conception and could have no conception of the true nature and length of the tremendous apostasy which was to set in upon the Christian Church. They were not prophets, and could not foresee that the Church was to remain nineteen centuries in the wilderness, and to pass through prolonged and bitter persecution under a succession of nominally Christian but apostate rulers, filling the place of the ancient Caesars and emulating their antichristian deeds. Had they known these things, we may well believe their views would have completely harmonized with those of historic interpreters of later times. The Fathers went as far as they could go in the direction in which historical interpreters of these last days have traveled. Further, much that was dark to them in prophecy has become clear to their successors in the light of its accomplishment. Divine providence has thrown light, as it could not fail to do, on Divine prediction.

II. We come now, in the second place, very briefly to review the history of prophetic interpretation in the interval extending between the fall of the western empire of Rome and the development of the Papal theocracy in the eleventh century, under Gregory VII. The interpreters of this period belonged, like the Fathers, to the historic school. They interpreted the Apocalypse as a prophecy of the whole course of events from the first advent to the consummation.

The following authors living in this interval wrote commentaries on the entire Apocalypse: Primasius, the Venerable Bede, Anspert, Haymo, Andreas, Arethras, and Berengaud.

Primasius, who lived in the middle of the sixth century, interpreted the “hundred and forty-four thousand” sealed persons in the Apocalypse as the Christian Church. He held that antichrist would substitute himself for Christ and blasphemously assume His dignity, and that the seven-hilled city was Rome.

The Venerable Bede, who lived in the north of England at the close of the seventh century, was an historical interpreter of the Apocalypse. Here is a copy of his commentary. He takes the first seal to represent the triumphs of the primitive Church. He expounds the lamb-like beast of Revelation 13 as a pseudo-Christian false prophet.

Ambrose Anspert wrote a copious commentary on the Apocalypse in the middle of the eighth century. He expounds the second beast of Revelation 13 as meaning the preachers and ministers of antichrist, and teaches that antichrist will be “pro Christo,” or in Christ’s place. It is a remarkable fact that he expounds the grievous “sore,” or ulcer, poured out under the first vial, as meaning infidelity. This is the general view at the present day among historical interpreters. They consider the infidelity of the French Revolution to be the fulfillment of this vial.

Haymo’s commentary, written in the ninth century, is for the most part abridged from Anspert. Andreas, who was Bishop of Caesarea, states definitely that the Apocalypse was a prophecy of the things to happen from Christ’s first coming to the consummation. He interprets the “hundred and forty-four thousand” as meaning true Christians, and antichrist to be a Roman king and “pseudo- Christ,” or false Christ.

Arethras, who wrote in the ninth century, mainly follows Andreas.

Berengaud’s commentary on the Apocalypse, written in the same century, is the least satisfactory of all. He was a Benedictine monk, and lived at a very dark period. His notion was that antichrist would be an avowed infidel and an open advocate of licentiousness. He was, as far as is known, the first interpreter to propound this view.

The interval during which these interpreters lived was marked by the steady rise, but not by the full manifestation of the Papacy. Two notions contributed powerfully to prevent their recognizing in the imperfectly developed Papacy the predicted “man of sin.” They imagined that as the eastern empire of Rome, seated at Constantinople, still continued, the “let” or hindrance to the manifestation of antichrist remained, completely overlooking the fact that the antichristian power foretold in prophecy is definitely linked with the seven hills of Rome, and thus with the fall of the western empire, and the apostasy of the Latin or western Church.

Then they spiritualized and explained away a great deal of prophecy, and supposed that they were living in the millennium, and that the antichrist would not be manifested till the brief outbreak of evil at its close. This false notion had fatal consequences. While these interpreters, in common with the generality of Christians at their period, were looking for the advent of the “man of sin” in the distant future, he stole unperceived into their midst, and usurped the place of Christ over His unwatchful flock.

Before we leave this mediaeval period, there are three remarkable testimonies to which we must just refer. Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, declared before Christendom that whosoever called himself universal bishop or universal priest was the precursor of antichrist. In this he was doubtless perfectly correct. When Boniface III, shortly after the death of Gregory, took this title in the year 607, he became the precursor of antichrist, as fully revealed under Boniface VIII.

Gherbert of Rheims, before the year 1000, said of the pope sitting on his lofty throne in gold and purple, that if destitute of charity, he was antichrist sitting in the temple of God.

Lastly, Berenger, in the eleventh century, referring to the pope’s enforcement at that time of the doctrine of transubstantiation, affirmed the Roman see to be not the apostolic seat, but the seat of Satan.

Thus gradually did an understanding of the true character of the Papacy dawn upon the Christian church of this period.

III. We will now, in the third and last place, briefly consider the history of prophetic interpretation from the time of Gregory VII, in the eleventh century, to the Reformation, in the sixteenth.

The pontificate of Gregory VII was the era of the Papacy unveiled. At this date the pope dropped the mask of the shepherd, and exchanged the crook for the scepter and the sword. The accession of Gregory VII, or Hildebrand, as he was called, created, as we have before stated, the Papal theocracy. Do you know what this means? He claimed for himself, in the name of God, absolute and unlimited dominion over all the states of Christendom, as successor of St. Peter, and vicar of Christ upon earth. The popes who came after him pushed these claims to their utmost extent. At the end of the thirteenth century they assumed the proud title of masters of the world. Three names stand out conspicuously in the three middle centuries of this dark period, Gregory VII, Innocent III, and Boniface VIII. The historian of the middle ages well says, “As Gregory VII appears the most usurping of mankind till we read the history of Innocent III, so Innocent III is thrown into the shade by the supreme audacity of Boniface VIII.”12 In those days lived the great Italian poet, Dante. He described his age with extraordinary power. Writing in the thirteenth century, and in Italy, he painted the Papacy as the world beheld it then. And what did the world see then? It saw in the Papacy the usurping “man of sin”; and in the Church of Rome the Babylon of the Apocalypse. Mark, even the world saw it. Hear a few lines from Dante’s immortal poem on Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise:

“Woe to thee, Simon Magus! woe to you His wretched followers, who the things of God Which should be wedded unto goodness, them, Rapacious as ye are, do prostitute For gold and silver!”

“Your avarice O’ercasts the world with mourning, under foot Treading the good, and raising bad men up. Of shepherds like to you, the Evangelist Was ware, when her, who sits upon the waves, With kings in filthy whoredom he beheld, She who with seven heads towered at her birth, And from ten horns her proof of glory drew, Long as her spouse in virtue took delight. Of gold and silver ye have made your god, Differing wherein from the idolater, But that he worships one, a hundred ye? Ah, Constantine, to how much ill gave birth, Not thy conversion, but that plenteous dower, Which the first wealthy Father gained from thee!” 13

In his poem on Paradise he says: “My place he who usurps on earth hath made A common sewer of puddle and of blood. No purpose was of ours that the keys Which were vouchsafed me should for ensigns serve Unto the banners that do levy war On the baptized: nor I for sigil mark Set upon sold and lying privileges, Which makes me oft to bicker and turn red. In shepherd’s clothing greedy wolves below Range wide o’er all the pastures. Arm of God, Why longer sleepest thou?”

In the end of his poem on Paradise, he refers to the Apostle John as “The seer That ere he died, saw all the grievous times Of the fair bride, who with the lance and nails Was won.”

You will observe that these beautiful and touching words recognize the historical interpretation of the Apocalypse. The Apostle John, according to Dante, saw “all the grievous times” through which the Church was destined to pass.

And what Dante saw, the Albigenses saw, and the Waldenses. What wonder was there in this? Would not the wonder have been had the saints remained blind to a fulfillment of prophecy so plain and palpable that even the world recognized it?

In the sunny south of France, in Provence and Catalonia, lived the Albigenses. They were a civilized and highly educated people. Among these people there sprang up an extensive revival of true religion, and one of its natural effects was a bold testimony against the abominations of apostate Rome. Here is Sismondi’s History of the Albigenses. On page 7 he says of them and of the Vaudois: “All agreed in regarding the Church of Rome as having absolutely perverted Christianity, and in maintaining that it was she who was designated in the Apocalypse by the name of the whore of Babylon.” Rome could not endure this testimony; she drew her deadly sword and waged war against those who bore it. In the year 1208 the Albigenses were murderously persecuted. Innocent III (what a mockery his name!) employed the crusaders in this dreadful work. The war of extermination was denominated sacred. The pope’s soldiers prosecuted it with pious ardor; men, women, and children were all precipitated into the flames; whole cities were burned. In Beziers every soul was massacred; seven thousand dead bodies were counted in a single church, where the people had taken refuge; the whole country was laid waste; an entire people was slaughtered, and the eloquent witness of these early reformers was reduced to the silence of the sepulcher.

Thus began the tremendous war against the saints foretold in Daniel and the Apocalypse, and thenceforward it was murderously prosecuted from century to century. Early in the thirteenth century was founded the Inquisition, and full persecuting powers entrusted by the popes to the Dominicans.

A remnant of the Vaudois escaping from the south of France took refuge in the Alps, where the light of the Gospel had been preserved from the earliest times. I have visited the Waldensian valleys, and will try in a few words to bring them before you.

You doubtless remember the position of the city of Milan on the plain of Lombardy. From the top of the famous cathedral of Milan there is a magnificent view of the southern Alps. The plains of Lombardy and Piedmont extend to their base. The Alps are seen stretching to the east and west, as far as the eye can reach. There they stand in rugged, wild sublimity, their lower slopes mantled with dark forests, their summits crowned with glaciers and eternal snows.

To the west, among these, beyond the city of Turin, rises the vast white cone of Monte Viso. Among the mountains at its base lie the Waldensian valleys. They are five in numbers, and run up into narrow, elevated gorges, winding among fir-clad steeps, and climbing into the region of the clouds, which hover round the icy, alpine peaks. These valleys were the refuge of the “Israel of the Alps.” Protestants long before the Reformation, these noble mountaineers resolutely refused to bow the knee to Baal; they were a faithful remnant of the early Church preserved all through the central ages of apostasy.

This folio volume is a faithful history of the Waldenses, written 217 years ago, by the Waldensian pastor Leger. It contains his portrait. I have often looked at it with interest. The countenance is scarred with suffering, but full of spiritual light. Leger tells with simple clearness the story of the Waldenses from the earliest times, quoting from ancient and authentic documents. He gives in full their confession of faith, and narrates the history of their martyrdoms, including the dreadful massacre in the vale of Lucerna, in 1655, of which he himself was an eye witness. This book was written only fourteen years after that massacre. It contains numerous depositions concerning it, rendered on oath, and long lists of the names of those who were its victims. It gives also plates depicting the dreadful ways in which they were slaughtered. These plates represent men, women, and children being dismembered, disemboweled, ripped up, run through with swords, impaled on stakes, torn limb from limb, flung from precipices, roasted in flames. They are almost too horrible to look at. And this was only one of a long series of massacres of the Waldenses extending through 600 painful years. Milton wrote of these Protestant sufferers his immortal sonnet:

“Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, Forget not: in Thy book record their groans Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple tyrant; that from these may grow A hundredfold, who, having learned Thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe.”

The persecuted Waldenses were students of prophecy from the oldest times. How did they interpret the prophecies concerning “Babylon” and the “man of sin”? Here in this book of Leger’s is their Treatise on Antichrist, written in the year 1120, or nearly 800 years ago. It is written in a language now extinct; Leger gives a French translation in parallel columns (here it is at p. 71). In simple, telling terms that treatise brands the Romish Church as the harlot Babylon, and the Papacy as the “man of sin” and antichrist. That was the faith and confession of the Waldenses. 14

Turn now for a few moments to Bohemia. You remember that it is an extensive province in the northwest of Austria. There a reformation sprang up more than a century before the time of Luther, and was quenched in seas of blood. What gave rise to it? The testimonies of John Huss and Jerome of Prague. What did these men hold as to the Church of Rome and the Papacy? That Rome is Babylon, and the Papacy the antichrist.15 Witness their testimony, quoted by Foxe the martyrologist. I have stood on the spot in Constance where these men were condemned to death. Rome burned them. Here is a history of “the Reformation and anti-reformation in Bohemia.” The Bohemian brethren avowed the doctrines of John Huss, including his views on the anti-Papal prophecies. Rome exterminated the reformed Bohemians. The story is a dreadful one.16 But from their ashes rose new witnesses. From the persecuted Bohemians sprang the Moravians, who this day are missionaries throughout the world!

Turn lastly, for a moment, to England. Before the Reformation, 500 years ago, God raised up in this country John Wicliffe. Men called him “the morning star of the Reformation.” He translated the Scriptures into the English tongue, and waged war against the errors and abominations of the Church of Rome. How did Wicliffe interpret these prophecies? Just as the Waldenses did. Here is one of his books filled with references to the pope as antichrist. He wrote a special treatise, entitled Speculum de Antichristo (“The Mirror of Antichrist”). From Wicliffe sprang the English Lollards. They numbered hundreds of thousands. What was their testimony? Let me give it to you in the words of one of them, Lord Cobham, that famous man of God, who lived just a century before Luther.

When brought before King Henry V and admonished to submit himself to the pope as an obedient child, this was his answer: “As touching the pope and his spirituality, I owe them neither suit nor service, forasmuch as I know him by the Scriptures to be the great antichrist, the son of perdition, the open adversary of God, and an abomination standing in the holy place.”

Remaining firm in his rejection of Romish error and refusal to bow down to the Papacy, Lord Cobham was condemned to death as a heretic.

John Foxe tells us that on the day appointed for his death, in the year 1417, Lord Cobham was brought out of the Tower of London, “with his arms bound behind him, having a very cheerful countenance. Then he was laid upon a hurdle, and so drawn forth to St. Giles’ Fields, where they had set up a new pair of gallows. As he was coming to the place of execution, and was taken from the hurdle, he fell down devoutly upon his knees, desiring Almighty God to forgive his enemies. Then stood he up and beheld the multitude, exhorting them in most godly manner to follow the laws of God written in the Scriptures, and in any wise to beware of such teachers as they see contrary to Christ in their conversation and living; with many other special counsels. Then he was hanged up there by the middle, in chains of iron, and so consumed alive in the fire, praising the name of God as long as his life lasted.

In other words, he was roasted to death. They were burned, burned, these blessed men of God! Huss was burned; Jerome was burned; Lord Cobham was burned. Even Wicliffe’s bones were dug up, forty- one years after his death, and burned. Savonarola, who preached with trumpet tongue that Rome was Babylon, was burned. All these were burned before the Reformation, and thousands more. They were burned, but their words were not burned! Their testimony was not burned! It lived on! Fire could not scorch it; could not stifle it; swords could not slay it; naught could destroy it. Truth is immortal, truth is unconquerable. Imprison it, and it comes forth free; bury it, and it rises again; crush it to the earth, and it springs up victorious, purer for the conflict, nobler for the victory.

The truth to which the confessors witnessed sprang up again a century later, and rolled over Europe the tremendous tide of the Reformation.

And whence came this testimony which no power could repress? Whence came this testimony, trumpet- tongued, that Rome, in all its myriad-handed might, was impotent to silence or arrest? Whence came it, but from that sacred volume, writ in gloomy prisons, in lands of captivity, in scenes of exile, for the guidance, the preservation, the support of God’s suffering saints and faithful witnesses in every age! Daniel the captive, Paul the prisoner, John the exile such were its inspired authors; men whose piercing vision looked down the long vista of the Church’s conflicts, marked her martyrdoms, and saw her triumphs from afar.

Oh, word of divinely given prophecy! Oh, wondrous volume, whose seven seals the Lamb has loosed and opened to meet the moral and spiritual needs of the suffering Church He loves so well! how have thy solemn utterances, thy mysterious symbols, been scanned and studied by earnest, saintly eyes! how hast thou been pondered in prisons, remembered on racks, repeated in the flames! Thy texts are windows through which the light shines from the third heaven down into the darkest depths of earth’s conflicts, mysteries, and woes. Oh, sacred and sanctifying truth! how have thy words been watered with the tears of suffering saints, steeped in their griefs and sorrows, and dyed in the copious streaming of their blood! Precious are the lives which have sealed thee; precious the truth those lives have sealed! Thy words have been wings by which the persecuted Church has soared from the wilderness and the battlefield into the pure serene of everlasting love and peace! Like a bright angel, thou art heaven descended, and leadest to the skies. By thee has God guided to their glorious consummation the noble army of saints, confessors, martyrs, shining round His throne like the everlasting stars. They are gone into that worm of glory for ever gone; but the light which led them there remains behind! We cannot touch them; they have vanished from the sight of men like the prophet whose chariot to heaven was the winged flame! We cannot hear the music of their harpings, or the thunder of their song; but we still grasp the book they loved, which made them all they were, and all they are. Ye Waldenses, from the lonely, blood- stained Alps; ye nameless victims of the dreadful Inquisition; ye noble Protestants before the Reformation, Wicliffe, Huss, Jerome, Cobham, Savonarola we possess the holy pages which ye pondered, the words of truth and life ye sealed with martyr blood! Be those words to us what they were to you; let them be our inspiration and our testimony, afand the testimony of our children after us, till the hour when truth, emancipated from all trammels, shall shine through the world in its unclouded splendor, and error and superstition and falsehood from its presence shall for ever flee away!

The sixteenth century presents the spectacle of a stormy sunrise after a dismal night. Europe awoke from the long sleep of superstition. Nations shook off their chains. The dead arose. The witnesses to truth who had been silenced and slain stood up once more and renewed their testimony. The martyred confessors reappeared in the Reformers. There was a cleansing in the spiritual sanctuary. Civil and religious liberty were inaugurated. The discovery of printing and revival of learning accelerated the movement. There was progress everywhere. Columbus struck across the ocean and opened a new hemisphere to view. Rome was shaken on her seven hills, and lost one-half of her dominions. Protestant nations were created. The modern world was called into existence.

The sixteenth century was the age of the Reformation. The Church had become frightfully deformed; it needed to be thoroughly reformed It had departed from the faith; it needed to be brought back to it. It needed a restoration of non-apostate Christianity. A reassertion was required of rights Divine and human. The Papacy had subverted both the government of God and the liberties of man. Its central principle involves the expulsion from the worm of its rightful Ruler and Savior, and substitutes for Him a dynasty of blasphemous usurpers. And it involves equally the destruction of all man’s noblest rights. It denies to him his lawful access to his Maker. A fellow mortal, a pretended priest, stands in the way, and blocks the path of eternal life. He stands across the sunshine of God’s love, and casts upon the trembling human spirit a deadly shade. He claims to have the keys of heaven and hell. He thunders lying anathemas, and forbids mankind to approach the throne of infinite mercy save through him, and then only just so far as he permits. Thus Christ is eclipsed, salvation is stolen; the Papal priest is substituted for the Savior of sinners, the mystery of iniquity for the mystery of godliness, the proud pope of Rome for the holy Prince of Peace, poison for food; and Satan himself is palmed upon the Church of Jesus Christ as her head and husband. What a cursed system! Thought can scarcely fathom the abyss of evil which it creates! It arrests the flowing of heaven’s waters in the wilderness, and turns the streams of life to stagnant, putrid blood. It arrests the shining of heaven’s holy light, the illuminating influence of gospel truth, and plunges the world in gloom and darkness so gross that they may be felt. It arrests the healing hand of Divine grace and forgiveness, and substitutes for it the polluting touch of priestly fingers, stained and contaminated with lust, hypocrisy, and blood. It changes grace, that sweet and sacred mystery, spiritual, holy, not of the earth, free, oh, how free, and how Divine! for it is the Spirit’s influence ” it changes this into a mystical abomination, an insufferable compound, a something manipulated by the fingers of hypocrites, “ministered,” as they say, through sacraments, and sacraments of their own invention and management. Seven sacraments, forsooth! A something transmitted, too, through a generation of pretended vicars of Jesus Christ, and their agents, and doled out by them to a dying worm for pecuniary considerations! Do they not blush to perpetuate such damnable deceptions? Have the eternal interests of men no value in their eyes? Is the grace of God to be transmuted to a vile currency, that it may be deposited in the pockets of priests, and circulated by them as base coin is by rogues and vagabonds? Is conscience utterly dead within them? Dead? It is as good as dead; “seared with a hot iron,” till it has lost the sense of right and wrong, and can no longer feel the infamy of doctrines and deeds which would have made the men of Sodom blush with shame. A system which travesties the truth, hardens the conscience, enslaves the mind, corrupts the heart, which buries the Bible, prostitutes the ministry, profanes the sacraments, persecutes the saints, betrays and butchers the flock of Christ, and outrages all that is sacred and all that is Divine ” deserves and demands to be exposed, detested, judged, destroyed, and swept out of an injured world.

And God raised up the Reformation to do this work of protest, exposure, condemnation, and deliverance. To restore to men His word, to restore to them their rights, to open the eyes of nations, to raise them and make them stand upon their feet as responsible and free, to roll off their spirits the dark incubus, the eternal nightmare of priestly imposture and tyranny, to reestablish the ordinances and privileges of pure and primitive religion; such was the work of the Reformation which God wrought in Europe three centuries ago.

He who had raised up the prophets and apostles in olden times, He who raised up confessors and witnesses in the middle ages, raised up reformers in the sixteenth century, lionlike men, to undertake this mighty enterprise and accomplish this glorious work. There was that lion Luther, who shook Rome and Europe with his roar; and that lion Tyndale, who wrenched the Bible from the priests and gave it to us here in England in our own mother tongue, though it cost him his life to do it; and that Swiss lion Zwingle, who fell on the battlefield; and that lion of Picardy, John Calvin, who rose in his strength and majesty when Zwingle fell; and that lion John Knox of Scotland, who feared not the face of man, and turned not aside for any: these, and such as these, were the men through whom God overthrew in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, in England, Scotland, and Holland, the diabolical power and dominion of the Papacy.

We wish to invite your special attention to the fact that the convictions of the Reformers with reference to the character of the Papal Church, and the duty of separation from it, were largely derived from their study and interpretation of the prophetic Scriptures. We invite you to consider the manner in which the Reformers interpreted the prophecies bearing upon the Papal apostasy, the practical use which they made of them, and the power which these prophecies exerted in directing and sustaining the great work of the Reformation. To the Reformers Rome was the “Babylon” of the Apocalypse, and the Papal pontiff the predicted “man of sin.” Separation from the Church of Rome and from its pontifical head was regarded by them as a sacred duty. They urged on all Christian persons within the Church of Rome the apocalyptic command, “Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” To them separation from Rome was not separation from Christ, but from antichrist. This was the principle upon which they began and prosecuted the work of the Reformation, the principle which directed and supported them, and rendered them invincible.

Take first the case of the reformer Luther. Early in the year 1520, he wrote to Spalatinus thus: “I am extremely distressed in my mind. I have not much doubt but the pope is the real antichrist. The lives and conversation of the popes, their actions, their decrees, all agree most wonderfully to the descriptions of him in Holy Writ.”

In the autumn of the same year he printed a treatise on the “Babylonish Captivity of the Church.” Such was the title. In this he exposed the imposture of indulgences; he showed that their object is to rob men of money by the perversion of the gospel. In this animated production Luther called the Papacy “the kingdom of Babylon.” Meanwhile Leo X. published his famous damnatory bull against Luther, containing extracts from his works, and forbidding all persons to read his writings on pain of excommunication; commanding those who possessed his works to burn them; excommunicating Luther as an obstinate heretic delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, and commanding all secular princes, under pain of incurring the same censures and forfeiting all their dignities, to seize his person, that he might be punished as his crimes deserved.

In October of the same year, Luther wrote to Spalatinus: “At last the Roman bull is come, and Eckius is the bearer of it. I treat it with contempt. You see that the expressed doctrines of Christ Himself are here condemned. I feel myself now more at liberty, being assured that the popedom is antichristian and the seat of Satan.”

On December 1st he published two tracts in answer to the bull, one of which was entitled, “Martin Luther against the Execrable Bull of Antichrist.” In its conclusion he admonishes the pope and his cardinals no longer to persevere in madness, “no longer to act the undoubted part of the antichrist of Scriptures.”

On December 10th in the same year, 1520, Luther called together the professors and students in the town of Wittemberg, and publicly burned the Papal bull. Along with it he burned the canon law, the decretals, the Clementines, and the extravagants of the popes.

The die was now cast. Luther had declared war against the Roman pontiff. He had “boldly denominated him the man of sin, and exhorted all Christian princes to shake off his usurpations.” In this manner was the Reformation inaugurated.

In order to justify his action, Luther selected thirty articles from the code of Papal laws, as illustrating the contents of the books he had consumed. These he printed with pointed remarks, calling on the people to use their own judgment with reference to them. He sums up by saying that on comparing the different parts of the canon law, its language simply amounts to this: “that the pope is God on earth above all that is earthly, temporal, or spiritual; that all things belong to the pope, and that no one must venture to say, What doest thou?”

Here is an old black-letter copy of Luther’s “Commentary on the epistle to the Galatians.” Under the expression in the second verse, “the Churches of Galatia,” he says, “Wheresoever the substance of the holy sacraments remaineth, there is the holy Church, although antichrist there reigns, who, as the Scripture witnesseth, sitteth not in a stable of fiends, or in a swine-sty, or in a company of infidels, but in the highest and holiest place of all, namely, in the temple of God.”

Again he exclaims: “Is not this to sit in the temple of God, to profess himself to be ruler in the whole Church? What is the temple of God? Is it stones and wood? Did not Paul say, The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are? To sit ” what is it but to reign, to teach, and to judge? Who from the beginning of the Church has dared to call himself master of the whole Church but the pope alone? None of the saints, none of the heretics hath ever uttered so horrible a word of pride.” 1

Elsewhere again he says, 2 that when Daniel “saw the terrible wild beast which had ten horns, which by the consent of all is the Roman empire, he also beheld another small horn come up in the middle of them. This is the Papal power, which rose up in the middle of the Roman empire.”

Thus did Luther interpret prophecy; and under the influence of these interpretations of the prophetic teachings of Daniel, Paul, and John sprang up and advanced the glorious Reformation of the sixteenth century.

One of the witnesses of Luther’s disputation at Leipsic in the year 1519 was Philip Melanchthon, the learned professor of Greek at Wittemberg. Melanchthon was a man of wonderful ability and application. The treatment of the most difficult subjects became simple in his hands. He was one of the greatest theologians of his age, and composed the celebrated Confession of Augsburg in 1530, the foundation of the reformed German faith. As this Confession was intended to be publicly read to the hostile Roman Catholic emperor Charles V, in the presence of princes and ecclesiastical dignitaries, Melanchthon toned it down as far as possible, avoiding all judgments of the Roman Catholic Church which would cause offense. Luther complained of this omission. “Satan sees clearly,” said he, “that your apology has passed lightly over the articles of purgatory, the worship of saints, and above all of the pope and of antichrist. ” 3

Melanchthon lacked the bold spirit of Luther, but he shared most of his sentiments. He was clear in his convictions that Rome is the Babylon of the Apocalypse, and the pope the man of sin. 4 In his disputation on marriage, referring to the first Epistle to Timothy, he says, “Since it is most certain that the pontiffs and the monks have forbidden marriage, it is most manifest, and without any doubt true, that the Roman pontiff, with his whole order and kingdom, is the very antichrist.” 5 He adds: “Likewise in 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul clearly says that the man of sin shall rule in the Church, exalting himself against the worship of God, etc. But it is manifest that the popes do rule in the Church, and under title of the Church in defending idols. Wherefore I affirm that no heresy hath arisen, nor indeed shall be, with which these descriptions of Paul can more truly and certainly accord and agree than to this Papal kingdom.” 6

He further adds in the same disputation (article 25): “The prophet Daniel also attributes these two things to antichrist; viz., that he shall place an idol in the temple, and honor it with gold and silver, and that he shall not honor women. That both these things belong to the Roman pontiff, who does not clearly see? The idols are clearly the impious mass, the worship of saints, and the statues which are exhibited in gold and silver that they may be worshipped.”

The Reformation begun in Switzerland by Zwingle, who was previously canon and priest of Zurich, and carried on by Oecolampadius, Bullinger, and others, produced the Helvetic Confession, drawn up at Basle by reformed Swiss theologians, in 1536. This Confession, after being accepted and signed by the reformed cantons and towns, was sent to the Lutheran divines assembled at Smalkald in 1537. In both the Helvetic and Smalkald Confessions the Papacy is condemned as the predicted antichristian power. 7

The same great doctrine is taught in the valuable Bohemian Confession of 1573, which was composed of four Confessions of more ancient date.

John Calvin, that mighty theologian and reformer, whose works are published in fifty volumes, uttered upon this subject no uncertain sound. In his letter to the emperor Charles V, on the necessity of reforming the Church, he wrote as follows: “The arrogance of antichrist of which Paul speaks is, that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. For where is the incomparable majesty of God after mortal man has been exalted to such a height that his laws take precedence of God’s eternal decrees? I omit that the apostle describes the prohibitions of meats and of marriage as a doctrine of devils; that is surely bad enough: but the crowning impiety is to set man in a higher rank than God. If they deny the truth of my statement, I appeal to fact.” He goes on, “What are those two laws of celibacy and auricular confession but dire murderers of souls?” At the conclusion of this letter to the emperor he says: “I deny that see to be apostolical wherein naught is seen but a shocking apostasy; I deny him to be the vicar of Christ who in furiously persecuting the gospel demonstrates by his conduct that he is antichrist; I deny him to be the successor of Peter who is doing his utmost to demolish every edifice that Peter built; and I deny him to be the head of the Church who by his tyranny lacerates and dismembers the Church, after dissevering her from Christ, her true and only head.”

In his “Institutes of the Christian Religion” 8 Calvin again defends the view that the Roman pontiff is antichrist. “To some,” he says, “we seem slanderous and petulant when we call the Roman pontiff antichrist; but those who think so perceive not that they are bringing a charge of intemperance against Paul, after whom we speak, nay, in whose very words we speak..Paul says that antichrist would sit in the temple of God. ..Hence we infer that his tyranny is more over souls than bodies, a tyranny set up in opposition to the spiritual kingdom of God..When he adds that in his own time the mystery of iniquity, which was afterwards to be openly manifested, had begun to work in secret, we thereby understand that this calamity was neither to be introduced by one man, nor to terminate in one man. Moreover, when the mark by which he distinguishes antichrist is that he would rob God of his honor and take it to himself, he gives the leading feature which we ought to follow in searching out antichrist, especially when pride of this description proceeds to the open devastation of the Church. Seeing then it is certain that the Roman pontiff has impudently transferred to himself the most peculiar properties of God and Christ, there cannot be a doubt that he is the leader and standard bearer of an impious and abominable kingdom.”

Take now the testimony of William Tyndale. Here are several volumes containing the doctrines and treatises of that famous minister, reformer, and martyr, who first translated the New Testament from Greek into English. See how plainly this learned and honest man spoke out on the antichristian character of the Papacy. “Antichrist,” he says, “in another manner hath sent forth his disciples, those false anointed of which Christ warneth us before, that they should come and show miracles and wonders, even to bring the very elect out of the way, if it were possible. ..A bishop must be faultless, the husband of one wife. Nay, saith the pope, the husband of no wife, but the holder of as many women as he listeth. What saith the pope? I command to read the gospel in Latin..It is verily as good to preach to swine as to men, if thou preach it in a tongue they understand not..Well, saith the pope, if they will not be ruled, cite them to appear, and pose them sharply what they hold of the pope’s power, of his pardons, his bulls, of purgatory, of ceremonies, of confessions..If they miss in any point, make heretics of them and burn them..The emperors and kings are no other nowadays but even hangmen unto the popes and bishops, to kill whomsoever they condemn, without any more ado; as Pilate was unto the scribes and Pharisees and high bishops, to hang Christ..What signifieth that the prelates are so bloody, and clothed in red? That they be ready every hour to suffer martyrdom for the testimony of God’s word? Is that also not a false sign, when no man dare [before] them once open his mouth to ask a question of God’s word, because they are ready to bum him?. . Is not that shepherd’s hook, the bishop’s crosier, a false sign? Is not that white rochet that the bishops and canons wear, so like a nun and so effeminately, a false sign? What other things are their sandals, gloves, miters, and all the whole pomp of their disguising, than false signs, in which Paul prophesies that they should come? And as Christ warned us to beware of wolves in lambs’ skins, and bade us look rather unto their fruits and deeds than to wonder at their disguisings. Run throughout all our holy religions, and thou shalt find them likewise all clothed in falsehood.”

In his exposition of the famous passage about antichrist in the First Epistle of John, Tyndale says: “Though the Bishop of Rome and his sects give Christ these names (His rightful names), yet in that they rob Him of the effect, and take the signification of His names unto themselves, and make of Him but a hypocrite, as they themselves be, they be the right antichrists, and deny both the Father and the Son; for they deny the witness that the Father bore unto His Son, and deprive the Son of all the power and glory that His Father gave Him. For ‘whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father,’ for ‘no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and to whom the Son showeth Him.’ Moreover, if thou know not the mercy that God hath showed thee in Christ, thou canst not know Him as a Father. Thou mayest well, apart from Christ, know Him as a tyrant, and thou mayest know Him by His works as the old philosophers did, that there is a God; but thou canst neither believe in His mercy nor love His laws ” which is the only worship in the spirit save by Christ.”

All the other English reformers, including Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Bradford, and Jewell, held the pope of Rome to be the man of sin. So did John Knox in Scotland; and he sounded out his testimony on this subject as with a trumpet. Here is an old copy of Knox’s “History of the Reformation.” Its contents are thus described on the title page: “The manner, and by what persons, the light of Christ’s gospel has been manifested into this realm after that horrible and universal defection from the truth which has come by the means of that Roman antichrist.”

Knox begins his history by giving a list of the articles of faith attributed to the Lollards of Kyle, taken from the register of Glasgow. Of these the thirty-second article runs thus: That the pope is the head of the Kirk of antichrist.” After describing the affecting martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton ” whose dying words were, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! how long shall darkness overwhelm this realm? how long wilt Thou suffer this tyranny of men?” he tells how he himself was led to undertake the public preaching of God’s word. In the year 1547 Knox, wearied of removing from place to place by reason of persecution, came to the Castle of St. Andrews, resolved to leave Scotland for Germany. Here he took the part of a godly preacher named John Rough against Dean Annan, a Romanist. Knox wielded his pen with such effect that Annan was beaten from all his defenses, and was compelled to take shelter under the authority of the Church, which authority, he said, “damned all Lutherans and heretics, and therefore he needed no further disputation.” To this Knox answered: “Before we hold ourselves, or that ye can prove us, sufficiently convinced, we must define the Church by the right notes given to us in God’s Scripture of the true Church; we must discern the immaculate spouse of Jesus Christ from the mother of confusion, spiritual Babylon, lest that impudently we embrace a harlot instead of the chaste spouse; yea, to speak in plain words, lest that we submit ourselves to Satan, thinking that we submit ourselves to Jesus Christ. For, as your Roman Church, as it is now corrupted,…I no more doubt but that it is the synagogue of Satan, and the head thereof called the pope, to be the man of sin of whom the apostle speaketh, than that I doubt that Jesus Christ suffered by the procurement of the visible Church of Jerusalem. Yea, I offer myself by word or writing to prove the Roman Church this day further degenerate from the purity which was in the days of the apostles, than was the Church of the Jews from the ordinances given by Moses when they consented to the innocent death of Jesus Christ.”

Knox tells us that these words were “spoken in the open audience of the parish church of St. Andrews,” after Dean Annan’s delivery. The people, hearing the offer, urged Knox to lay his proofs before them in a public speech, saying that if Knox was right, they had been miserably deceived.

Knox consented, and was appointed to preach the following Sunday. On that day, he tells us, he preached his first sermon, taking his text from the seventh chapter of Daniel. He gives us an outline of its contents. It opened with a “short discourse” on the four empires the Babylonian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman ” as set forth by the four wild beasts of the seventh chapter of Daniel, and then showed that the persecuting “little horn” of the fourth empire was identical with the man of sin and antichrist, and signified the Roman Papacy. For this sermon Knox was called to account before a convention of “gray friars and black fiends,” as he calls them. Nine articles were laid against him. Of these the first was that he had taught that “no mortal man can be head of the Church”; and the second that “the pope is an antichrist, and so is no member of Christ’s mystical body.” Knox gives an account of his argument with the friars on this occasion, in which he evidently had the best of it. Thus was launched the Reformation in Scotland, and Knox’s sermon in St. Andrews on the “little horn” of prophecy struck its keynote and started its testimony.

The English reformers were no less clear in their views and emphatic in their teachings. Ridley thus expresses himself: “The see of Rome is the seat of Satan, and the bishop of the same, that maintaineth the abominations thereof is antichrist himself indeed; and for the same causes this see at this day is the same that St. John calls, in his Revelation, Babylon, or the whore of Babylon, and spiritual Sodom and Egypt, the mother of fornications and abominations upon earth.”

Latimer, when examined by the commissioners on his trial, said: “I confess there is a Catholic Church, to the determination of which I stand, but not the Church which you call Catholic, which sooner might be called diabolic.” In his second conference with Ridley he says: “Yea, what fellowship hath Christ with antichrist? therefore it is not lawful to bear the yoke with Papists. ‘Come forth from among them, and separate yourselves from them, saith the Lord.'”

Bishop Jewell wrote a most masterly and powerful commentary on Thessalonians, proving the pope of Rome to be the man of sin. Here is a copy of it. Take as a specimen the following sentences about antichrist: “Some say that he should be Jew of the tribe of Dan; some that he should be born in Babylon;…some that Mohammed is antichrist;…some that Nero was antichrist; some that he should be born of a friar and a nun; some that he should continue but three years and a half; some that he should turn trees upside down with the tops to the ground, and should force the roots to grow upwards, and then should flee up into heaven and fall down and break his neck. These tales have been craftily devised to beguile our eyes, that whilst we think upon these guesses, and so occupy ourselves in beholding a shadow, or probable conjecture of antichrist, he which is antichrist indeed may unawares deceive us.

“He will come in the name of Christ, yet will he do all things against Christ and under pretense and color of serving Christ; he shall devour the sheep and people of Christ; he shall deface whatsoever Christ hath taught; he shall quench that fire which Christ hath kindled; those plants which Christ hath planted he shall root up; he shall undermine that house which Christ hath built; he shall be contrary to Christ, his faith contrary to the faith of Christ, and his life contrary to the life of Christ..”

“Christ was humble and lowly. The prophet, in his own person, speaks of Him, Psalm 22: ‘I am a worm, and not a man; a shame of men, and the contempt of the people.’

And the apostle saith, Philippians 2: ‘He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.’

Behold His parents, His birth, His cradle; behold His life, His disciples, His doctrine, and His death; all were witnesses unto His humility. He saith of Himself, ‘The Son of man hath not where to rest His head’; and to His disciples He saith, ‘The kings of the Gentiles reign over them, and they that bear rule over them are called gracious lords; but ye shall not be so.’ And again, ‘Learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.'”

“Now, on the other part, take view of antichrist. Behold his birth, his place, his chair, his estate, his doctrine, his disciples; and all his life you shall see nothing but pomp and glory. Gregory calls him the king of pride. He is proud in life, proud in doctrine, proud in word, and proud in deeds; he is like Lucifer, and sets himself before his brethren, and over nations and kingdoms.”

“He makes every knee to bow down to him and worship him; he makes kings to bring him water, to carry his train, to hold his cup, to bear his dish, to lead his bridle, and to hold his stirrup; he claims power over heaven and earth; he saith he is lord over all the world, the lord of lords and the king of kings; that his authority reaches up into heaven and down into hell; that he can command the angels of God; that he condemns whom he will condemn; that he makes saints at his pleasure; that whatsoever he blesses is blessed, and that whatsoever he curses is cursed.”

“He sells merits, the forgiveness of sins, the sacrifice for the quick and the dead; he makes merchandise of the souls of men; he lays filthy hands upon the Lord’s anointed; he removes kings and deposes the states and princes of the world. This is antichrist; this is his power. Thus shall he work and make himself. So shall he sit in the temple of God. The people shall wonder at him, and shall have him in reverence; they shall say, Who is like unto the beast? who is so wise, so mighty, so godly, so virtuous, so holy, so like unto God? ” so intolerable and monstrous shall be his pride.”

Listen now to the dying testimony upon this subject of the well-known reformer Archbishop Cranmer. Let me read you the words he spoke just before his martyrdom: “Forasmuch as I am come to the last end of my life, whereupon all hangeth of my life past and of my life to come, either to live with my master Christ for ever in joy, or else to be in pain for ever with wicked devils in hell, and I see before mine eyes presently either heaven ready to receive me, or else hell ready to swallow me up, I shall therefore declare unto you my very faith, how I believe, without any color or dissimulation; for now it is not time to dissemble, whatsoever I have said or written in time past.” Having briefly expressed the chief articles of his faith, he refers to his previous recantation in the following terms: “And now I come to the great thing that so much troubleth my conscience more than anything I ever did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth, which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and which was written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be; and that is all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation, wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall first be burned; and as for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy, and antichrist, with all his false doctrines.”

On uttering this, Cranmer was pulled down from the stage and led to the fire. Having put off his outer garments, he stood there in a shirt which hung down to his feet. His beard was long and thick, and covered his bosom. Then was an iron chain tied about him, and the fire set to the faggots. When these were kindled, and the fire began to burn near him, stretching out his arm he put his right hand into the flame, holding it there immovable. Thus did he stand, moving no more than the stake to which he was bound. His eyes were lifted to heaven and often he repeated, “This hand hath offended; oh, this unworthy right hand!” At last, in the greatness of the flame, he cried, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” and gave up the ghost.

“Antichrist, which now by the will of God doth rage for the trial of our faith, doth nothing else but procure us a ready horse to bring us to heaven.” So said that holy man John Bradford; “brother Bradford,” as Ridley called him. And he too was burned. When led to the stake, he took a faggot in his hand and kissed it, rejoicing to suffer death in the cause of Christ. Standing then by the stake, with both hands uplifted, he cried, “O England, England! repent thee of thy sins; repent thee of thy sins; beware of idolatry; beware of the false antichrists; take heed they do not deceive thee.”

Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Bradford were burned for their testimony against the Papal antichrist, just as Huss and Jerome and Cobham had been before. Thousands of martyrdoms have sealed this testimony, and on this testimony rests the Reformation. To reject this testimony is to reject the foundation of that work; it is to reject the foundation of the noblest and divinest work which has been wrought in this world since the day of Pentecost.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not say that the teachings of Scripture prophecy form the sole foundation of the Reformation. The doctrinal and practical truths of Scripture guided the action of the reformers as well as the prophetic. They opposed the Church of Rome, as condemned alike by the doctrines, the precepts, and the prophecies of the word of God. It might be difficult to say which of the three weighed with them most. On each they were clear and emphatic. These three elements cannot be separated in estimating the springs of the Reformation. From the first, and throughout, that movement was energized and guided by the prophetic word. Luther never felt strong and free to war against the Papal apostasy till he recognized the pope as antichrist. It was then he burned the Papal bull. Knox’s first sermon, the sermon which launched him on his mission as a reformer, was on the prophecies concerning the Papacy. The reformers embodied their interpretations of prophecy in their confessions of faith, and Calvin in his “Institutes.” All the reformers were unanimous in the matter; even the mild and cautious Melanchthon was as assured of the antipapal meaning of these prophecies as was Luther himself. And their interpretation of these prophecies determined their reforming action. It led them to protest against Rome with extraordinary strength and undaunted courage. It nerved them to resist the claims of that apostate Church to the uttermost. It made them martyrs; it sustained them at the stake. And the views of the reformers were shared by thousands, by hundreds of thousands. They were adopted by princes and peoples. Under their influence nations abjured their allegiance to the false priest of Rome. In the reaction which followed, all the powers of hell seemed to be let loose upon the adherents of the Reformation. War followed war: tortures, burnings, and massacres were multiplied. Yet the Reformation stood undefeated and unconquerable. God’s word upheld it, and the energies of His almighty spirit. It was the work of Christ as truly as the founding of the Church eighteen centuries ago; and the revelation of the future which He gave from heaven ” that prophetic book with which the Scripture closes ” was one of the mightiest instruments employed in its accomplishment.

To resist the use to which Scripture prophecy was put by the reformers is no light or unimportant matter. The system of prophetic interpretation known as Futurism does resist this use. It condemns the interpretation of the reformers. It condemns the views of all these men, and of all the martyrs, and of all the confessors and faithful witnesses of Christ for long centuries. It condemns the Albigenses, the Waldenses, the Wicliffites, the Hussites, the Lollards, the Lutherans, the Calvinists; it condemns them all, and upon a point upon which they are all agreed, an interpretation of Scripture which they embodied in their solemn confessions and sealed with their blood. It condemns the spring of their action, the foundation of the structure they erected. How daring is this act, and how destitute of justification! What an opposition to the pillars of a work most manifestly diviner for it is no less than this, for Futurism asserts that Luther and all the reformers were wrong in this fundamental point. And whose interpretation of prophecy does it justify and approve? That of the Romanists. Let this be clearly seen. Rome felt the force of these prophecies, and sought to evade it. It had no way but to deny their applicability. It could not deny their existence in Scripture. They were there plainly enough. But it denied that these prophecies referred to the Romish Church and its head. It pushed them aside. It shifted them from the entire field of mediaeval and modern history. As to Babylon the Great, it asserted that it meant Rome pagan, not Rome Papal. Rome pagan shed all the blood referred to in Revelation 17,18. Rome Christian had shed none of it. Prophecy was eloquent about the deeds of the Caesars, but silent as to those of the popes; and this though the persecutions perpetrated by the popes had exceeded those of the Caesars. Prophecy expended its strength in warning the Church of the perils from heathenism which it perfectly understood, and was speechless as to the far greater perils arising from the Christian apostasy on which it needed the fullest warning and instruction. It was eagle-eyed as to dangers from without, but blind to dangers from within. It guided and guarded the Church of the three first centuries, but left the Church of the next thousand years and more without a lamp to light its footsteps. As to the prophecies of the man of sin, or antichrist, these had nothing to do with the middle ages, or with the Roman popes, or the long central centuries of the Church’s sorest conflicts; they only referred to a diminutive interval in the far off future, at the end of the world. The man of sin was only an ephemeral persecutor. His whole power was to continue but three and a half years. He was to be a cunning Jew of the tribe of Dan; a clever infidel who was to call himself God and set himself up in a Jewish temple at Jerusalem. Christians had nothing to do with him as such. A Jew was to do all the mischief. The whole evil was but a Jewish infidel spasm in the very last hour of history before the Second Advent. Therefore the reformers were all wrong in their denunciations of the Papacy. They were foolish, misguided, unreasonable, fanatical, and the popes were uncondemned by the voices of the prophets. Daniel and John said nothing about them. They were not the predicted apostates. What though they did shed the blood of heretics like water, and drink it like wine, and make themselves drunken with it, and exalt themselves above kings, and above the world, and clothe themselves with wealth and splendor, with purple and scarlet, gold and peats! what though they did sit supreme upon the seven hills, and ride and rule the Roman empire in its divided Gothic state, and use its powers for the persecution of heretics, and the suppression of what some presumed to call the gospel of Jesus Christ! The prophecies which those contemptible reformers and miserable so-called martyrs said applied to them did nothing of the sort; it was folly to suppose they did. They applied to other people and to other circumstances.

The thunders of prophecy were not directed against them, but against those dead Caesars, and that unborn Jew. And so they puffed at the reformers, and scoffed at the martyrs, and scorned and derided and despised them, and went on in their proud tyranny, and abated nothing of their blasphemous pretensions and blood persecutions.

Which think you were right in their interpretations of Scripture? Those proud popes, those cruel inquisitors, those inhuman monsters who mangled the bodies of holy men and women in their torture chambers, those sanctimonious murderers who stirred up all the might of Christendom, from century to century, against the gospel and against the faithful witnesses of Jesus; or those pure and persecuted saints, those faithful Waldenses and Wicliffites, those earnest Hussites and Lollards, those self-sacrificing Lutherans and Huguenots, those noble confessors, reformers, and martyrs? With one mind and mouth all these Protestants agreed in the substance of their protest. To them Rome was Babylon, and its proud head the antichrist. Were they all mistaken, deluded, and their cruel, tyrannical oppressors and persecutors correct? What think you?

Perhaps you say, But was Rome right in nothing? Must a doctrine be wrong because Rome holds it? Does not Rome hold the truth as to the divinity of Christ, and as to some other points of importance? I grant Rome holds some truths. It would have no moral power unless it did. Even the Mohammedans hold some great truths, and the heathen also. But mark, this is a question of Rome’s judgment concerning herself and the bearing of prophecy on her own history and character. It is here in this judgment that the Futurist claims that Rome was right, and the reformers in the wrong. And the consequences are most serious, for we are living in an age of revived Papal activity. Not only is the Papacy exerting an enormous influence in the outside world, not only has it formulated and decreed its own infallibility, not only is it attacking Protestantism in its strongholds with every weapon in its reach, political, civil, religious, but the principles and practices of the system it guides and governs have been introduced into the bosom of the Protestant Church, and planted securely within its walls, and are working most disastrously for its corruption and overthrow. Never was there a time in the Church’s history when she more needed the barriers which prophecy has erected for her protection. And now when they are so sorely needed, they are not to be found. Futurism has crept into the Protestant Church, and broken down these sacred walls. Romanists, Ritualists, and Protestant Futurists are all agreed as to the non- applicability of Scripture prophecies to the Church of Rome and the Papacy. The Romanists are two hundred millions, the Ritualists are hundreds of thousands, and Protestant Futurists are many thousands in number. They all deny these prophecies their place and office. They remove these barriers. What then is to keep out the incoming Papal flood? The word of prophecy in its solemn warnings of the dangers the Church has to encounter, the foes it has to resist, is asserted to be silent as to this. Why then should this be feared? The reformers were mistaken; the popes were right. Charles V and Charles IX, Philip of Spain and Mary of England, the Duke of Alva and Louis XIV, and all the tribe of Innocents and Leos, Gregories and Clements, Pius IV and Pius IX ” all these were right in rejecting the fundamental position that Papal Rome is Babylon, and its head antichrist; and all the reformers, without an exception, were wrong in maintaining it; they were foolish interpreters of the “sure word of prophecy,” and utterly in error as to the real testimony of Scripture concerning the Church of Rome.

Is this the position you adopt? Is this the conclusion you defend? Are these the views you advocate? You, a Protestant, and this after all that has been written upon the subject, and all the blaze of light which history and experience have poured upon it? If it is, look to it that you be not found fighting against the truth, warring against the word of God, resisting the testimony of the prophetic Spirit; hindering the work of the Reformation, promoting the progress of the apostasy, opposing Christ, and helping antichrist.

Even the Romanists themselves shame you in their clear-sighted comprehension of the issues of this question. Cardinal Manning says, “The Catholic Church is either the masterpiece of Satan or the kingdom of the Son of God.” Cardinal Newman says, “A sacerdotal order is historically the essence of the Church of Rome; if not divinely appointed, it is doctrinally the essence of antichrist.” In both these statements, the issue is clear, and it is the same. Rome herself admits, openly admits, that if she is not the very kingdom of Christ, she is that of antichrist. Rome declares she is one or the other. She herself propounds and urges this solemn alternative. You shrink from it, do you? I accept it. Conscience constrains me. History compels me. The past, the awful past rises before me. I see THE GREAT APOSTASY, I see the desolation of Christendom, I see the smoking rains, I see the reign of monsters; I see those vice-gods, that Gregory VII, that Innocent III, that Boniface VIII, that Alexander VI, that Gregory XIII, that Pius IX; I see their long succession, I hear their insufferable blasphemies, I see their abominable lives; I see them worshipped by blinded generations, bestowing hollow benedictions, bartering lying indulgences, creating a paganized Christianity; I see their liveried slaves, their shaven priests, their celibate confessors; I see the infamous confessional, the mined women, the murdered innocents; I hear the lying absolutions, the dying groans; I hear the cries of the victims; I hear the anathemas, the curses, the thunders of the interdicts; I see the racks, the dungeons, the stakes; I see that inhuman Inquisition, those fires of Smithfield, those butcheries of St. Bartholomew, that Spanish armada, those unspeakable dragonnades, that endless train of wars, that dreadful multitude of massacres. I see it all, and in the name of the ruin it has wrought in the Church and in the world, in the name of the truth it has denied, the temple it has defiled, the God it has blasphemed, the souls it has destroyed; in the name of the millions it has deluded, the millions it has slaughtered, the millions it has damned; with holy confessors, with noble reformers, with innumerable martyrs, with the saints of ages, I denounce it as the masterpiece of Satan, as the body and soul and essence of antichrist.

Three centuries have rolled by since the accomplishment of the glorious Reformation. These centuries have a double aspect a Protestant, and a Papal. On the one hand, they present the spectacle of an era of liberty and light; and, on the other hand, of reaction and revolution. In the history of Protestantism these centuries have been an era of liberty, civil and religious. In A.D. 1500 there was not a free nation in Europe; all were subject to the tyrannical government of Rome. Now half Europe and America are free from that intolerable yoke. In the year 1500 there was hardly a Protestant to be found in the world; Rome had exterminated them all by prolonged and cruel persecution. At the present day Protestants are 150,000,000 in number.

And the last three centuries have been an era of light. At their commencement the human mind experienced an emancipation, and was furnished with new instruments. Learning was revived, and the art of printing discovered. Since then the Word of God has been multiplied, translated, and expounded as never before. And the understanding of prophecy has shared the general advance. During this time libraries have been written on the prophetic Scriptures. Mighty interpreters have been raised up, men such as Mede, Sir Isaac Newton, Elliott, whose investigations have drawn back the veil of long continued ignorance, and let in new light upon some of the darkest obscurities of the theme. Interpreters have risen in groups like constellations of stars, and knowledge has increased.

On the other hand, post-Reformation times have been times of Papal reaction and revolution. In the first place, the Protestant Reformation was encountered by a tremendous Papal reaction, the rising wave of life and liberty was met by a counterwave of resistance. Hardly was the ship of a Protestant Church set free and launched upon the deep than there arose a mighty tempest. The resurrection of the slain “witnesses” of Christ in the person of the reformers was answered by a resurrection of all the powers of the pit. The awakening of men’s souls brought war, ecclesiastical and civil, a war of anathemas and a war of extermination. Swords flashed forth, flames were kindled; Rome rose in its anger and its might, and did wondrously. She thundered excommunications, she slaughtered millions; not without an awful struggle would the prince of darkness give up his kingdom. No! Look to it, ye brave reformers; ye will need the armory of heaven and its help, for the hosts of hell are roused against you. Ye may conquer, but it shall be through strife and anguish, and seas of blood.

Draw up your confessions of faith, ye blessed restorers of a pure gospel; dare to give them to the world if ye will, but ye shall be stoutly answered. Against your Confession of Augsburg Rome shall erect her Council of Trent: she shall formulate her canons and decrees; she shall impose her Creed of Pius IV, and utter her chorus of anathemas.

Rise up, O Luther! cry out concerning “the Babylonian captivity of the Church,” burn the Papal bull, rouse Germany; but you shall have your match. Satan shall bring forth his Loyola, and Loyola his Jesuits subtle, learned, saintly in garb and name, protean in form, infinite in disguises, innumerable, scholars, teachers, theologians, confessors of princes, politicians, rhetoricians, casuists; instruments keen, unscrupulous, double-edged; men fitted to every sphere and every enterprise they shall swarm against the Church of the Reformation, each one wise in the wisdom and strong in the strength which are not from above but from beneath.

Rise up, Zwingle, thou lion of Zurich! lead forth thy brave Swiss against the enemies of liberty and truth! but ye must perish on the field of battle ere your cause succeed.

Ride forth, fair flower of France! strive, ye brave Huguenots, for your country’s freedom and the faith of the gospel! But Paris shall run with your blood; ye shall fall like leaves from a tree shaken by tempest; ye shall lie in heaps, like rubbish in the streets; your bodies shall choke the streams, they shall rot in rivers, they shall hang in chains, they shall be shoveled into cemeteries, or buried in dung-heaps. Rome shall ring her joy- bells and sing her Te Deums, and fill her cathedrals and palaces with acclamations because the massacre of St. Bartholomew has overthrown, for a time, the work of the Reformation in France.

Stand up, ye Hollanders! stand up, William the Silent! stand up, ye men of Haarlem and Rotterdam, of Amsterdam and Leyden, ye brave burghers and earnest theologians. Ye dare to contend for civil liberty and sacred truth: your land shall groan beneath the tread of Alva’s troops; your fortresses shall fall, your citizens shall be thrust through with Spanish swords, your possessions shall be plundered, your wives and your daughters shall be dishonored and foully murdered, your children trampled beneath horse-hoofs, and trodden down like mire in the streets.

Break thy chains, O England! Rome shall find means to rivet them again; thou shalt have thy bloody Mary, and thy fires of Smithfield. Protestant bishops shall burn for it; against thy seagirt isle Spain shall send her proud armada; a fleet of one hundred and thirty great ships of war shall come across the seas, twelve of them named after the twelve apostles; they shall be laden with seamen and troops, with swords and guns, with priests and Jesuits; the pope shall bless the banners. Woe to thee, O England, if Heaven help thee not, if its winds forsake thy cause!

Combine yourselves together, ye Protestant states of Germany: claim your rights of conscience; stand for the truth; establish your Protestant liberties: but you shall have your desolating war of thirty years! From Bohemia to the broad waters of the Scheldt, from the banks of the Po to the shores of the Baltic, whole countries shall be devastated, harvests destroyed, cities and villages reduced to ruins! half Europe shall be set on fire, and civilization shall be buried for a season in bloodshed and barbarism.

The apostate Church commands the swords of Latin Christendom the harlot rides the beast, and the beast has claws and great iron teeth, and sharp, strong horns, and inhuman ferocity: she sits proudly upon it, and it obeys her, grasping, rending, and crushing whom she will. But what if the beast should grow weary of carrying her? What if the beast should take a dislike to her usurping ways? What if it should resist her, and cast her off and turn its power against her, and serve her as she had served others? Ah! that would be a different story, but not an experience unforetold. John foresaw it would be thus eighteen centuries ago, and history has fulfilled his predictions: for Romish reaction was followed by democratic revolution; 1572 was followed by 1793, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew by the Reign of Terror. France Papal crushed France Protestant, and was crushed in its turn by France infidel. Have you not heard of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Robespierre, of Danton, of the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, of the massacres in Paris in 1793, of the guillotine, of the noyades or wholesale drownings, of how the river Loire was choked with corpses, of the war in La Vendee, of the worship of the goddess of reason, of the turning cathedrals into stables, of the forty thousand churches, chapels, and oratories tom down by the revolutionists, of the massacre and banishment of priests and Jesuits, of the burning of palaces, the beggaring of princes, the overthrow of monarchy and government and aristocracy and corrupt religion, as by the heavings of a social earthquake, or the outburstings of an irresistible volcano? Have you not heard of how the infidel democracy rose in its might, struck down the powers which had deceived and oppressed it, confiscated all the vast revenues of the Church, the domains of the Crown, the estates of the nobles, “slaughtered one million and twenty-two thousand persons, of all ranks and ages, and both sexes, till the streets of Paris ran with blood, and the guillotines could not overtake their work”? And have you not heard how a little later on the Papal States were conquered by Napoleon, and converted into a Roman republic; how the Papacy was extinguished, the Vatican plundered, ecclesiastical property confiscated, and the pope dragged from the altar, and sent as a prisoner to die in exile? Are not these matters of history, and of recent history? Here is Thiers’ “History of the French Revolution”; here is Alison’s history of that revolution, in twelve volumes; and here is Carlyle’s history of the same, written as with a pen of fire. It is but a century since these things were accomplished, and the after-waves of that mighty revolution are rolling still.

These two great movements which have followed the Reformation, the Papal reaction of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Revolution of the 18th century, have mightily helped to open men’s eyes to the true character of Romanism, and to the fulfillment of the prophetic Scriptures. The last three centuries have consequently witnessed a great advance in the comprehension of prophecy, and we are this evening to study the expositions which have resulted.

First, note the fact that Rome’s reply to the Reformation in the 16th century included an answer to the prophetic teachings of the Reformers. Through the Jesuits Ribera and Bellarmine, Rome put forth her futurist interpretation of prophecy. Ribera was a Jesuit priest of Salamanca. In 1585 he published a commentary on the Apocalypse, denying the application of the prophecies concerning antichrist to the existing Church of Rome. He was followed by Cardinal Bellarmine, a nephew of Pope Marcellus II, who was born in Tuscany in 1542, and died in Rome in 1621. Bellarmine was not only a man of great learning, but “the most powerful controversialist in defense of Popery that the Roman Church ever produced.”

Clement VIII used these remarkable words on his nomination: “We choose him, because the Church of God does not possess his equal in learning.” Bellarmine, like Ribera, advocated the futurist interpretation of prophecy. He taught that antichrist would be one particular man, that he would be a Jew, that he would be preceded by the reappearance of the literal Enoch and Elias, that he would rebuild the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, compel circumcision, abolish the Christian sacraments, abolish every other form of religion, would manifestly and avowedly deny Christ, would assume to be Christ, and would be received by the Jews as their Messiah, would pretend to be God, would make a literal image speak, would feign himself dead and rise again, and would conquer the whole world Christian, Mohammedan, and heathen; and all this in the space of three and a half years. He insisted that the prophecies of Daniel, Paul and John, with reference to the antichrist, had no application whatever to the Papal power.

The futurist writings of Ribera and Bellarmine were ably answered by Brightman, of whose work on the Apocalypse, published about the year 1600, this is a copy; and they have been answered since his time in a succession of learned works which I cannot stop to enumerate: for I desire to dwell upon another, and, as I regard it, a more important phase of prophetic interpretation marking the last three centuries, a phase not of a negative but of a positive character. Protestant interpreters have done more than answer the false futurism of the Church of Rome. They have built up the true historic interpretation of prophecy; they have built up a solid and symmetrical system, a system which has developed slowly, which has progressed constantly, which has been born not of diligent investigation only, but of profound experience; a system whose truth has been sealed and demonstrated by its ever-growing correspondence with the actual course of events. True theology, like true science, is slow in development. The growth of astronomy, for example, has extended through six thousand years. The system of Ptolemy was corrected by that of Copernicus; that of Copernicus was advanced by the laws of Kepler and the wonderful discoveries of Newton; and then further perfected by the Herschels and many others in recent times.

Keeping strictly to the prophecies relating to Romanism and the Reformation, I will now endeavor to show you some of the analogous progress which has been made in their comprehension during the last 250 years. The following names represent a complete pillar of prophetic interpretation: Joseph Mede, Sir Isaac Newton, Jurieu, Vitringa, Daubuz, Fleming, De Chesaux, Bishop Newton, Faber, Cunninghame, Keith, Bickersteth, Wordsworth, Elliott, and Birks. Their principal works are on this table, and I will now briefly trace the progress they exhibit in prophetic interpretation made in the last two and a half centuries.

Joseph Mede was a fellow of Christ’s College in Cambridge, and lived in the first half of the 17th century, the century immediately succeeding that of the Reformation. He was a man of great learning and diligence, and deep insight into the Divine word, and made prophecy his special study. Dr. Twisse, who was prolocutor in the Westminster Assembly of Divines, wrote a preface to Mede’s work on the Apocalypse, in which he says that “as it is written of the virtuous woman in the Proverbs of Solomon, ‘many daughters have done virtuously, but thou surmountest them all,’ so it may be said of Mede’s exposition of Revelation: many interpreters have done excellently, but he surmounteth them all.” Mede’s key to the Apocalypse, written in Latin, was translated into English by Richard More, one of the burgesses in the English Parliament; and the House of Commons published that translation in 1641, the year of the great massacre of Protestants in Ireland. Here is a copy of that work published by the House of Commons. The Puritan Parliament set its seal thus upon the historical antipapal interpretation of prophecy, and upon this valuable work of Joseph Mede. Mede did what no interpreter had previously done; he laid down the important principle, that, for the correct understanding of the Apocalypse, it is necessary, in the first place, to fix the order of its principal visions apart from the question of their interpretation. Accordingly Mede sought to exhibit the synchronism and the succession of these visions, or the order of the prophecies contained in the Apocalypse. Setting aside and ignoring for the time all question of the meaning of these prophecies, he endeavored to demonstrate from the visions themselves the position they occupy with reference to one another. Their mutual relations once proved serve as a most valuable clue to their significance. Mede prefaces his work with the prayer: “Thou who sittest upon the throne, and Thou, O Lamb, Root of David, who wast only worthy to take and open this book, open the eyes of Thy servant, and direct his hand and mind, that in these Thy mysteries he may discern and produce something which may tend to the glory of Thy name and profit of the Church.”

The first synchronism which Mede establishes is that of what he calls a “noble quaternion of prophecies,” remarkable by reason of the equality of their times. First, of the woman remaining in the wilderness for three and a half times, or as it is declared in the prophecy, 1,260 days; second, of the beast whose deadly wound was healed ruling forty-two months; third, of the outer court of the temple trodden underfoot by the Gentiles for the same number of months; fourth, of the witnesses prophesying in sackcloth 1,260 days. Mede points out that not only are these times equal, but they begin at the same period and end together, and must therefore synchronize throughout their course. The events of the last 250 years have confirmed Mede’s interpretation as to the general synchronism of these times, but they have also shown that these periods should be reckoned from an era rather than from a point of time; and that they terminate in a corresponding era. The three and a half times of prophecy date from the era of the rise of the Papal and Mohammedan powers, and extend to the era of the overthrow of those powers; in which era we are living at the present day. Let me refer you to a work on this subject which I published a year ago, entitled “Light for the Last Days,” tracing these prophetic times, and the eras of their commencement and close. Mede established several other synchronisms; as, for example, one between the revived Roman head of Revelation 13, and the two-horned, lamb-like beast, which John calls elsewhere “the false prophet,” which acts for the revived head. He shows that the two are inseparable companions; that they are together alike in their rising and in their ruin, that the one exercises the power of the other, and thus, whatever be their meaning, that they are necessarily synchronous. He then traces the position of the remaining visions of the Apocalypse as they stand related to these, showing which precede these central visions, which synchronize with them, and which succeed them; thus making out and establishing the connection and order of the entire series of visions; and this, as I have already stated, apart from all question of interpretation. Having gone through the book of Revelation thus, Mede next proceeds to expound and demonstrate its fulfillment in the events of history.

I have said that Mede’s work on Revelation was approved and printed by the Puritan Parliament. Just at that time the Westminster Assembly of Divines drew up its most valuable Confession of Faith, a Confession subsequently accepted by the national Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Here is a copy containing a list of the hundred Puritan divines who met in the Westminster Assembly, headed by the name of Dr. William Twisse, the prolocutor, who wrote the preface to Mede’s work to which I have already referred. The Westminster Confession of Faith endorsed the historical interpretation of prophecy, and declared the Roman pontiff to be the predicted “man of sin.” Weigh well the following words of the Westminster divines upon this subject, embodied in the 25th chapter of their solemn declaration of the things they held and taught on the authority of Scripture. “There is no other head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof but is that antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ and all that is called God.”

One of the divines who put his hand to this statement was the famous Puritan writer, Dr. Thomas Goodwin, of London, and he has left us an exposition of the book of Revelation of which this is a copy. It belongs, I need hardly say, to the historical school, and describes the Apocalypse as “the story of Christ’s kingdom.”

Sir Isaac Newton followed Mede and the Puritan writers and further advanced the comprehension of prophecy. He was a Christian as well as a philosopher, and took delight in studying and comparing the works and word of God. The vastness of his genius led him to the most extensive views of things natural and Divine. He studied nature as a whole, history as a whole, chronology as a whole, and, in connection with these, prophecy as a whole. While Mede directed his attention especially to the Apocalypse, Newton investigated both it and the book of Daniel, tracing out their connections with the course of history and chronology, utilizing in the latter his unrivaled astronomical skill. Here is a copy of his “Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John,” printed in the year 1733, six years after his death. In the first chapter Newton says: “Among the old prophets Daniel is most distinct in order of time, and easiest to be understood, and therefore in those things which relate to the last times he must be made the key to the rest. In the third chapter he says: “The prophecies of Daniel are all of them related to one another as if they were but several parts of one general prophecy given at several times. The first is the easiest to be understood, and every following prophecy adds something new to the former.” “In the vision of the image composed of four metals the foundation of all Daniel’s prophecies is laid. It represents a body of four great nations which should reign over the earth successively, viz. the people of Babylonia, the Persians, the Greeks, and Romans; and by a stone cut out without hands which fell upon the feet of the image and brake all the four metals to pieces and became a great mountain and filled the whole earth, it further represents that a new kingdom should arise after the four, and conquer all those nations, and grow very great, and last till the end of all ages.” In chapter 4 he says: “In the next vision, which is of the four beasts, the prophecy of the four empires is repeated with several new additions, such as are the two wings of the lion, the three ribs in the mouth of the bear, the four wings and four heads of the leopard, the eleven horns of the fourth beast, and the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of days sitting in judgment.”

In chapter 7 he expounds the “little horn” of the fourth beast, with eyes as a seer and a mouth speaking great things, and changing times and laws; and shows it to represent a power both prophetic and kingly, and that such a seer, a prophet, and a king is the Roman Papacy. He traces its rise, and the contemporaneous rise of the ten horns at the fall of the western Roman empire. He traces also its dominion, and anticipates its doom at the close of the foretold period. He interprets the days of prophecy as years, reckoning, to use his own words, a prophetic day for a solar year. He shows the futurity in his time, and proximity of the worldwide overthrow of the Papal power. He says that the time had not then come perfectly to understand these mysterious prophecies, “because the main revolution predicted in them had not yet come to pass. In the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God shall be finished, as He hath declared to His servants the prophets; and then the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ, and He shall reign for ever.” Till then, he says, “we must content ourselves with interpreting what hath been already fulfilled.” He adds: “Amongst the interpreters of the last age there is scarce one of note who hath not made some discovery worth knowing, and thence I seem to gather that God is about opening these mysteries.”

He points out that an angel must fly through the midst of heaven with the everlasting gospel to preach to all nations before Babylon falls and the Son of man reaps His harvest, and says: “If the general preaching of the gospel be approaching, it is to us and our posterity that those words mainly belong, ‘In the time of the end the wise shall understand, but none of the wicked shall understand.’ ‘Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein.'”

How marvelously has Sir Isaac Newton’s anticipation of a general preaching of the gospel been accomplished in the glorious evangelization of the world during the last century!

This judicious writer expressed it as his opinion to Whiston, his learned successor, that the Church of Rome was destined to be overthrown by a tremendous infidel revolution; in other words, that superstition would be trodden down by infidelity. Remembering that Sir Isaac Newton died half a century before the French Revolution, this was a very remarkable anticipation!

One of the most important features of Sir Isaac Newton’s work is its exposition of the use of symbolic language in prophecy. He lays it down as a principle, that “for understanding the prophecies we are in the first place to acquaint ourselves with the figurative language of the prophets.

This language is taken from the analogy between the world natural, and an empire or kingdom considered as a world politic.” The prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse being symbolic in their language are not to be interpreted literally. In these books the sun, moon, stars, earth, fire, meteors, winds, storms, lightning, hail, rain, waters, sea, rivers, floods, dry land, overflowing of waters, drying up of waters, fountains, islands, trees, mountains, wilderness, beasts, as the lion, bear, leopard, goat, with their horns, heads, feet, wings, teeth, etc., are all symbolic; they are symbols of things of a different nature, though things analogous to these, or in some sense resembling them. On this principle, for example, the two witnesses of Revelation 11 are symbolic, and do not represent two actual men from whose mouth literal fire proceeds, and who literally shut heaven, and literally turn waters to blood, and smite the earth with literal plagues, and who are slain and lie dead for three and a half literal days, and then literally rise from the dead, and literally and visibly ascend to heaven in a cloud; nor is their ascension followed by a literal earthquake, and a literal fall of the tenth part of a literal city, and by literal lightnings, voices, thunderings, and hail. All these are symbols of other things, and their literal interpretation is an absurdity. Futurists utterly degrade these solemn and majestic predictions by their pernicious attempts to expound them on the principle of a literal fulfillment. The first step in the direction of the comprehension of these prophecies is the consistent recognition of their symbolic character. A sufficient number of these symbols are divinely interpreted for us, to serve as a clue to all the rest, as when a beast is explained to represent a kingdom, and a candlestick a local Church. The second step to a comprehension of symbolic prophecy is the settlement of the meaning of the various symbols which they employ.

Contemporaneous with Sir Isaac Newton there were several great Huguenot expositors of prophecy. Among these I may name Jurieu and Daubuz. Both these were exiled Huguenots, and belonged to the five hundred thousand Protestants who were compelled to leave France by the persecuting action of Louis XIV in revoking the Edict of Nantes. Their sufferings under the Papal power turned their attention to the prophetic word, and in it they found support and consolation. Jurieu, for example, begins his prophetic work with the sentence: “The afflicted Church seeks for consolation. Where can she find it but in the promises of God?” Here is a copy of this work by Jurieu, published in 1687, entitled, “The Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies; or, The Approaching Deliverance of the Church,” “proving that the Papacy is the antichristian kingdom, and that that kingdom is not far from its ruin; that the present persecution may end in three years and a half, after which the destruction of antichrist shall begin, which shall be finished in the beginning of the next age, and then the kingdom of Christ shall come upon the earth.”

Here is another work published at the same period by one of the exiled Huguenot ministers. Its title runs thus: “A New System of the Apocalypse: written by a French Minister in the year 1685, and finished but two days before the dragoons plundered him of all except this Treatise.” The author anticipated that the reformed religion overthrown by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes would be again reestablished in three and a half years; which it was in the most remarkable manner, though not just as he expected. The great English Revolution, which brought about the re- establishment of Protestantism, followed three and a half years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and these men lived to see it, and to rejoice in it. The author of this little work points out the futurity at that time of the vials on Papal Rome, in which he was evidently correct. Here is another Huguenot work of the same period, written by an exiled minister, describing the way in which all Protestants throughout France had been forbidden, under the severest penalties, to assemble for the worship of God; and also forbidden to leave the country under pain of the galleys or even condemnation to death. This work traces in a very remarkable way the similarity of the experience of the reformed Church in this last great Papal persecution, to that of the Jews under Antiochus Epiphanes in the time of the Maccabees. It contains in an appendix the famous bull of Pope Clement XI, condemning a hundred Jansenist propositions as “false, pernicious, injurious, outrageous, seditious, impious, blasphemous,” etc. The hundred propositions taken from the works of the Jansenists are given here, and they are all most excellent and in perfect harmony with the teachings of Scripture. Among them are the following:

“Proposition 79. It is useful and necessary at all times, in all places, and for all sorts of persons, to study the Scripture, and to understand its spirit, piety, and mysteries.”

“Proposition 84. It is to close to Christian people the mouth of Jesus Christ to take from their hands the holy word of God, or to keep it shut in taking from them the means of understanding it.” In other words, to take the Bible out of the hand of Christian people, or to take away from them the means of understanding the Scripture, is to shut the mouth of Christ Himself as far as they are concerned.

“Proposition 85. To forbid the reading of Scripture, and particularly of the gospel, to Christians is to forbid the use of light to the children of light.” Which proposition also the pope condemns as an insufferable and abominable doctrine, and adds: “We forbid to all the faithful of both sexes to think, teach, or speak on these propositions in any other way than as we lay down in this constitution or bull; and whoever shall teach, understand, or expound these propositions, or any of them, in public or private in any other way than is laid down by the pope, subjects himself to the severest censures and condemnations of the Church, and incurs the indignation of Almighty God, and of the holy apostles Peter and Paul.” All the propositions cited by Clement XI in this bull, and condemned by him as “scandalous, impious, blasphemous,” are as scriptural as those we have quoted.

I have mentioned Daubuz among these exiled Huguenots. He was the author of a large and learned commentary upon the Apocalypse of considerable value, with which I must associate, as belonging to the same period, the “Commentary on Revelation” published by the learned Dutch professor, Vitringa. Here are copies of these two works. Vitringa’s was published in 1695, and the commentary by Daubuz in 1720. They both belong to the historical school, and exhibit an erudition of the widest range, both secular and ecclesiastical, embracing Hebrew, Greek, and other literature bearing on the interpretation of prophecy.

The well-known prophetic student Robert Fleming lived at the time of Vitringa and Daubuz. He published, in the year 1701, a small but remarkable work, of which this is a copy, entitled, “The Rise and Fall of Rome Papal.” Its theme is the relation of Papal and prophetic chronology. Fleming shows, as others had done for many centuries, that the 1,260 days of prophecy represent 1,260 years, and advocates their interpretation upon the intermediate or calendar scale, which would shorten the whole period by eighteen years. Reckoning from the most important dates in the rise of the Papacy, and guided by the prophetic times, Fleming indicated two years then future which would be marked in all probability by crises in the overthrow of the Papal power, the years 1794 and 1848; he also mentions 1866. Now it should be remembered that Fleming published this work in 1701, and that the French Revolution fell out at the first of the dates which he indicated the Reign of Terror took place, as you will remember, in 1793; and that the year 1848 brought another tremendous crisis in Papal history. The revolution that year broke out in Paris on February 23rd, and before March 5th every country lying between the Atlantic and the Vistula had in a greater or less degree been revolutionized. On March 15th, a fortnight after the fall of Louis Philippe, a constitution was proclaimed at Rome, and the pope fled to Gaeta, and was subsequently formally deposed from his temporal authority, and an Italian republic proclaimed. The year 1866 was equally or even more important, as introducing the series of Papal defeats which culminated four years later, in 1870, in the overthrow of the Papal monarchy in France, and the fall of the Papal temporal power in Italy.

“Is it not a proof that this historical expositor Fleming was working on right lines, and had seized the true clue, that he should have fixed, nearly a century beforehand, on the close of the eighteenth century as the commencement of the era of Divine vengeance on the Papal power, and have pointed out, within a single year, the very central period of that signal judgment; 1 and that he should have similarly indicated the years 1848 and 1866 as years of Papal overthrow, saying, with reference to the former, “We are not to imagine that this vial will totally destroy the Papacy, though it will exceedingly weaken it, for we find it still in being and alive when the next vial is poured out”? The vial which succeeds he interprets as the judgment on the Mohammedan power, especially as existing in Turkey; and by the vial which follows that again, the seventh vial, he understands the final destruction of Rome or mystical Babylon. He says: “As Christ concluded His sufferings on the cross with this voice, ‘It is finished,’ so the Church’s sufferings are concluded with a voice out of the temple of heaven, and from the throne of God and Christ there, saying, ‘It is done.’ And therefore with this doth the blessed millennium of Christ’s spiritual reign on earth begin.” 2

About fifty years later than the time of Fleming, or in the middle of the last century, was published a work by a Swiss astronomer named De Cheseaux, entitled “Historical, Chronological, and Astronomical Remarks on Certain Parts of the Book of Daniel.” A copy of this book exists in the British Museum. It demonstrates the astronomic character of the prophetic times. It proves, in the clearest and most conclusive way, that the 1,260 years of prophecy, and the 2,300 years of prophecy, and also the period of 1,040 years which is their difference are astronomic cycles of one and the same character, luni-solar cycles, or cycles harmonizing the revolutions of sun and moon, and affecting the order of time dealt with in the calendar. These discoveries are of the deepest interest. As M. de Cheseaux says: For many ages the book of Daniel, and especially these passages of it, have been quoted and commented on by numerous and varied authors, so that it is impossible for a moment to call in question their antiquity. Who can have taught their author the marvelous relation of the periods he selected with soli-lunar revolutions? Is it possible, considering all these points, to fail to recognize in the author of the book of Daniel the Creator of the heavens and of their hosts, of the earth and the things that are therein?

I cannot enlarge at the present time on De Cheseaux’s discoveries. If you desire to know more about them, you will find a chapter on the subject in my work on the “Approaching End of the Age.” I must notice one more writer of the last century, the excellent Bishop Newton, whose deservedly popular work on prophecy has gone through so many editions. Newton acted on Lord Bacon’s suggestion, expressed in his “Advancement of Learning,” that a history of prophecy was wanted, in which every prophecy of the Scripture should be compared with the event fulfilling it. The twenty- sixth dissertation of Newton’s work recapitulates his exposition of the prophecies relating to Romanism. In it he says: “The prophecies relating to Popery are the greatest and most essential, and the most striking part of the revelation. Whatever difficulty and perplexity there may be in other passages, yet here the application is obvious and easy. Popery being the great corruption of Christianity, there are indeed more prophecies relating to that than to almost any other distant event. It is a great object of Daniel’s, and the principal object of St. Paul’s, as well of St. John’s prophecies; and these considered and compared together will mutually receive and reflect light from, and upon, each other.” Bishop Newton considered that the sounding of the seventh trumpet, or pouring out of the third woe, the woe of the vials, upon the Papacy was still future in his day, and he was evidently correct, as he lived before the time of the French Revolution. He held also that at the fall of the Ottoman empire and the Christian antichrist the Jews would turn to the Lord and be restored to their own land, and says that the prophecies relating to the conversion and restoration of the Jewish people are simply innumerable. 3

We must now, in the last place, briefly consider the progress made in prophetic interpretation during the present century. I have already said that the French Revolution cast a flood of light upon the whole question of prophetic interpretation. It strongly confirmed the historic view, including its leading feature, the year- day chronology of the prophetic times.

Faber and Cunninghame wrote very fully upon this subject during the first twenty years of the century, showing the true measure and position of the “seven times” of prophecy, as extending from the rise of the four monarchies to the fall of the fourth, in the days in which we live; and of the three-and-a-half times as reaching from the rise to the fall of the Papal power.

Among the most valuable expositors who have succeeded these I may mention Keith, who deals mainly with the evidential side of prophetic interpretation. One of his most important works is entitled, “History and Destiny of the World and the Church according to Scripture; or, The Four Monarchies and the Papacy.” He quotes throughout, from first to last, the testimony of the Romanists themselves, in confirmation of his assertions. His work is an unanswerable argument for the Protestant interpretation of prophecy.

The time would fail me to speak of the works of the well-known Bickersteth, or to refer in detail to the many able writers in England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and America, who within the last fifty years have expounded Scripture prophecy on the historic principle. I can do no more than say a few sentences in closing about three of the greatest of these writers, Bishop Wordsworth, Revelation E. B. Elliott, and Professor Birks, of Cambridge.

The works of the late Bishop Wordsworth, that learned and eloquent commentator, demonstrate with perfect conclusiveness that Rome Papal is the Babylon of the Apocalypse. Wordsworth understood the Church of Rome better than any commentator, Elliott excepted, in recent times; and he was familiar also with the entire history and literature of the Christian Church. His testimony on the fulfillment of prophecy in Papal Rome is such as to settle the question finally for all intelligent and unbiased minds.

The learned commentator, Dean Alford, who was a semi-futurist, says: “I do not hesitate..to maintain that interpretation which regards Papal and not Pagan Rome as pointed out by the harlot of this vision (Revelation 17). The subject has been amply discussed by many expositors. I would especially mention Vitringa and Dr. Wordsworth.”

While quoting Dean Alford, I would warn you against the snare into which many have fallen, of trusting themselves implicitly to the guidance of Greek scholars such as Alford, Tregelles, and Ellicott, in the study of prophecy. These students of the letter of sacred writ have their place and value, and should stand high in our estimation; but their special work did not qualify them for the comprehension of the far-reaching system of prophetic truth. The instrument they employ in their researches is the microscope, not the telescope. You cannot scan the starry heavens, or the breadth of the earth, with a microscope; you need a telescope for that.Greek scholars of such eminence are naturally short-sighted. They pore over manuscripts, words, letters, points. They seldom grasp the meaning of history of prophecy as a whole. They generally neglect the philosophy of history, and the light which astronomy has cast on the chronology both of history and prophecy. Besides this, they are too much influenced by traditional testimony, by the views of antiquity. The notions of the Fathers as to an individual, short-lived antichrist, notions which grew up in the twilight of early times, weigh more with them than the teachings of ages of subsequent experience. Wedded to the past, they are blind to the progressiveness of prophetic interpretation. They do not grasp the simple principle that the true interpreter of prophecy is neither tradition nor speculation, but ever-evolving history; that prophecy must be studied in the light of its fulfillment, and the future in the light of the past. Prophecy is vast, mountainous, and far- reaching sight is needed for its elucidation. A Christian philosopher like Sir Isaac Newton, accustomed to the study of the facts and laws of nature, and the entire course of history and chronology, is a far safer guide in this extensive subject than a Greek scholar whose whole business is the study of words. The man with the microscope sees small points uncommonly well, but he fails to perceive great general relations. As he does not steadily contemplate these relations, they produce no vivid impression upon him, and he is often led to conclusions totally at variance with the whole course of experience, and even with the teachings of common sense.

Not that all scholars however are shortsighted. Occasionally scholars are met with like Revelation E.B. Elliott and Professor Birks, both fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, equally able to use the microscope and the telescope. Unquestionably the most learned and able work ever written upon the book of Revelation is Mr. Elliott’s “Horae Apocalypticae.” The late Dr. Candlish, of Edinburgh, no mean judge, describes Elliott as “among the most learned profound and able expositors any of the books of Scripture ever had.” 4

Elliott’s commentary on the Apocalypse is to historic interpretation what Butler’s “Analogy” or Paley’s famous work is to the evidence of Christianity a solid foundation. It is learned, candid, and conclusive. It assumes nothing without ground. It deals with unquestionable facts, and that too with great fullness. It compares history with prophecy in a more elaborate way, at all points, than any work which preceded it. In style it is somewhat involved and overloaded, and its ten thousand references repel the superficial reader; but it will remain a masterpiece of exposition while the study of the sure word of prophecy endures.

Professor Birks, of Cambridge, while equal to Elliott as a scholar, and nearly equal to him in painstaking research, was his superior in philosophic grasp and logical ability. He was a comprehensive synthesist, a keen analyst, a convincing reasoner, an eloquent writer. He was accurate, clear-headed, patient in investigation, fair in statement, ripe in judgment. His works are an intellectual feast, as well as full of spiritual instruction. One of his books, that for example on “The Earlier Visions of Daniel,” is worth more than all the futurists ever wrote on prophecy put together. His work on the “First Elements of Sacred Prophecy” is an overwhelming answer to futurism. Dealing with the most learned and masterly works in exposition and defense of that system which have ever appeared, those by Maitland, Tyso, Burgh, and Dr. Todd, without an effort it shivers them to fragments, and scatters them to the winds. It is a pity that this work has long been out of print, and that futurism is left to flourish in certain quarters in ignorance of this able demonstration of its error and absurdity.

I shall ever esteem it as a great privilege to have known Professor Birks. To him I communicated the earliest discoveries I made on the astronomic nature of the prophetic times discoveries afterwards embodied in my work entitled “The Approaching End of the Age,” now in its tenth edition. Of my subsequent investigations on the same line I will say nothing here, save that I have partially published, and hope yet more fully to publish, the evidence that the whole of revealed chronology Historic, Levitical, and Prophetic is so related to natural chronology, or the time order of nature, as to form with it a single system, united and harmonious in all its parts. This is an important department of the connection of the natural and revealed; a connection involving the unity of their authorship. Nature and Scripture are not the works of two minds, or of many, but of one. They are two testaments, but one book, and as such are the work of the same Divine Author.

And now in conclusion. We have traced in these last three lectures the antiquity, the practical use, and the systematic development of the historical interpretation of prophecy the interpretation which regards Rome as the Babylon of the Apocalypse, and the Roman pontiff as “the man of sin.” We have shown that the historical interpretation was the earliest adopted in the Christian Church; that it developed with the course of history; that it sustained the Church through the long central ages of apostasy; that it gave birth to the Reformation; that it has been since confirmed by the events of several centuries, and elaborated and defended by an unbroken series of learned and unanswerable works. In vain do the waves of controversy rage against this stately rock. It has stood for ages, and is destined to remain till the light of eternity shall break upon the scene. The historic interpretation is no dream of ignorant enthusiasts. It is no speculation of fanciful, ill-balanced minds. It has grown with the growth of generations; it has been built up by the labors of men of many nations and ages. It has been embodied in solemn confessions of the Protestant Church. It forms a leading element in the testimony of martyrs and reformers. Like the prophets of old, these holy men bore a double testimony a testimony for the truth of God, and a testimony against the apostasy of His professing people. The providential position which they occupied, the work they accomplished, gave singular and special importance to their testimony; and this was their testimony, and nothing less, that Papal Rome is the Babylon of prophecy, drunken with the blood of saints and martyrs; and that its head, the Roman pontiff, is the predicted “man of sin,” or antichrist.

To reject this testimony of God’s providential witnesses on a matter of such fundamental import, and to prefer it to the counter-doctrine advocated by the apostate, persecuting Church of Rome, is the error and guilt of modern futurism.

And that futurism is self-condemned. Futurism is literalism, and literalism in the interpretation of symbols is a denial of their symbolic character. It is an abuse and degradation of the prophetic word, and a destruction of its influence. It substitutes the imaginary for the real, the grotesque and monstrous for the sober and reasonable. It quenches the precious light which has guided the saints for ages, and kindles a wild, delusive marsh-fire in its place. It obscures the wisdom of Divine prophecy; it denies the true character of the days in which we live; and while it asserts the nearness of the advent of Christ in the power and glory of His kingdom, it at the same time destroys the only substantial foundation for the assertion, which is prophetic chronology, and the stage now reached in the fulfillment of the predictions of the apostasy.

But in spite of the injurious effects of these false interpretations, “the foundation of God standeth sure”; none can cancel the prophecies which He has written in His holy word, and none can deny or destroy the mighty and far-reaching results which their true interpretation has already accomplished in the world. It has given us, and this is its glory, it has given us the REFORMATION. It has broken the iron chains of superstition and despotism, and lifted nations from the depths of their abasement. It has reared a temple whose walls no enemy can ruin. It has reopened, it has given back to the world, that book whose teachings have led millions into the way of life and peace.

And the sacred light of these prophecies is still guiding the Church of God across the wide ocean of her dangerous way. Those steadfast stars of prophecy which lighted of old the persecuted Waldenses through the darkness of the middle ages, which lighted the progress of the Lollards and the Bohemians before the Reformation, which lighted the noble reformers through gloom and tempest three hundred years ago, and which have since lighted watchful saints through troubled centuries, are shining still in that high and holy firmament, whence no mortal hand can pluck them down; and they shall shine on those thousand glittering stars of prophecy till they have fulfilled their glorious mission, till they have guided the Church in safety to her celestial haven, and their long-enduring radiance melts at last in the rising splendors of eternal day.

In our previous lectures we have considered from the standpoint of prophecy the great Papal system of Latin Christianity, and it now remains for us to show you, in this closing one, that the same mirror of the future which so fully reflected the coming Roman apostasy reflects as clearly that Reformation movement of the sixteenth century which emancipated from it myriads of mankind.

This could hardly be otherwise. As prophecy traces the entire story of Roman rule, in both its pagan and Papal forms, and carries it on to a point even now future, it would not, of course, pass by unnoticed the most remarkable and noteworthy incident in the later section of history. It could not omit from its anticipative record an episode so distinctly providential as that Protestant exodus, which split western Christendom into two halves, and severed from the communion of Rome Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, and Great Britain.

It might well be omitted from Daniel’s very distant foreview, but scarcely from the latter prophecy of John, when the incipient workings of the apostasy had already commenced. Neither the story of the apostate Church nor that of the true would be complete without it; for it was an episode of stupendous importance to the welfare of hundreds of millions of mankind through nine or ten generations, both to those whom it liberated from the superstitions and tyrannies of Rome, and to those on whom by a counter movement it riveted her fetters more strongly then ever.

What! should the ruin wrought by Romanism be plainly portrayed in advance on the prophetic page, and the revival produced by the Spirit of God and the word of His mouth be left altogether out of view? Should the work of Satan, his corruption and defilement of the professing Church, be reflected in the Divine mirror, and not the work of the glorious Head of the true Church through His faithful witnesses in the restoration to the world of the primitive Christianity it had lost? Never! A true mirror reflects everything alike, and Scripture prophecy anticipates the entire outline of Church history. Just as there were no events in the history of Israel which were not foretold before they came to pass, so in the history of the Church. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, and its glad and glorious results, are as clearly foreshadowed and foretold as the Romanism of the dark ages.

You will naturally inquire, Where and how? Before replying, let me remind you that there are two kinds of prophecy in Scripture the acted, and the spoken or written; the type and the prediction. In the Levitical sacrifices, for instance, we have acted prophecies of the atonement; in Isaiah 53 we have verbal predictions of it. The whole history of the natural Israel is typical of that of the spiritual Israel, or Christian Church. Both are delivered from Egypt, both are redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, both are led through a desert, both are sustained by bread from heaven, both journey towards a rest that remains for the people of God. This broad analogy descends in a wonderful way to details. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 shows this, and states that, not only was Israel’s history typical, but that it was divinely ordered that it might be so; in other words, it was intentionally prophetic. “These things,” he says, “happened unto them for ensamples (or types, ?????), and are written for our instruction.” Not only are they recorded for our warning, but they occurred in the providence of God in order that they might foreshadow the experiences of the Christian Church, and that she might learn from them solemn and needed lessons.

The incidents of Jewish history actually happened, that they might be types of Christian history; and Divine foreknowledge is as much exemplified in this correspondence between type and antitype as in that between prediction and fulfillment.

I am to show you this evening, then, two sets of predictions of the Reformation, one acted in Jewish history, the other symbolized in apocalyptic prophecy; the one embodied in the story of the Old Testament, the other in the symbolic predictions of the New.

Before I can do this, you must allow me to remind you with some degree of accuracy what the Reformation was, as to its broad historical characteristics.

It was not the formation of the Church, but its re-formation after its ruin by Romanism. It was not a first beginning, but a second. Pentecost formed the Church; Popery deformed it; Protestantism reformed it. Pentecost occurred in the first century, and is associated with the work of the apostles themselves. The Reformation did not occur till the sixteenth century, and was not completed till the seventeenth, and is associated with such names as Luther and Calvin, Zwingle and Knox, Cranmer and Latimer. The first belongs to ancient history, the last to modern times. A great chronological gap of nearly fifteen hundred years lies between the two. There were the early ages of first love, apostolic zeal, rapid extension, martyr suffering, noble confessions and apologies; followed by other centuries of imperial Christianity, growing corruption, of bitter strife and ambitious rivalries; and these again by a thousand years of Papal domination and ever- deepening moral darkness before the glad light of the Reformation broke over the earth. It is a late episode of Church history, not an early one.

And further. When it did take place, its results were very partial. It has affected but a portion of apostate Christendom. It has not brought back to the faith of Christ Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, or Belgium. The reformed nations may be the mightiest, the wealthiest, and the most progressive; but they constitute only a fraction of Roman Christendom. The greater part of it remains involved still in the Papal apostasy.

Moreover Protestantism priceless as have been the benefits it has conferred on those who have joined its ranks is yet very far from being a perfect recovery of primitive Christianity. It has risen out of the gross ignorance and superstition of mediaeval Romanism; it has altogether abandoned the idolatry of image worship, virgin worship, saint worship, and the adoration of the priest-made wafer deity of the Latin mass; it has recovered a purer faith and a simpler ritual, and secured for the Church a measure of liberty and independence; above all, it has circulated the Scriptures in the vulgar tongues of the nations of Christendom, and has adopted as its motto, “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible”: but it has never completely purified itself from Romish doctrine and practice, it has never regained complete independence of secular domination, it has never got clear of union with the world. It has rejected the claim of the Church to rule the State, it has not as clearly refused the pretension of the State to rule the Church; it has suffered worldly ambition, priestcraft, simony, and abuses of many kinds; and it has developed two strong tendencies, one to a return to the Romish apostasy, and the other to rationalism and infidelity. The true spiritual Church of Christ is still, even in Protestant lands, but a small part of the professing Church.

I want you clearly to bear in mind from the outset then, first, that, in point of time, Protestantism is a late or modern movement; secondly, that it is, in point of sphere, a limited one; and thirdly, that it is, in point of character, a very imperfect return to primitive Christianity.

One more introductory remark before I pass on. May we not safely conclude that Protestantism will last till the end of the age and the second advent of Christ? The reformed Churches will never be darkened by a universal apostasy, as was the early Church. The innumerable millions of Bibles read and studied all over the world, the countless human minds enlightened by their contents, and human hearts regenerated by their revelation of God in Christ, and linked by faith and love and eternal life to the Savior, forbid the fear that the recovered gospel will ever again be lost to the world. The chronology of the Papacy shows us that the coming of the Lord is at hand; and hence we may rest assured that the Reformation is, not only a late incident in Church history, but that it is the last great movement. The next will be the final change from the militant to the triumphant condition of the Church, when the fourth empire shall pass away, and be succeeded by the kingdom of the Son of man and of the saints. We have entered on that phase of Church history which will exist at the second advent; nothing remains unfulfilled of the predictions concerning Romanism, except her sudden destruction at the end of this age.

As regards the history of the Reformation, I want you to remember that it took place in stages during a period extending over about half a century. Its commencement is reckoned from the year when Luther published his theses against indulgences, A.D. 1517; and its close, in Germany at least, may be placed in A.D. 1555, when the celebrated Peace of Augsburg confirmed the Protestants of Germany in all their rights and possessions, and recognized their complete national and ecclesiastical independence of the popes. The close of the anti-Reformation Council of Trent and the full establishment of the Protestant Church in England were in A.D. 1563, forty-six years from the initial date of the Reformation. The struggle to maintain the position gained, in face of the murderous Papal reaction, which dates from the Council of Trent, occupied a much longer period, and was not over even at the Peace of Westphalia, at the end of the thirty years’ religious war, in A.D. 1648, when a basis was laid for the settlement of the long struggle in Central Europe.

It extended however in France and England still further, nearly up to the close of the seventeenth century, when it was finally settled in favor of Popery in France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and in favor of Protestantism in England by the glorious Revolution, which placed William of Orange on the throne, and passed the act of succession excluding Popish monarchs for the future. Not without so severe and long-continued a struggle did the reformed religion establish itself, even in the countries where it did take root, nor did Protestantism cease to resist, even in the countries where it was ultimately crushed.

As to the various aspects of this great Reformation movement, you must distinguish especially between three.

1. It was first and mainly, as we have said, a return from gross and long-continued apostasy to primitive Christianity; it was a revival of spiritual religion in the hearts of men. As at the first promulgation of the gospel in Europe the pagan people “turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven,” so in the sixteenth century. Men turned once more from the idols of Papal instead of pagan Rome which they had been worshipping, and they turned to GOD. They turned from the doctrines of demons to the gospel of Christ; they began once more to rejoice in the belief that Jesus had delivered them from the wrath to come; they received the doctrines proclaimed by the reformers not as the word of men, but as it was in truth, the word of God. It worked in them effectually, so that they took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, and all the other sufferings which came upon them from their enemies, and from them sounded out everywhere the word of the Lord. They received the word in much affliction, but in the joy of the Holy Ghost, and in power and assurance. The Reformers were like the apostles, holy, self-denying, Bible-loving, hard-working preachers of the gospel. In its first and primary aspect the Reformation was a spiritual work. Its germ was the work of the Holy Ghost in the soul of Luther, convincing him of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, leading him to repentance and to belief of the gospel of God’s grace, and convincing him that salvation was “not of works.” It was what we should in these days call a spiritual revival, traceable to the sovereign grace of God in the first place, and to the republication of His Word in the second.

2. But the Reformation did more than produce a spiritual revival. As a matter of history, it gave also to the world a new ecclesiastical system. It established reformed Churches in separation from the Church of Rome, national Churches, with secular monarchs in some cases at their head. This was the case in England, where Henry VIII made himself head of the Church in these lands. Whether this was for evil or for good we must not here consider, but simply note the fact that the Reformation movement built up a new outward organization of an ecclesiastical character, with new articles and rubrics, new ceremonies and practices, and a new fountain head of authority. This new organization was not only distinct from, but antagonistic to Romanism, and because of its being so was called Protestant. It has grown with enormous rapidity during the last three centuries, and has already attained proportions not far short of those of the ancient and apostate Church against which it protests. It is characterized by the circulation of the Bible, and the reference to it as to a standard of all controversies; by the recognition that ministers of Christ should not be “sacrificing priests” but gospel preachers, preachers of the word, heralds of the great salvation; and by an acknowledgment of the right of private judgment in the interpretation of Scripture.

3. And lastly, the Reformation produced Protestant kingdoms nations which severed all the links that bound them to Rome, and asserted their own absolute independence of the popes.

In a word, the movement was one of renovation and liberation, which spread in successive and everwidening circles, from the individual to the Church, and from the Church to the nation. It was one founded on a recovered Bible, extended by a renewal of the long-disused practice of preaching, and issuing in the largely improved but still imperfect state of things which we see around us this day. It emancipated the minds of men from long and bitter bondage; it gave an impetus to arts and sciences, to enterprise and culture, to freedom and liberty. It was naturally hailed as a glad deliverance by all who came under its influence; but it brought upon them long struggles and cruel sufferings under the terrible and mighty Roman wild beast. The world reeled under the fierceness of his wrath on the escape of so many of his victims, his thunderous roar rent the air, his mad passion caused the blood of saints to flow in torrents, his cruel claws dragged thousands into his dens of torture in dark Inquisition dungeons; and so horrible was the sacrifice of human life resulting from his rage, that the world turned on him at last and bade him be still; bound, and beat him into silence, drew his claws and his teeth, deprived him of dominion and the power to do further damage, and left him feeble and defenseless, albeit as fierce as ever.

We stated just now that this great Reformation movement was doubly foretold in the Bible. It is foreshadowed in the typical history of Israel in the Old Testament, and its story forms one act of the prophetic drama of the Apocalypse in the New.

1. IT WAS FORESHADOWED IN THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL. Just as the exodus of Israel from Egypt after the passover and their crossing of the Red Sea foreshadowed the redemption of the Church by the death and resurrection of “Christ our Passover,” just as the murmurings and rebellions of Israel in the wilderness prefigured the similar incidents in Church history so the idolatries of Israel foreshadowed the idolatry which early crept into the Church, and which soon corrupted it altogether. Even in the desert Israel fell into idolatry, and worshipped the golden calf; and perhaps the most salient feature of their history is the constant tendency to relapse into this degrading iniquity. No sooner were Moses and Joshua and their contemporaries dead and gone than declensions into idolatry became frequent. Various tyrants were allowed to conquer and oppress the people as a chastisement for this sin; and when they cried to God in their trouble, and He sent judges and deliverers, they perhaps served Jehovah as long as the judge lived, but quickly afterwards relapsed again. Six times over they were given up to their enemies, and the united servitudes they endured extended to a hundred and eleven years. Still they did evil

“in the sight of the Lord, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria and Zidon, the gods of Moab and Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served not Him” (#Jud 10:6):

Hardly had the Jews reached the zenith of their national prosperity under David and Solomon than again there set in a process of declension. Solomon himself built idol temples for his heathen wives, and after the schism between Israel and Judah, idolatry became the State religion among the ten tribes, who worshipped the golden calves set up by Jeroboam the son of Nebat at Dan and at Bethel, and adopted besides all the idolatries of the heathen around them.

Israel built, as we read in Kings, “high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city. And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree: and there they burnt incense in all the high places, as did the heathen whom the Lord carried away before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the Lord to anger: for they served idols, whereof the Lord had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing..And they left all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal” (#2Ki 17:9-16).

So general did this worship of Baal become in Israel, that in the days of Elijah it was all but universal, and there were but seven thousand left who had not bowed the knee to Baal. Jeremiah exclaims in the Lord’s name, “Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but My people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord. For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (#Jer 2:11-13).

Isaiah cries, “How is the faithful city become a harlot!..They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward.”

Ezekiel describes the idolatry of Jerusalem and Samaria under the figure of the grossest and most abominable harlotry.

Hosea said, “Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples” (Hosea 8:14).

“Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone” (Hosea 4:17).

Amos accused Israel, saying, “Ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves” (#Amos 5:26).

Speaking by the mouth of Jeremiah, the Lord exhorts His people “Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these..Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; and come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations? Is this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? (Jer 7:4-11).

The ancient prophets are full of this subject, as you will remember; expostulations, appeals, threats, irony, indignant remonstrance are all employed in turn; but the people were obdurate. “We will not hearken unto thee,” said they to Jeremiah “we will certainly..burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and pour out drink offerings unto her” (#Jer 44:16,17).

The enormity of this sin was enhanced by the fact that the very object of Israel’s existence as a nation was that they might be a holy nation, a peculiar people to Jehovah. They were the sole witnesses to the true God in the world, and yet they seemed obstinately resolved to sink back to the level of their heathen neighbors.

The relapse of Israel and Judah into heathen idol worship was punished in the providence of God by their captivity in the lands of the heathen: Israel was carried captive into Assyria, and Judah into Babylon. The heathenism of Jerusalem and of Babylon were substantially the same; each was marked by gross idolatry, and accompanied by the cruel persecution of all who resisted it. Manasseh filled Jerusalem with the blood of the faithful whom he slew. In Babylon, however, both idolatry and persecution found their most complete development. Nebuchadnezzar set up his golden image, issued his persecuting edict, and kindled his fiery furnace; and Belshazzar made his impious feast, and brought the vessels of God’s house to his table, that he and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink wine in them; and praise “the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know”; and Daniel said, addressing the doomed man,

“The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified” (#Dan 5:23)

Jeremiah cries concerning Babylon: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will do judgment upon her graven images” (#Jer 51:52).

“A drought is upon her waters; and they shall be dried up: for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols” (#Jer 1:38).

The climax of apostasy and rebellion was reached at last; and when Judah had practically sunk to the level of idolatrous Babylon, God suffered her to be conquered and carried captive by one Babylonian tyrant after another, and His own temple at Jerusalem, which had been so desecrated and profaned, He permitted to be captured and burned. The visible existence of the Jewish nation ceased for a time. The daughters of Jerusalem hung their harps upon the willows by the rivers of Babylon, and Judah lay desolate.

Then, about five hundred years before the first advent of Christ, there came suddenly and unexpectedly deliverance and restoration. Ezra and Nehemiah were raised up to lead back and reorganize in the land a remnant of the people. The temple of God rose from its ashes once more on Mount Moriah. Jerusalem was rebuilt, and its civil and religious polity restored; it was surrounded with walls and towers; the long forgotten word of God was recovered, and read in the audience of the people; and as the language had become somewhat obsolete during the seventy years of the Babylonish captivity, the Jewish reformers, we are told, not only “read in the book in the law of God distinctly,” but they also “gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (#Neh 8:8).

The restoration from Babylon inaugurated a blessed era of civil and religious liberty. The restored remnant were not without severe trials; it was by no means easy for them to accomplish their task in face of the persistent and successful opposition of Sanballat the Horonite and his confederates and companions. Again and again the work had to cease, and the people would have given up in despair but for the encouraging and stimulating words of Haggai, Zechariah, and other prophets. The joint ministry of Ezra and Nehemiah seems to have lasted about half a century, and they were permitted to see the work accomplished, the Jewish people liberated from their long exile, and, better still, from all tendency to heathenism and idolatry. They never fell back into that sin after the return from Babylon. The long suspended worship of God was restored; magistrates, judges, and teachers of the law were appointed over the land. The people entered into a solemn covenant to separate themselves from all idolaters, and even, painful as it was, from the heathen wives some of them had taken; and before Ezra and Nehemiah passed to their rest the people, the worship, the temple, and the city were all restored, and the canon of Old Testament Scripture was arranged and closed.

Many political and military troubles arose afterwards, but no such overthrow and restoration. It was to that second temple that Christ came, thus making the glory of the latter house greater than that of the former.

Need I interpret all this true and yet typical history? Does it not apply itself to the later antitypical history? Have you not seen the Reformation of the sixteenth century as I have described the return from Babylon? Is not Jerusalem the true Church, and Babylon the false? and is not Babylon, Rome? Scripture distinctly states this. “The woman which thou sawest” (whose brow was branded “Babylon”) “is that great city which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” The angel said this to John. In John’s days no other great city than Rome ruled over the kings of the earth. Babylon represents Rome. The captive Jews represent God’s people oppressed in and by Rome. Their deliverance and restoration, under Ezra and Nehemiah, represent the Reformation under Luther and Calvin and other reformers. Their repentance and abandonment of idolatry, their reading of the word of God and re-establishment of the worship of God, all this had its parallel in the movement we have described. Their rebuilding of Jerusalem and reorganization of Jewish polity and national life foreshadowed the constitution of reformed Protestant communities and nations; the duration of the two movements was the same, about half a century; the results of the two movements were similar; in spite of much bitter but futile opposition; the proportion of the restored remnant was the same, representatives of only two tribes out of the twelve returned to Jerusalem.

Protestantism is growing now with amazing rapidity; but at the end of the sixteenth century it was small, compared with the hosts of Romanism. Both movements consisted of a spiritual work, an ecclesiastical work, and a political work. Both are connected with a recovered Bible, and both “gave the sense” of the original documents to the common people, or made them understand the word of God. Luther, Tyndale, and others translated the Bible into the vulgar tongues of Europe. The close and wonderful parallel extends to many particulars, which I have no time to indicate. Both movements occur late in the stories to which they respectively belong; and if the first advent belongs to the days of the restored temple, we have every reason to believe that the second will take place in this Protestant era, for, as I will show you presently, a chronological prediction occurs in the prophecy of it in Revelation.

But I must revert to the point of Israel’s idolatry for a moment, and ask you to glance at the remarkable development of this same sin in the apostasy in the Romish Church.

All through its history idolatry has been the most marked characteristic of the Papal system. Romanism is simply the old Roman paganism revived under Christian names. Romanism and paganism bear to each other the most exact and extraordinary resemblance.

Had paganism its temples and altars, its pictures and images? So has Popery. Had paganism its use of holy water and its burning of incense? So has Popery. Had paganism its tonsured priests, presided over by a pontifex maximus, or sovereign pontiff? So has Popery; and it stamps this very name, which is purely heathen in origin, upon the coins, medals, and documents of the arrogant priest by whom it is governed. Had paganism its claim of sacerdotal infallibility? So has Popery. Had paganism its adoration of a visible representative of Deity carried in state on men’s shoulders? So has Popery. Had paganism its ceremony of kissing the feet of the sovereign pontiff? So has Popery. Had paganism its college of pontiffs? So has Popery, in the college of cardinals. Had paganism its religious orders? So has Popery. Had paganism its stately robes, its crowns and crosiers of office? So has Popery. Had paganism its adoration of idols, its worship of the queen of heaven, its votive offerings? So has Popery. Had paganism its rural shrines and processions? So has Popery. Had paganism its pretended miracles, its speaking images, and weeping images, and bleeding images? So has Popery. Had paganism its canonization of saints, as in the deification of the dead Caesars? So has Popery. Had paganism its idolatrous calendar and numerous festivals? So has Popery. Had paganism its enforced celibacy, its mystic signs, its worship of relics? So has Popery. Had paganism its cruel persecution of those who opposed idolatry? So has Popery. Was paganism satanically inspired? So is Popery. God overthrew paganism; Satan revived it under Christian names: but God shall yet destroy it, and sweep its hateful presence from the earth.

And further, just as there never failed in Israel

A LINE OF FAITHFUL WITNESSES

to testify against the idolatry of the people of God, so also in the case of Romanism. All the prophets testified against Jewish idolatry. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, Hosea and Amos were burning witnesses against it; but perhaps the most typical witness of all was Elijah the Tishbite. This holy and earnest man was one who feared God, and consequently feared not the face of his fellow man. Though Jezebel had slain the prophets of the Lord, he hesitates not to startle Ahab with the bold accusation that his idolatries were the cause of the famine that was desolating the land. “I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou has followed Baalim.”

Forced to flee to the wilderness when Jezebel seeks his life, hear him plead with God that he had been jealous for His name, “because the children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

Like these Jewish witnesses, the Christian witnesses of later days were very jealous for the Lord, grieved and indignant at the desecration of His name and cause. Like the prophets they were opposed, despised, denounced, persecuted, exiled, and slain. Who were these Christian witnesses? They were, to use the words of one of them, an exiled Huguenot, “those who since the birth of anti-Christianity have cried against its errors and idolatries.” If you wish to know their names this Huguenot will tell you. He says in his “Commentary on the Apocalypse,” “they were called Berengarians, Stercorists, Waldenses, Albigenses, Leonists, Petrobrusians, Henricians, Wicliffites, Lollards, etc.; as they are now styled Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Sacramentarians, Huguenots, heretics, schismatics, etc; and to these reproachful names their enemies added fines, confiscations, imprisonments, banishments, and condemnations to death.”1

Read Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments of the Martyrs” if you desire a fuller account of the lives and testimony of these faithful witnesses against antichrist and his abominable idolatries, and of the sufferings they endured in the cause of truth through weary centuries. God never left Himself without a witness. All through the dark ages there were bold and holy men who stood aloof from Rome’s corruptions, as we have seen, who denounced her idolatries, who endured her malice, who dared the fury of the wild beast, who resisted unto blood striving against sin. We shall have to speak again of these witnesses in connection with the New Testament prophecy of the Reformation.

Meantime let me remind you that from the existence of this analogy it follows that the moral judgments which are applicable to the Jewish apostasy and reformation are equally so to the Christian. To justify the Christian apostasy is in principle to justify that Jewish apostasy so signally condemned in the Word of God; and to condemn the Christian reformation is in principle to condemn that Jewish reformation so evidently sealed with divine approval. To approve the apostasy, whether Jewish or Christian, is to approve the work of sin and Satan; and to condemn the Reformation, whether Jewish or Christian, is to condemn the work of divine providence and grace. The enemies of the Reformation are the enemies of God. Those who would pull down the sanctuary which the Reformation reared would have pulled down the second temple built by the exiles restored from Babylonish bondage. But what said the promise of God as to that second temple?

“Be strong, saith the Lord, and work: for I am with you..I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of hosts..The glory of this latter house shall be greater than that of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace.” 2 And again, “The Lord whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple.” 3

NEW TESTAMENT PROPHECY OF THE REFORMATION

We turn now, in the second place, to THE PROPHECIES OF THE REFORMATION in the last book of the Bible. Here again the prediction is an acted one; but instead of being acted in real history, it is acted as on a stage. The whole drama of the Apocalypse is thus acted. Symbolic beings perform symbolic actions. The dramatis personae seen in vision by St. John include heavenly, earthly, and satanic beings, all of whom are representative, symbolical. Christ is represented by “a lamb as it had been slain,” or by a mighty, cloudclothed angel; Satan, as inspiring the Re-man empire, by “a great red dragon”; and so on. In no other way could so vivid a foreview of the events of ages have been presented in so small a compass. The book of Revelation consists of John’s descriptions of the living, moving, acting hieroglyphs he saw. He uses constantly the words, “and I saw,” “and I heard.” In reading it we should try first to realize accurately what the hieroglyph which John saw and describes was, and then consider what it signified. Other Scripture use of similar figures will in most cases give the clue to the meaning.

John also takes part in the drama himself. He speaks and is spoken to, and when he does so he represents the true witnesses of Christ at the time and in the circumstances prefigured. He is himself a hieroglyph, as it were, and stands as the representative of the true servants of God who would be living in the successive periods the events of which are predicted.

The drama as a whole foreshadows the external and internal history of the Church from John’s own day to the second advent. As its outward history depends largely on the mere political history, many purely secular events, such as the overthrow of the Roman empire, have their place in this prophetic drama. For just as, if a traveler takes a voyage in a ship, the history of the ship becomes for the time his history, just as the story of an individual cannot be told without taking into account his environment, so the story of the Church cannot be told without a consideration of the contemporary state of the world in which it exists. Moreover Providence employs outward events in the government of the Church itself; wars and invasions are judgments; so are revolutions and insurrections, famines and pestilences. They have therefore properly their place in Church history.

But the Church has also an inward spiritual history, which depends, not on earthly events, but on heavenly and satanic action. If she is sustained, revived, increased, and rendered spiritually victorious, it is because her glorious Head is acting in her and on her behalf. If she is betrayed, corrupted, misled, or persecuted and oppressed, it is because Satan is acting against her in and by her enemies. In the Apocalypse these spiritual agencies are symbolized, as well as material historical events. They are seen acting, but always indirectly through outward agents. Thus earthly material events are continually linked in this wonderful prophecy with their hidden spiritual causes. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, angels and archangels, and the spirits of the just, are all seen in action under various symbols; and so also are the devil and his agents. Under the symbols of the dragon and the wild beasts, they are seen opposing and counterworking Christ, and persecuting and slaughtering His faithful witnesses.

The visions of this holy and sanctifying book, to the study of which a special blessing is attached, constitute a prophetic history of the Church and of the world from apostolic days to the present day, and on to the end of this age. They are, as you know, arranged in order in three groups of seven: first seven seals, then seven trumpets, and then seven vials. Speaking broadly (for I have no time to do more, nor is it needful to our subject), the first six seals represent events extending from John’s own day to the fall of paganism and the establishment of Christianity in the Roman earth; while the seventh contains the seven trumpets and all that follows. The first four trumpets depict the Gothic invasions and the overthrow of the old Roman empire in the fifth century. The next two trumpets give events in the East instead of the West, the fifth predicting the Saracenic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries (symbolized as the ravages of an army of locusts), and the sixth the Turkish invasions of eastern Europe, which extended from the middle of the eleventh century to the middle of the fifteenth. These, and the intolerable misery they occasioned to the Greek Churches of the East, are symbolized under the sixth trumpet by the career of the Euphratean horsemen in the ninth chapter of the book. This vision brings down the prophetic history to the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the eastern empire of Rome, before the Turks in A.D. 1453; and the remainder of the fifteenth century seems covered in the prophecy by the statement that “the rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and wood.” This description of continued obdurate and inveterate apostasy and idolatry applies both to eastern and western Christendom at that time. Thus we are brought down chronologically to the end of the fifteenth century; and then there is a break and a great change in the series of visions!

And what is the next scene that attracts the eye of the holy seer? It is a vision symbolic of the Reformation movement of the sixteenth century, coupled with a retrospective narrative of the history of Christ’s true witnesses against idolatry, from the beginning of the apostasy to the close of the Protestant Reformation. You will find this most interesting prophecy in the tenth and first thirteen verses of the eleventh chapters of Revelation. Study it carefully at your leisure, and you will see that the vision consists of the manifestation of a glorious mighty angel, who evidently symbolizes Christ Himself, and of the bestowal by Him on John (in his representative character) of three things:

1. Of a little open book which he was to eat;

2. Of a great commission which he was to execute; and

3. Of a reed with which he was to measure the temple of God.

There follows the story of Christ’s “two witnesses,” symbolized as two olive trees and two candlesticks; the narrative of their doings and sufferings, of their persecution and slaughter by their enemies, of their brief, trance-like death, and of their speedy resurrection and exaltation. Lastly, there is a great earthquake or revolution, and the fall of a tenth part of the city, or a tenth part of Roman Christendom.

Do you ask my grounds for asserting that the “mighty Angel” of this vision is no other than Christ Himself? I will give you them! His power and glory, the rainbow encircling His head, the sun-like brightness of His countenance, and the resemblance of His feet to pillars of fire all these features identify Him with the Son of man seen by John in the first vision of this book. His position and his words identify him also with the one whom Daniel in his last chapter calls “my Lord.” No mere angel is cloud-clothed and rainbowcrowned, resplendent as the sun, or speaks with a voice full of majesty, or assumes an attitude which implies the lordship of earth and sea, setting “his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the earth.” No angel would talk of “my two witnesses,” or claim to give to men power and authority. There is a loftiness of tone and a sublimity of appearance and action about this Angel that distinguishes Him from all the other lowly servant angels of the book as widely as heaven is distinguished from earth. It is the Lord of angels and of men alike who is manifested in action at this point in the apocalyptic drama; and the very manifestation prepares us for events of the first magnitude, events like those which succeeded Christ’s actual manifestation on earth, events like the first promulgation of the gospel in the apostolic age. The manifestation is of course only symbolic. The prediction is not that Christ would visibly appear at the juncture in question. He would act, but indirectly. His action would be the cause of human action. His glorious influence and interference would become visible in the course of mundane events. He would reveal His power in His providence.

This glorious Being holds in His hand, not seven stars, as in the first vision, but a little book open. At a command from heaven, John asks the Angel for this little book and receives it with the injunction, “Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.” It is immediately added, “Thou must prophesy (or preach) again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.” Now the same remarkable figure of eating a book, and then going forth to proclaim to others its contents, does not occur here for the first time. We meet it in the Old Testament, where Ezekiel is commanded to eat a roll, and go and speak to the house of Israel; and the action is thus explained. Ezekiel says: “I did eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness. And He said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of Israel, and speak with My words unto them..All my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee..unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord God; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.” We have no question therefore as to the meaning of this emblematic action in the vision. John was first to appropriate and digest the contents of the little book, and then to go forth and proclaim its messages to others as the word of the Lord.

Now what is this little book? What can it be but the Bible that blessed word of God, His own word? It is here seen given afresh, a second time, to the Church. And indeed, so long had the Bible been buried in Latin, so long withheld from the people, so long made void by the traditions of men, that it was as a new book given afresh to the Church when it was, as it were, rediscovered, restudied, and republished by the reformers at the close of the dark ages.

When Martin Luther, then a student of about twenty years of age, in the University of Erfurt, first accidentally found a Latin Bible, he was amazed.

One day he opens several books of the library, one after the other, to see who their authors were. One of the volumes which he opens in its turn attracts his attention. He has never before seen one like it. He reads the title..It is a Bible! a rare book, at that time unknown. His interest is strongly excited; he is perfectly astonished to find in this volume anything more than those fragments of gospels and epistles which the Church has selected to be read publicly in the churches every sabbath day. Hitherto he had believed that these formed the whole word of God. But here are so many pages, chapters, and books of which he had no idea. His heart beats as he holds in his hand all this divinely inspired Scripture, and he turns over all the leaves with feelings which cannot be described. The first page on which he fixes his attention tells him the history of Hannah and young Samuel. He reads, and his soul is filled with joy to overflowing. The child whom his parents lend to Jehovah for all the days of his life; the song of Hannah, in which she declares that the Lord lifts up the poor from the dust, and the needy from the dunghill, that He may set him with princes; young Samuel growing up in the presence of the Lord: the whole of this history, the whole of the volume which he has discovered, make him feel in a way he has never done before. He returns home, his heart full. “Oh!” thinks he, “would it please God one day to give me such a book for my own!” Luther as yet did not know either Greek or Hebrew, for it is not probable that he studied these languages during the first two or three years of his residence at the university. The Bible which had so overjoyed him was in Latin. Soon returning to his treasure in the library, he reads and re-reads, and in his astonishment and joy returns to read again. The first rays of a new truth were then dawning upon him. In this way God put him in possession of His word. He has discovered the book which he is one day to give his countrymen in that admirable translation in which Germany has now for three centuries perused the oracles of God. It was perhaps the first time that any hand had taken down this precious volume from the place which it occupied in the library of Erfurt. This book lying on the unknown shelves of an obscure chamber, is to become the book of life to a whole people. The Reformation was hid in that Bible. 4

Later on, when soul agony had driven the young student from his loved university into a Benedictine convent, to seek the salvation for which he longed, it was the same blessed book, with its glorious doctrines of the forgiveness of sins and justification by faith alone, that calmed his storm-tossed spirit, and quickened his soul to new spiritual life. Staupitz, the vicar-general of his order, who proved himself a true pastor to the poor young monk, gave him a Bible of his own. His joy was great. He soon knew where to find any passage he needed. With intense earnestness he studied its pages, and especially the epistles of St. Paul. Right valiantly did the young reformer use the sword of the Spirit thus placed in his hand.

The Reformation, which commenced with the struggles of a humble soul in the cell of a convent at Erfurt, has never ceased to advance. An obscure individual, with the word of life in his hand, had stood erect in presence of worldly grandeur, and made it tremble. This word he had opposed, first, to Tetzel and his numerous host; and these avaricious merchants, after a momentary resistance, had taken flight. Next, he had opposed it to the legate of Rome at Augsburg; and the legate, paralyzed, had allowed his prey to escape. At a later period he had opposed it to the champions of learning in the halls of Leipsic, and the astonished theologians had seen their syllogistic weapons broken to pieces in their hands. At last he had opposed it to the pope, who, disturbed in his sleep, has risen up upon his throne, and thundered at the troublesome monk; but the whole power of the head of Christendom this word had paralyzed. The word had still a last struggle to maintain. It behooved to triumph over the emperor of the West, over the kings and princes of the earth, and then, victorious over all the powers of the world, take its place in the Church, to reign in it as the pure word of God. 5

“Let us believe the gospel, let us believe St. Paul, and not the letters and decretals of the pope,” Luther was wont to say. “Are you the man that undertakes to reform the Papacy?” said an officer to him one day. “Yes,” replied Luther; “I am the man. I confide in Almighty God, whose WORD I have before me.” “Sooner sacrifice my body and my life, better allow my arms and legs to be cut off,” said he to the archbishop, who tried to persuade him to retract his writings, “than abandon the clear and genuine WORD OF GOD.”

From his lonely, Patmos-like prison in the castle of Wartburg, in the forests of Thuringia, Luther gave this priceless treasure, the word of God, to his country in a translation which is still in use in Germany. He felt that the Bible which had liberated him could alone liberate his people. “It was necessary that a mighty hand should throw back the ponderous gates of that arsenal of the word of God in which Luther himself had found his armor, and that those vaults and ancient halls which no foot had traversed for ages should be again opened wide to the Christian people for the day of battle.” “Let this single book,” he exclaims, “be in all tongues, in all lands, before all eyes, in all ears, in all hearts”; and again, “The Scripture, without any commentary, is the sun from which all teachers must receive light.”

And not Luther only, but all the reformers like the apostles held up the word of God alone for light, just as they held up the sacrifice of Christ alone for salvation. They gave to the world the book which Christ had given to them, which they had found sweet to their souls, though it subsequently brought on them bitter trouble. It was an established principle of the Reformation to reject nothing but what was opposed to “some clear and formal declaration of the Holy Scriptures.” “Here only is found the true food of the soul,” said Luther, familiar as he was with the writings of the philosophers and schoolmen “here only.” “You say, Oh if I could only hear God! Listen then, O man, my brother. God, the Creator of heaven and earth, is speaking to you.”

The New Testament once printed and published did more to spread the revival of primitive Christianity than all the other efforts of the reformers. The translation was a splendid one; as a literary work it charmed all classes. It was sold for so moderate a sum that all could procure it, and it soon established the Reformation on an immovable basis. Scores of editions were printed in an incredibly short time. The Old Testament from the same hand soon followed, and both were diffused through a population, familiar till then only with the unprofitable writings of the schoolmen. The Bible was received with the utmost avidity. “You have preached Christ to us,” said the people to the reformer; “you enable us now to hear His own voice.” In vain Rome kindled her fires and burnt the book. It only increased the demand, and ere long the Papal theologians, finding it impossible to suppress Luther’s translation, were constrained to print a rival translation of their own.

Once the Bible was thus read in the households of Christendom, the great change could not be averted. A new life, new thoughts, new standards, a new courage sprang up. God’s own words were heard at the firesides of the people, and the power of the priest was gone. “The effect produced was immense. The Christianity of the primitive Church, brought forth by the publication of the Holy Scriptures from the oblivion into which it had fallen for ages, was thus presented to the eyes of the nation; and this was sufficient to justify the attacks which had been made upon Rome. The humblest individuals, provided they knew the German alphabet, women, and mechanics (this is the account given by a contemporary), read the New Testament with avidity. Carrying it about with them, they soon knew it by heart, while its pages gave full demonstration of the perfect accordance between the Reformation of Luther and the Revelation of God.” 6

It was the same in France. In 1522 a translation of the four Gospels was published in France by one Lefevre, and soon after the whole New Testament. Then followed a version of the Psalms. In France, as in Germany, the effect was immense. Both the learned and noble and the common people were moved. “In many,” says a chronicler of the sixteenth century, “was engendered so ardent a desire to know the way of salvation, that artisans, carders, spinners, and combers employed themselves, while engaged in manual labor, in conversing on the word of God, and deriving comfort from it. In particular, Sundays and festivals were employed in reading the Scriptures and inquiring after the goodwill of the Lord.”

The pious Briconnet, Bishop of Meaux, sent a copy to the sister of Francis I, urging her to present it to her brother “This from your hands,” added he, “cannot but be agreeable. It is a royal dish,” continued the good bishop, “nourishing without corrupting, and curing all diseases. The more we taste it, the more we hunger for it, with uncloying and insatiable appetite.” “The gospel,” wrote LeFevre in his old age, “is already gaining the hearts of all the grandees and people, and soon, diffusing itself over all France, it will everywhere bring down the inventions of men.” The old doctor had become animated; his eyes, which had grown dim, sparkled; his trembling voice was again full toned. It was like old Simeon thanking the Lord for having seen His Salvation. Farel, the French reformer, maintained the sole sufficiency of the word of God as a rule of faith, and the duty of returning to its use. In the great Protestant Confession of Augsburg it is by a simple reference to Scripture that the new doctrines of the Reformation are justified. From first to last, from its incipient germ in the soul of Luther to the crowning day of the Reformation, the Bible was the very heart and core of the movement; and Protestantism has since deluged the world with Bibles. Do you wonder then that prophecy makes the giving of a “little book open” to the representative of the Church at that time a leading feature of its prefiguration?

But you must note that this was not the only thing given to John by the mighty Angel. There follows a great commission, which he was to execute.

He who of old had said to His disciples, “Go ye into all the world, and proclaim the glad tidings to every creature,” renews this commission to John in his representative character, and says to him, “Thou must prophesy (or preach) again, before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.” It is a second sending to the world of the gospel message, a second appointment of witnesses to proclaim the glad tidings.

And this was needed, for the fundamental ordinance of gospel preaching had long fallen into entire disuse among Romanists; the preacher had been lost in the sacrificing priest; the people had for ages had none to break to them the bread of life. Luther shrank at first from the office of a preacher, but it was forced on him by circumstances. After he had finished his translation of the book, and returned from his seclusion in the Wartburg, he began to publish the truth from the pulpit as well as through the press. “It is not from men,” he wrote to the Elector, “that I received the gospel, but from heaven, from the Lord Jesus; and henceforth I wish to reckon myself simply His servant, and to take the title of evangelist.” He began to preach in an old wooden hall in Wittemberg, and soon the largest churches were thronged to hear him. Within two or three years the gospel was being preached as well as read all over Germany, and in Sweden, Denmark, Pomerania, Livonia, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, and also in our own isle. Bilney had procured a copy of Erasmus’ New Testament, and found comfort and saving light in its study. “Then,” he says, “the Scriptures became to me sweeter than honey or the honeycomb”; adding, “as soon as, by the grace of God, I began to taste the sweets of that heavenly lesson which no man can teach but God alone, I begged the Lord to increase my faith, and at last desired nothing more than that I being so comforted of Him might be strengthened by His Spirit to teach sinners His ways.”

Renouncing the Romish title of “priest” and that of doctor, Luther, in a treatise against Papal orders, styles himself simply, “the preacher,” and the reformed Churches provided for a continuance, not of sacrificing priests, but of gospel preachers. “In the Popedom,” says Luther in his “Table Talk,” “they invest priests not for the office of preaching and teaching God’s word; for when a bishop ordaineth one he saith, ‘Take to thee power to celebrate mass, and to offer for the living and the dead.’ But we ordain ministers, according to the command of Christ,…to preach the pure gospel and the word of God.” So in the reformed Swedish Church it was enacted that none should be ordained who did not approve themselves both able and willing to preach the gospel. Instead of putting into the hands of the newly ordained the chalice and the patten, the reformers presented them with “a little book” the New Testament saying, ‘Wake thou authority to read and to preach the gospel.” If a recovered Bible be the first and greatest feature of the Reformation, most assuredly a renewal of gospel preaching stands next.

But a third thing was also given to John (in his representative character). In the vision, it was “a reed like unto a rod,” with which he was to measure “the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein,” omitting, or casting out, the outer court, which was given up to the Gentile enemies who were treading down the holy city. It was a measuring reed in the first place, but it looked like a rod of princely or ecclesiastical authority “a reed like a rod.” This measuring of “the temple of God” the symbol of the outward, visible Church in the world and this command to define and measure out its boundaries and dimensions, including one portion, and excluding another, looks like a direction to give attention and definition to the ecclesiastical foundations and boundaries, or limits, of the new reformed Churches, and to separate them in a formal public manner from the apostate Church of Rome.

If Protestant Christianity owed its birth to the Bible, and its early growth to revived gospel preaching, it owed its continued existence to its definite constitution as a separate ecclesiastical organization from Romanism. This came in due course. At first the reformers had to attend to the core and kernel of the movement; its spiritual side claimed all their efforts. A reformation of creed, of doctrine, of life and manners, of worship, of ordinances all this came first. But there followed and if the change was to be permanent there had to follow something additional and of a different character. When the child was born, it had to be dressed and named; life first, organization afterwards.

There had to come an embodiment of the new life in a new Church organization, and a definite separation from Rome. It was not merely that Rome on her part excommunicated and anathematized those whom she called heretics. The reformers felt that they had a solemn duty to perform. They had to justify their own separation from the apostasy by a public denunciation of it as such. They had to cast it out as any part of the true Church of Christ. They had to constitute a new evangelical and Protestant Church, to provide it with schools and colleges, with ministers, services, and buildings, and all the outward requirements of a fully organized system of religion.

This accordingly was the next stage of the Reformation movement, both in Germany and elsewhere. And this could not be done effectually without the concurrence of the governments of the respective countries. If Romish authority was to be thrown off, if public property was to be converted to Protestant uses, if Papal ordination was to be rejected and Papal bishops refused, the governments must evidently take part, and sanction the great change. Hence the need of the “rod” of authority; nor was it lacking when the time came for its use.

I have not time to trace the story. The Elector John, assuming to himself, like our own Henry VIII, the supremacy of the Church as a natural right of the Crown, “exercised it with resolution and activity, by forming new ecclesiastical constitutions, modeled on the principles of the great reformer.” “Come, let us build the wall, that we be no more a reproach,” said Nehemiah to the Jews. And so Luther and Melanchthon and other reformers urged the introduction into the reformed Churches of new formularies of public worship, the appropriation of the ecclesiastical revenues to the reformed parochial clergy and schools, and the ordination of a fresh supply of ministers independently of Rome. A general visitation of the churches was made by the prince’s desire, to see to the execution of the new system, and complete what might be wanting to the establishment throughout Saxony of a

SEPARATE EVANGELIC CHURCH.

In this feature the Reformation differed from all the earlier movements of a kindred nature, such as that of the Lollards in England or of Huss in Bohemia. As Schlegel remarks in his “Philosophy of History,” “It was by the influence Luther acquired by asserting the king’s authority, as well as by the sanction of the civil power, that the Reformation was promoted and consolidated. Without this, Protestantism would have sunk into the lawless anarchy that marked the proceedings of the Hussites.” This change took place in all the reformed States, the measuring reed like a rod being given by the civil authorities to the founders of the new communions, that they might solidly construct them on a permanent basis.

The outer court, representing the apostate Church, they on the other hand formally cast out. It was insisted on at the Diet of Augsburg that “the Roman pope, cardinals, and clergy did not constitute the Church of Christ, though there existed among them some that were real members of that Church, and opposed the reigning errors. That the true Church consists of none but the faithful, who had the word of God, and were by it sanctified and cleansed; while, on the other hand, what Paul had predicted of antichrist’s coming and sitting in the temple of God had had its fulfillment in the Papacy; and that the reformed Churches were not guilty of schism in separating themselves, and casting out Romish superstitions.” In his answer to the pope, Luther writes: “Rome has cut herself off from the universal Church; if ye reform not, I and all that worship Christ do account your seat to be possessed and oppressed by Satan himself, to be the damned seat of antichrist, which we will not be subject to nor incorporate with, but do detest and abhor the same.”

This formal separation of the reformers from the apostate Church, and this formal organization of the new Churches, holding evangelic faith, and using a pure ritual, is the fulfillment of this part of the symbolic prophecy of the Reformation; but we must not pause to justify this interpretation, as a most important and interesting section of our subject lies still before us. Thus far we have seen that the Reformation is predicted as first the result of the action and interference on her behalf of the glorious Head of the Church, that it was produced instrumentally by a recovered Bible and by a renewed gospel testimony in all lands, and that it issued in the development of a new ecclesiastical organization.

A retrospective narrative of the history of Christ’s two witnesses is then given, which time forbids my fully expounding now. These witnesses unquestionably represent the faithful evangelic Churches, which held fast the gospel all through the dark ages of Roman apostasy. They are called candlesticks; and we are told in the first chapter of the book that CANDLESTICKS SYMBOLIZE CHURCHES. They are also called olive trees, and this figure is used in Zechariah (where two such trees are seen supplying the candlestick with oil) to represent faithful ministers. The double symbol seems to predict, that all through the darkest period of antichristian apostasy, faithful Churches, ministered to by faithful pastors, should exist. They might be few and feeble, persecuted and hidden, small in numbers, and inconspicuous in status; yet acting as Christ’s faithful witnesses, and holding forth the word of life, they would keep alight amid the darkness the lamp of truth.

The number two is used apparently in compliance with the law of testimony. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.” These witnesses are not individuals, but Churches, and their prophesying or preaching lasts all through the dark ages, through the entire period of Papal domination, with the exception of one brief interval, during which they are to all appearance killed extinct.

In addition to witnessing for Christ and to His gospel, these evangelical Churches would also witness against the Roman antichrist and his assumptions. And the result would naturally be intense opposition on his part. When their testimony reached this point, he would make war with them, until at last he would overcome and kill them; that is, he would silence their witness completely. He would so exterminate Bible Christians wherever they were found in Christendom, by persecution unto death, that as witnessing Churches, maintaining a public testimony to the truth, they would cease to exist. Individuals, of course, would still like the seven thousand in Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal hold fast their integrity; but such would be the power of the oppressor, that they would have to hide their heads and hold their peace, in face of a mighty and triumphant and universal idolatry. This state of things would however be of very brief duration; for at the end of three years and a half the death-like silence would be broken, the voice of true testimony would once more be publicly heard, the witnessing Churches would experience a wonderful and startling resurrection, which would greatly alarm the enemies who witnessed it; and instead of being oppressed and extinguished, the faithful Churches would thenceforth be exalted and established. Such is the prediction of Revelation 11 translated from symbolic into plain language.

Now to those who are familiar with the Church history of the middle ages all this reads like history. It is a sketch from nature, in which all the leading features of a well-known landscape are clearly discernible, though laid down only in a small miniature. All came to pass precisely as here foretold. As superstitions and apostasy darkened down over Christendom, and an ever- increasing multitude faithlessly bowed the knee to Baal; as the man of sin gradually developed his power and his false pretensions at Rome protests arose here and there, and witnesses for Christ sprang up whose records remain with us to this day. In the East there were the Paulicians, who arose about the middle of the seventh century, and whom we know principally through the writings of their foes, who brand them as heretics. Already, even at that date, the priests withheld the Testament from the laity as too mysterious for the comprehension of common people, and a sort of paganized Christianity had begun to prevail, when a man named Constantine, who had come into possession of the gospels and of the epistles of St. Paul, and received their teachings into his heart, set himself like the great apostle himself to propagate the truth by extensive missionary labors. He pledged his followers to read no other book, and hold no other doctrines than those of Scripture, and his thirty years of labor produced what his enemies called a sect, but what seems to have been in reality a true Christian Church. A persecuting edict was issued against it; Constantine himself was stoned to death, his successor burned alive, with other leaders of the party. A subsequent president of the sect, one Sergius, writes, “From East to West and from North to South, I have run, preaching the gospel of Christ, and toiling with these my knees.” His faithful ministry lasted for thirty-four years, and tended to the large extension of the Church, which was bitterly persecuted by the eastern emperors of Rome. He too sealed his testimony with his blood, urging his followers to “resist not evil.” The Empress Theodora slaughtered and drowned one hundred thousand of these Paulician Christians, without extinguishing them. Her cruelties, however, at last drove them to resistance, and they lost to some extent the purity and godliness which had marked their earlier days. They spread into Thrace and as far as Philippopolis, and even as late as the twelfth century it was found impossible to reconcile them to the Catholic faith.

In the West, the confessors of Christ were similarly raised up in the early part of the seventh century, just when Gregory the Great was founding at Rome the distinctive system of Latin Christianity. Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles, protested both by word and deed against image worship one of the most characteristic features of Romanism. In the great Council of Frankfort, A.D. 794, under Charlemagne, a protest was made by the emperor and three hundred bishops of the West, in opposition to the popes, on this subject of image worship; and the Council of Paris, in A.D. 825, accompanied its decrees against the practice with an express rebuke to the pope. In fact, the Gallican Churches at this time held many views which we should now call Protestant, in opposition to the doctrines already prevalent at Rome; such as the sufficiency of the Scriptures, prayers in the vulgar tongue, the nature of the eucharist, and the truth as to justification and repentance, the folly of relics and pretended miracles, and other similar practices. Claude, the good Bishop of Turin, has been called “the Protestant of the West.” He was a contemporary of Sergius “the Protestant of the East” in the ninth century. He was a true, fearless, enlightened witness for Christ, though men called him a “heretic.” He took Scriptures as his guide, and protested against all the Romish innovations. He delighted, like Augustine, to set forth Christ and Divine grace through Him as the all in all in man’s salvation. “With the utmost fullness, unreserve, and precision he asserts the great doctrine of man’s forgiveness and justification in all ages through faith alone in Christ’s merits, and not by any works of the law, ceremonial or moral.”

Claude of Turin, though thus faithful, was not martyred, for the Papacy had not at that time established its supremacy in Savoy; but he was sorely persecuted, and his prophesying or preaching was “in sackcloth,” like the emblematic witnesses. “If the Lord had not helped me, they would have swallowed me up quick,” he writes. “They who see us do not only scoff but point at us.” His diocese was a wide one, and his influence great, nor did it soon pass away. Traces of its effects may be found long after his departure; faithful witnesses continued to hold and teach the truth, as the corruptions around them increased. A sect who are mentioned by their enemies as “prophets” in the tenth century seem to have been spiritually descended from this good Bishop of Turin, and his sphere continued in Papal estimation to be a hotbed of heretics.

Later on, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we have numerous accounts of “heretics,” who were brought before the Councils of Orleans, Arras, Toulouse, Oxford, and Lombers. The accounts still extant of the examinations of these so-called heretics show that, so far from being such, they were men who witnessed a good confession, and held fast the doctrines of the apostles. They denied all the distinctive teachings and practices of Popery, and were blameless and godly in their lives, even by the admission of their foes. Berenger, in the middle of the eleventh century, was the founder of a fresh witnessing Church, or, as his enemies put it, a fresh set of heretics. He was principal of a public school, and afterwards Archdeacon of Angers, and began by contending against the dogma of transubstantiation. He was a brilliantly clever, learned, and good man, and much venerated by the people. His doctrines were condemned by Papal councils; he was deprived of his benefice: but he had not the fortitude of a martyr, and was at last driven to retract through fear. Still he employed poor scholars to disseminate his doctrine, and died a penitent for his own want of courage and fidelity in A.D. 1088.

Time would fail me to tell of Peter de Bruys and his disciple Henry the Whitefield of his age and country who, after having almost overthrown the Papal system in Languedoc and Provence, was seized, convicted, imprisoned, and some say burned; of the heretics of Cologne, in 1147, who “bare the torment of the fire, not only with patience, but with joy and gladness”; of the thirty poor publicani, as they were called, tried at Oxford in 1160, who, convicted of holding the truth of Christ and denying the errors of Rome, were “branded on their foreheads, beaten with rods before the eyes of the populace,…publicly scourged, and with the sounding of whips cast out of the city.”

A prohibition having been previously made that none should succor or shelter them, these poor, persecuted witnesses for Jesus, whose garments had been cut down to the girdle though the weather was cold and inclement perished in helpless wretchedness, yet singing, “Blessed are ye, when men hate you and persecute you!”

Nor can I pause to speak of the Henricians, who were condemned in 1165 for their noble testimony to the truth, and against the errors of the wolves in sheep’s clothing who were called priests; nor of others who formed links in the long chain of witnesses which extended from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. One and all they endured privations and sufferings, which bear out the emblem of being clothed in sackcloth; and one and all they exhibited a self-denial, an unwearied zeal, and a degree of consistency and fortitude which show they were sustained by the power of Christ, according to this prediction: “I will give power unto My two witnesses, and they shall prophesy, clothed in sackcloth.”

But I must pass on to the great witnessing Church of the Waldenses. Would that I could tell its thrilling story! Read it for yourselves; it deserves to be restudied in these dangerous days of latitudinarian indifference to truth or falsehood in doctrine. This far-famed “sect,” or true Church of Christ, arose in A.D. 1179; some of its members were present at the third Lateran Council, with their books. Pope Alexander III showed them some favor, but they and their writings were condemned and anathematized by his successors, and persecution forthwith arose against them. They had a powerful missionary spirit, however, and their views soon spread in every direction; Provence, Languedoc, Arragon, Dauphine, and Lombardy were speedily permeated with the gospel, as preached by them. Their doctrine, as illustrated in their ancient poem called “The Noble Lesson,” was scriptural and spiritual; and they protested against the Romish system, as one of soul- destroying error, against the confessional, against purgatory, against masses for the dead and the assumption of power to forgive sin, and against the love of money which marked the whole system. They denounced the Papacy as antichrist in a separate treatise. These Waldenses united all their communities into the bond of one Church, cultivated learning, eschewed mere ignorant fanaticism, and were filled with zeal and prudence. Their motto was, “The light shineth in darkness”; and their symbol or crest, a lighted candle in a candlestick the very symbol employed in this prediction of them and their fellow witnesses.

But we must now recall that the prophecy not only presents the whole line of faithful witnesses as sufferers and mourners by the sackcloth emblem, but that it predicts that at a certain stage in their history the Roman wild beast would in some specially definite way make war against them, conquer them, and kill them. This part of the prophecy began to receive its fulfillment at the end of the twelfth century, when, at the third Lateran Council (A.D. 1179), the Popedom roused itself collectively to a war of extermination against heretics. Previously to this, separate members of the system, acting alone and independently, had opposed the truth by force and cruelty. But in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, Romanism, then in the plenitude of its power, gathered itself together for a great, determined, united, and persistent effort to crush out all that opposed its supremacy, and to clear Christendom of heresy.

This deadly onslaught against the saints was predicted, as you will remember, both by Daniel and by John in their foreviews of the Roman antichrist. He was to wear out the saints of the Most High, and prevail against them. Here the same fierce and fatal antagonism comes in as an incident in the career of the two representative “witnesses,” who symbolize the succession of evangelical Churches, which kept up the testimony of Jesus during the dark ages. During the three centuries we have just mentioned the furnace was heated seven times hotter than it was wont to be heated. Persecution raged systematically. The fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, sanctioned all former plans for the extirpation of heresy, urged their adoption with renewed vigor, and subordinated secular authority to spiritual powers for the purpose. If kings would not clear their dominions of heresy, their subjects were to be absolved from all allegiance to them. Crusades against heretics were to be organized, and to secure the same privileges and rewards as crusades against the Turks. The Holy Scriptures were to be interdicted to the laity; even children were to be forced to denounce their own relatives.

All sorts of methods were to be used for the detection of heretics; bishops were to gird themselves for the work of ferreting out and exterminating them; and all the Franciscan and Dominican monks were to supply instruments for carrying out this process of inquisition and blood. The Waldenses and Albigenses were, of course, especially singled out for extermination. A crusade was proclaimed against them, and plenary absolution promised to all who should perish in the holy war. Never was a more merciless spirit of murder exhibited than by these terrible crusaders against the meek and lowly and Christian-spirited Vaudois. The Inquisition that invention of Dominic, or rather Gregory IX established its horrid tribunal for making inquest after unseen, secret “heresy”; and wherever any revival of true religion took place, or any confessors of Christ could be found, there they were hunted, if possible, to death. Genuine disciples of Christ, under whatever name they might pass, whether called Petrobrusians, Catharists, Waldenses, Albigenses, Wicliffites, Lollards, Hussites, Bohemians, or any other name, it mattered not to the torture and the stake with them if they held fast the gospel of Christ! Savonarola, one of the wisest and worthiest of the age, was burnt at the stake in 1498. Seven years of cruel war raged against the Hussites, and a civil persecution yet more bitter followed. Eighteen thousand soldiers were sent into the valleys of Piedmont, towards the end of the fourteenth century, to exterminate the Waldenses of Piedmont, and appropriate to themselves all their property. The Christians of Val Louise, in Dauphiny, were actually exterminated, burned alive, and suffocated in the caves in which they had sought refuge. Four hundred infants were found dead in their mothers’ arms, and 3,000 perished in the struggle.

Lorente calculates, from official reports, that in the forty years prior to the Reformation, the Inquisition alone burned 13,000 persons and condemned 169,000. The latter half of the fifteenth century was a time of Satan’s raging against the saints. But in spite of racks and prisons and sword and flame, the voices of the witnesses of Jesus were still raised in behalf of the truth, and against the power and pretensions of antichrist.

At last, however, as the fifteenth century drew to a close, the furious crusade seemed about to accomplish its object. The beast had all but conquered and killed the witnesses, according to the prediction. The strong figure employed of the witnesses lying dead for three and a half days, means, of course, that their testimony was silenced. They no longer prophesied; they were silent, helpless, extinct for a brief period. They were worn out. The wild beast from the abyss had prevailed against them. For the moment the struggle was over.

The fulfillment of this part of the vision was at the opening of the sixteenth century, just before the Reformation movement commenced. Hear Mosheim’s description of the crisis. “As the sixteenth century opened, no danger seemed to threaten the Roman pontiffs. The agitations excited in former centuries by the Waldenses, Albigenses, Beghards, and others, and afterwards by the Bohemians, had been suppressed and extinguished by counsel and by the sword. The surviving remnant of Waldenses hardly lived, pent up in the narrow limits of Piedmontese valleys, and those of the Bohemians, through their weakness and ignorance, could attempt nothing, and thus were an object of contempt rather than fear.” Milner, the Church historian, says that at this date, though the name of Christ was professed everywhere in Europe, nothing existed that could properly be called evangelical. All the confessors of Christ, “worn out by a long series of contentions, were reduced to silence.” “Everything was quiet,” says another writer; “every heretic exterminated.” This was not, of course, literally true. The Lord knoweth them that are His, and had even in that darkest hour of the night that precedes the dawn, His own who served Him secretly. But so far as collective testimony before Europe was concerned, the witnesses were dead! Their enemies gloried in the fact. The Lateran Council congratulated itself that Christendom was no longer afflicted by heresies, and, as one of its orators said, addressing Leo X, “Jam nemo reclamat, nullus obsistit.” “There is an end of resistance to the Papal rule, and religious opposers exist no more.” And again, “The whole body of Christendom is now seen to be subjected to its head, i.e. to thee.” Leo commanded a great jubilation, and granted a plenary indulgence in honor of the event. Dean Waddington, describing the close of this council, says: “The pillars of Rome’s strength were visible and palpable, and she surveyed them with exultation from her golden palaces.” “The assembled prelates separated with complacency and confidence, and with mutual congratulations on the peace, unity, and purity of the apostolic Church.” “The power of Rome was de facto paramount in the Church.” So Neander says: “The edifice of an unlimited Papal monarchy had at that time come victoriously out of all the preceding flights, and established itself on a firm basis. In the last Lateran Council at Rome, the principle of an unlimited Papal power was established, in opposition to the principle of general councils, and the Waldenses and Hussites had no more any importance to fight against the Papacy.” So another writer 7 says: “At the commencement of the sixteenth century Europe reposed in the deep sleep of spiritual death. There was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.”

The witnesses were dead! Never before, and certainly never since, was Rome able to congratulate herself that heresy was extinguished and heretics exterminated from the face of Christendom. It is a fine, striking hieroglyph of the crisis that the prophecy presents. There stands the fierce wild beast monster from the abyss! He has prevailed against his defenseless human victims. The struggle has been long and hard; it has made him all the more savage and impatient: but it is over at last! His jowls still drop with gore, his eyes are red with blood as he stands glaring with his fierce eyes on the pale, cold, silent corpses of Christ’s two witnesses, so long empowered from above to resist and defy all his might.

As John watched the sad scene, did there not recur to his mind scenes in the amphitheaters of pagan Rome, scenes such as Dore has imagined and painted for us, scenes with which the exile of Patmos was all too familiar? The arena strewn in the pale moonlight with the cold, stiff corpses of the faithful witnesses of Christ; and the victorious wild beast, glutted and sufficed with their flesh and blood, standing guard over the remains! That was the symbol. The reality was wimessing Churches silenced by long and bloody persecution. The time A.D. 1514, the close of the last Lateran Council, which proclaimed to the world in a formal, official manner the fact that all opposition to Rome had ceased.

Now note the sequel: In 1517 the Reformation began the movement which, like a snowball growing ever greater as it rolls along, has in the year 1887 one hundred and tiny millions of adherents, all professing the faith of Christ in opposition to the apostasy of Rome! Witnessing Churches Protestant Churches sprang up everywhere, and have been multiplying ever since.

What shall we say? Is not this a resurrection of the witnesses? Rome had crushed them, had she? So she thought! But she knew better before fifty years had rolled by! She knew better when Germany threw off her yoke, and England withdrew from her communion, and Holland resisted her legions, and the trumpet of Protestant defiance deafened her ears, and the earthquake of Reformation revolution shook her throne, and when the outburst of heavenly light so illumined the minds of men that they laughed at her once dreaded excommunications, sat unmoved under the thunders of her interdicts, and boldly tearing the mask of mother Church from her face, exposed her as the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth!

They were dead, were they, the witnesses of Christ? They had no longer any voice to testify, any courage to struggle, any fortitude to resist? So Rome fancied till the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they rose up a mighty host to proclaim the glad tidings through Europe, to do and dare and die in their myriads, denouncing Rome’s “doctrines of devils,” with such boldness and power as to arrest the attention of the world, and to produce a revolution of unexampled greatness in Christendom. Rome reeled on its seven hills as if shaken by an earthquake, and a “tenth part” of the Babylonian “city” fell. England, one of the ten kingdoms into which the western Roman empire had been divided, fell away separated from Latin Christendom. Thousands perished in the terrible struggle which ensued in many lands, and Rome was worsted in her warfare. The rise of Protestantism was, as the very name attests, the resurrection of the witnesses; the Reformers themselves recognized it as such, and their enemies also. Pope Adrian, Leo’s successor, wrote in a brief to the Diet of Nuremberg, “The heretics Huss and Jerome seem now to be alive again in the person of Luther.”

The Reformation of the sixteenth century commenced in the year 1517. The translation and publication of the Word of God, the definition of Protestant doctrine, and the founding of Protestant Churches occupied the next half-century, while the liberation of Protestant States from Papal dominion was not completed till the century which followed. During much of this period the “war” of the “wild beast” against the “witnesses” continued, and with it the sufferings, “sackcloth” testimony, and slaughter of the latter.

The birth of Protestant Churches and nations in the first half of the sixteenth century did not however, as we know, mark the close of Rome’s bitter and bloodthirsty opposition to the truth. The Papal war against the witnesses continued to rage all through that century and all through the next with undiminished hatred and cruelty. But there was one great difference. In pre-Reformation times the beast had the best of it; he “prevailed against” the saints; he wore them out, and was at last so far victorious that for a few brief years he completely silenced all corporate testimony to the truth. But after the marvelous resurrection of the witnesses, after the uprising of powerful Protestant communities, duly organized on a permanent basis and backed up by civil power, the Papacy was never again able to silence the witnessing Churches as a whole, never again able to prevail against them simultaneously in all quarters. Her victims had been transformed into her powerful enemies; and while Rome prevailed against the reformers in some lands, they prevailed against her in others. Henceforth Roman Christendom was divided into two camps; and, as of old, the house of Saul grew weaker and weaker, and the house of David stronger and stronger, so there was a gradual loss of power on the part of the Papacy and the Papal nations; and as time passed on, a gradual growth in political influence, material prosperity, intellectual enlightenment, and social condition, on the part of Protestant nations. But at first the struggle was a sore one. Just as Pharaoh pursued the people after he had been compelled reluctantly to let them go, and pursued them to the annihilation of his own power, so Rome pursued the young Protestant Churches of Europe to her own undoing in the end. She stirred up opposition and international conflicts, instigated blood massacres and cruel exiles and banishments, and plunged the reformed communities into a sea of sorrow and trouble: witness the terrible massacre of St. Bartholomew with its 60,000 victims in France, the Marian persecutions in England, the cruel slaughter in six brief years of 18,000 Protestants in the Netherlands, the desolating Thirty Years’ War in central Europe, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which in 1685 exiled 400,000 Huguenots from France and caused the death of nearly as many more. This may be regarded as the last great act of the Papal war against the witnesses. Protestantism had to pass through a long drawn out agony before Rome recognized, not its right to exist, for she still denies that, but its existence and growth as a fact against which it was useless to fight.

It was not till the close of the seventeenth century, not until the glorious Revolution which placed William of Orange on the throne of England in 1689, that Protestantism was firmly established in England. This event took place about three and a half years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Papal supremacy had been abrogated in England in 1534, but in the reign of Mary and again under the Popish Stuarts its very existence was imperiled afresh. The Peace of Ryswick, at the close of 1697, first completely established the civil and religious liberty of Protestants.

All this proves that while the first stage of the resurrection of the “witnesses” took place at the commencement of the Reformation movement of the sixteenth century, their exaltation to political power and supremacy, the establishment of Protestantism, occupied a much longer interval. Like all other similar great movements, the Reformation, starting from an epoch, extended over an era.

Space forbids the exposition of the chronology of this most remarkable period, including its relation to the 1,260 years of prophecy. Suffice it to say, that the interval from A.D. 1534, the date of the abrogation of Papal supremacy in England, and the publication of Luther’s Bible in Germany, to A.D. 1697-8, the date of the complete establishment of Protestantism at the Peace of Ryswick, is separated by exactly 1,260 lunar years from A.D. 312-476, or the period which extended from the fall of paganism at the conversion of Constantine to the fall of the western Roman empire.

I have not attempted, nor could I in the compass of this lecture attempt, to expound fully the wonderful Reformation vision of the book of Revelation. I have only glanced at its leading features. There is in it very much more of the deepest interest which I dare not touch at this time because it would take me too far. But have I not said enough to convince you that the great and blessed revival of true doctrine and of spiritual life which took place between three and four centuries ago, and which we call the Reformation, was both foreshadowed in Jewish history and foretold in Christian prophecy, and that in connection with each of these wonderful predictions the seal of God’s approval is conspicuously set on the movement? What is the vision of Revelation 10? One of a divine interference, giving back to the Church the Bible and the preaching of the gospel, and formally separating between apostate Christendom and the true Church. What is the retrospective narrative told by the angel? It is the story of witnessing Churches, sustained for long centuries amid sorrow and poverty and shame, destroyed at last as corporate bodies by the ferocious attacks of the Roman beast, resuscitated however after a very brief interval, and exalted to political power in spite of all enemies. Such is the prediction; such have been the facts. How came that strange prediction to be incorporated 1,800 years ago with these sacred writings? Realize, if you can, the stupendous marvel of the fact that it is here in this book, and that myriads of men of all nations were for ages engaged, all unconsciously to themselves, in fulfilling it. Realize, if you can, the sublime tenderness and sacred sympathizing approval with which the Savior uttered those simple words, “My two witnesses.” Yes, Lord, they were Thy witnesses, those poor, persecuted Lollards and Huguenots, those martyred Waldenses and Paulicians! Thy witnesses, Thou blessed Sufferer, who didst Thyself resist unto blood, striving against sin!

They were witnesses to Thy grace, to Thy glory, to Thine all-sufficient atonement, to Thine only high priesthood and sole mediatorship; and for this they suffered, for this they died! They suffered with Thee; they shall reign with Thee, according to Thine own word, “Where I am, there shall also My servant be.”

“My two witnesses”! Ah, Lord, how Thou didst love Thy faithful martyrs! How Thou dost hate the cruel and evil system which for ages made bitter war upon them, and would fain do so still! In persecuting them did it not persecute Thee? Oh, how often didst Thou ask of pope and prelate, as of Saul of Tarsus in earlier days, Why persecutest thou Me?” As we think of these things, must we not share the feelings of the psalmist, and say, “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee? Am I not grieved with them that rise up against Thee?” Far, far be it from us to sympathize with the persecutors and lightly esteem the true witnesses, as is the fashion with too many in our days! Let us rather maintain against the great enemy of the gospel the same testimony they held fast amid his fiercest onslaughts, and thus share with them the honor of being numbered by Christ among His faithful witnesses.

We trust that the lectures to which you have listened have produced in your minds the profound conviction that the existence and character of Romanism the entire history of the Papacy was foretold in the Bible long ages before that evil power arose in the earth. If so, the conviction will bear fruit, for knowledge influences conduct. Several practical results of an important nature should follow, otherwise we should not have cared to expound to you, this great subject.

And first, let your knowledge of this truth confirm and deepen your confidence in the divine inspiration of Scripture. None but God can thus foresee and foretell the events of a long series of unborn ages. In these symbolic prophecies the history of twelve or thirteen centuries is written in advance. Compare them with anything else in the entire circle of literature, and you will realize that they stand apart as a thing unique, like a living man in a gallery of statues.

The miracle of the existence of these prophecies in the book, and of their fulfillment in the facts of history, is so great that few minds can grasp it. That not only twelve or thirteen, but twenty-five centuries of history should have fallen out exactly as it was foretold in the days of Daniel they would, is a marvel that nothing but the Incarnation itself can exceed. It is a stupendous miracle in the world of mind, that world which rises high above the world of matter. It evinces more markedly the finger of God than any mere physical sign, however great, could do. It appeals to the intelligence of the human mind; it challenges the recognition not of the senses, but of the conscience. It sets a seal of supernatural wisdom on the entire Bible. None but God could have delineated beforehand the Papal power. Its very unnaturalness forbids the possibility of its being the fruit of human imagination. That a power claiming to act for God, to be “as God,” and enthroned in the temple of God or of the Christian Church, should yet be His most determined enemy, the opposer of His truth, the destroyer of His saints, the great agent of Satan in the earth; that it should, by fraud and corruption and false pretenses, rule the world for ages from the very same seven-hilled central city whence it had already been ruled for other ages by military force; and that Roman rule should, in its Christian stage, shed more saintly blood than in its pagan stage all this could never have been anticipated by man, but only foretold by God. It is a demonstration which candor cannot resist of the divine inspiration of this holy book.

Is not this a practical result? Let criticism carp as it may, it cannot blind our eyes to this gigantic fact, that twenty-five centuries of history have, in their leading outline, exactly corresponded with Bible predictions. We are bound to conclude that the page that bears the prophecy was written by a divinely guided pen. The tremendous importance of this conclusion I need not indicate. I solemnly charge you to reverence this book. It will judge you in the last day. Heaven and earth may pass away, but not a jot or tittle of the word of God shall ever fail. Trust its promises! They are as true as its predictions. Tremble before its warnings and its threats! They will as assuredly be fulfilled as its prophecies have been. Study its sacred pages, never think you know it all; it is as fathomless in its wisdom as is the mind from which it emanates. I have been studying it for more than thirty years, and I am convinced that it has oceans of truth which I have not yet explored. How few really study it? and yet it has riches of wisdom which exceed those of all the libraries on earth. And remember that as certainly as it unveiled beforehand the past history of the Church in the world, so surely does it unveil and illuminate her critical present and her glorious future. The guide book that has proved true thus far may be trusted till we reach the goal.

Secondly, there are personal, social, and civil duties as regards Romanism and the Reformation arising from the truth we have learned which are of primary importance, and which I must indicate and urge on you before I close.

What is the present position of Romanism in the world? and what the condition of the Reformed Churches? You must be able to answer these questions before you can clearly see your own practical duties in relation to this subject.

As to Romanism, I have shown you that its present stage is that of decay, and swiftly approaching destruction. Its rise took place one thousand three hundred years ago; it reached the height of its dominion five hundred years ago; it received its first fatal blow in the Reformation over three hundred years ago, its second in the French Revolution at the end of the last century, and a third in the unification of Italy and the liberation of Rome itself from Papal rule in 1870. The final blow is yet to fall, at the fast approaching advent of Christ, as described at the end of the nineteenth chapter of Revelation.

To enable you to realize the extent and steady increase of this consumption and decay of Romanism, I will mention a few facts and give you a few figures.

1. Just before the Reformation Rome boasted that heresy was extinct in Christendom. Not a Protestant existed; she had slain the witnesses of Jesus. Now the number of Protestants is variously estimated at from one hundred and thirty-six to one hundred and fifty millions of mankind. In the national convention of Protestants held last year in Glasgow, the last figure was given as the correct one. Including the Greek, Coptic, and Armenian Churches, there are two hundred and fifty millions of professing Christians opposed to Rome, and only one hundred and eighty millions subject to her. She has therefore no claim whatever to supremacy or universality, but is in a minority, as compared with other Christians.

2. Romanists have, during the present century, increased sixty millions, owing to the natural growth of population. At the end of the last century they numbered one hundred and twenty millions; now they are one hundred and eighty millions. But Protestants have in the same period grown from forty millions to one hundred and fifty millions. In other words, Romanists have increased fifty percent, and Protestants two hundred and seventy-five percent. Going on at the same ratio, Protestants will, by the end of this century, equal or exceed Romanists in the world. Had they increased at the same rate, the Papacy would now have had four hundred and fifty millions of adherents, instead of only one hundred and eighty millions. It is a decadent cause throughout the world.

Among the English-speaking populations the proportions are still more remarkable, and when it is remembered that this section of mankind includes the most enterprising, prosperous, and powerful nations of the earth, the facts are most suggestive. Out of the hundred millions who speak English, only oneseventh are Romanists, including all the Catholics in Ireland and America, in Africa and our colonies. Everywhere among the intelligent, educated English-speaking races Romanism is an effete religion, and its votaries are being absorbed by the purer and more vigorous faith. In America it declined twenty per cent in the ten years between 1863 and 1873. In Montreal alone there are five congregations of ex-Romanists. Even in Ireland Romanism is decreasing and Protestants are increasing; that is, the disproportion between the two grows less each decade.

As regards the United Kingdom, the facts are most remarkable and cheering. At the beginning of this century the Romanists numbered one-third of the population. Now they are only one-seventh. The proportion of Romanists has decreased from one-third to one-seventh, and that of Protestants has increased from two-thirds to six-sevenths. In other words, whereas in 1801 every third man was a Papist; now only every seventh man is such. The population has in this interval increased from sixteen to thirty-five millions. Protestantism has trebled its numbers, and now reaches over thirty millions, while Romanism remains stationary at about five millions. Had it thriven like Protestantism it would have had fifteen millions.

Now these statistics tell their own tale. As surely as Romanism rose in the sixth century and culminated in the thirteenth, so surely is it decaying and falling in the nineteenth. Not only has it lost all temporal sovereignty and all direct political power, but it has ceased to hold its own in the world, and especially in the foremost nations of it, even as regards its adherents. It is consuming and wasting, diminishing while others are increasing, and losing even the semblance of a right to the proudly arrogated title of catholic.

But this is only one aspect of the subject. There is another, and a very important one. Romanism is, and has been all through this century, and especially during the last fifty years, MAKING A DESPERATE EFFORT TO SECURE A RENEWED ASCENDANCY IN OUR OWN EMPIRE, AND ESPECIALLY IN ENGLAND. It has enormously increased its working staff and its working centers. During the last quarter of a century, that is from 1850 to 1885, its priests in Great Britain have increased by 1,641, its churches, chapels, and stations by 866, its monasteries and convents by 558, and its colleges by 20. This immense and rapid growth is not owing to any proportionate increase of adherents, though it is of course designed to secure such an increase. But it indicates “the determination of the Papacy to try issues on the grandest scale with Protestantism in its stronghold.” We have to face a deliberate and desperate effort on the part of this wealthy, highly organized, and centralized system, to weaken and, if possible, subjugate the champion of Protestantism in the earth. The present perplexities of England are the result.

Whether we believe it or not, we are again in the old battle, which we thought had been won at the Reformation and at our Revolution. It is the struggle for power between the priests of Rome and the people of England. The one, a party small in number, but organized, united, and unwearied. The people, the majority, but divided, distracted, and deceived.

The Church of Rome has never concealed her claim. Her chief, Dr. Manning, has repeatedly asserted it. She is to lay down the laws which we are to obey. Our Government is to receive and enforce them. Her success now in Ireland is only a step in her imperial progress. She will never rest till she has gained her ends, till our throne has ceased to be Protestant, and our Parliament is subservient to her will. Nor is her scheme unreasonable, though, as yet, incomplete. She has gained a section of the Anglican clergy, who adopt her principles, use her worship, and teach her dogmas. She returns a considerable section of the members of the House of Commons, who think, speak, and vote as she desires. She uses this section to bring pressure to bear on Government and parties. To the Liberals she speaks the language of Liberalism; to the voluntaries she is a voluntary. A large body of the English dissenters, and two-thirds of the Free Church of Scotland, have fallen into her trap, and are now her tools. In Parliament she is strong. She moves members through their constituen-cies. She fills some of the public offices with her creatures.

She assails all by importunity, flattery, or threats. She has gained a premier, who is possibly her disciple certainly her accomplice; through him she commands a cabinet. She works incessantly through the press. No publication is too small for her hand, none too strong for her agency. She is served by a host of devoted troops, who work with all their soul for her, under all sorts of names, in all places and disguises; reporters, writers for the press, literary and scientific men, ministers of State, preachers in the pulpits of the Church and of dissent, masters of schools, inspectors and examiners. She enters families by governesses, tutors, nurses, and domestics. She has secured a large section of our upper classes, and every day she gains more. She draws them by shows, by music, by taste, by frivolity and reflection, by dissipation and remorse. She works on the hearts of women by their fancies, their love of pleasure, and their fear of pain. She makes the wealth of men her exchequer, and the influence of the rich becomes hers. From the marquis down to the carpenter, she considers none below her notice or too strong for her power.

Against this disciplined and able confederacy, you the English people have to stand. And for such a fight you are ill prepared. Your impulse is right, your disposition is good; but impulse and feeling are insufficient against unscrupulous and unwearied conspirators. You are divided by parties, distracted by business, weakened by indifference. Yet the issue is great. It is, whether we are to keep the rights and liberties which our forefathers gained? Your freedom stands on your faith; and if your faith fails, your freedom will fail. That is the lesson of your own history; for all that we ever won of liberty was had through the strength of Protestant convictions. I ask you to weigh the issue. It is no light matter. It is your life. Don’t despise or underrate your adversary, but don’t flinch or quail before him. Rome has in her service the highest intellect and the most untiring zeal. She is served with the talents of the ablest and the passions of the keenest. She uses the vices of men as well as their virtues; and she has no restraints. She adapts herself to all forms of government and all states of society. She plies every class with arguments suited to its habits, and she can prevail as well with the accomplished and jaded man of fashion as with the illiterate peasant. The history, which I now put before you, tells you what strides she has made in England in the last forty years. It is for you to decide whether she will go on till she has mastered you, or whether you will re-assert your power and compel her to obey your laws. That is the real question. I have given you the facts; draw your own conclusions, and act like thoughtful men.” 1

We urge you carefully to study the pamphlet to which these words form the preface. It is a catalogue of facts, and they prove that all our Protestant privileges are in peril, and that it behooves us to be on our guard. Rome makes no secret of her object; it is to reunite England to Latin Christendom by reestablishing the Papal supremacy here. “If England is ever to be reunited to Christendom,” says Cardinal Manning, “it is by submission to the living authority of the vicar of Jesus Christ. The first step of its return must be by obedience to his voice, as rebellion against his authority was the first step of its departure.” 2 He proceeds to show that religious toleration is a complete delusion, that the true Church can tolerate nothing but absolute and unconditional submission. “Neither true peace nor true charity recognize tolerance; the Church has a right to require every one to accept her doctrine”; that “the duty of the civil power is to enforce the laws of the Church, restrain evil doers, and punish heresy.” “It is astonishing,” he writes, “how small is the space rightfully left to the exclusive domination of the civil power..Even in passing laws, Parliament must defer to the Church. The State may enact a law, but it must see that it in no way contravenes the higher laws of the Church.” 3

Dr. Manning plainly asserts that Rome has entered on a struggle between the supremacy of the pope and that of the Crown, that it is a struggle for life and death, and that it embraces the whole question of the Reformation in these countries. As Colquhoun remarks, “It is the old battle fought under the Plantagenets, whether the law of England is to be sovereign and supreme, or whether we are to have a confederacy of Roman priests, aided by treacherous English priests, braving English law, defying the British Parliament, and trampling on the sovereign’s crown.”

One of the avowed objects of the “Catholic Defense Society” is the removal from our statute book of the coronation oath and the Act of Settlement, which limit the possession of the crown of England to Protestants. Cardinal Manning considers that Rome has the full right to depose a Protestant sovereign.

The election of a prince in a Christian community cannot be put in the category of a purely civil act. If therefore an heretical prince is elected, or succeeds to the throne, the Church has a right to say, “I annul the election, or I forbid the succession.” Or again, if a king of a Christian nation falls into heresy, he commits an offense against God,..and against his people..Therefore it is in the power of the Church, by virtue of the supreme authority with which she is vested by Christ over all Christian men, to depose such a prince, in punishment of his spiritual crime, and to preserve his subjects from the danger of being led by his precept and example into heresy or spiritual rebellion. 4

There is no mistaking this doctrine. Leo XIII has a perfect right to depose Queen Victoria; nay, more, it would be a bounden duty for him so to do, if he had the power. He has not, and he is never likely to have that power; but meantime we have foolishly given him the power to cause serious political trouble in her realm, and he is availing himself to the full of the opportunity.

This is, be it observed, no antiquated claim quoted from mediaeval times; it is published in England in this nineteenth century by one who is styled the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. And it is no mere theory, no mere fancy sketch; it is a working drawing, as architects would say, a practical scheme which Rome is steadily endeavoring to carry out.

The chances of his ever bringing England back under his sway are very remote; but if “home rule” could be obtained for Ireland, it becomes atonce a Papal kingdom and a perpetual menace to England. This therefore is an object to be attained by any and every means. The chief result of home rule is to be the extirpation of Protestantism in Ireland. “The woes of Ireland are due to one single cause the existence of Protestantism in Ireland. The remedy can only be found in the removal of that which causes the evil..Would that every Protestant meeting-house were swept from the land! Then would Ireland recover herself and outrages be unknown.” 5

That this attempt would be made is not to be questioned. Cardinal Manning insists that it is a sin, and even an “insanity,” to hold that men have an inalienable right to liberty of conscience and of worship, or to deny that Rome has the right to repress by force all religious observance save her own, or to teach that Protestants in a Catholic country should be allowed the exercise of their religion.

“Catholicism,” says a Romish magazine, “is the most intolerant of creeds; it is intolerance itself, because it is truth itself. The impiety of religious liberty is only equaled by its absurdity.” Conceive what home rule in Ireland would be in the light of these statements!

A most important point to be borne in mind in the consideration of this question is, that Romanism is not a religion merely, but a political system. We are of course bound to allow the Roman Catholics the liberty of conscience which we claim for ourselves; but we are not bound by any law, human or divine, to allow them the right of conspiring for the overthrow of our liberties, Government, and empire. Adam Smith well says: “The constitution of the Church of Rome may be considered the most formidable combination that was ever formed against the authority, and security of civil government, as well as against the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind.” 6

Peace and prosperity are impossible under Papal and priestly rule, as all history attests. “The Papacy,” says Prince Bismarck, “has ever been a political power which, with the greatest audacity and with the most momentous consequences, has interfered in the affairs of this world.” The question before our country now is, whether we are willing to make a further and most decisive advance on the road in which we have already traveled too far, and to grant to an alien and antagonistic political power a most real practical supremacy over five millions of the queen’s subjects in Ireland, including a million of loyal Protestants in that land.

I cannot close these lectures without urging you to study the subject more thoroughly, and to get well grounded in your Protestant principles. A dangerous laxity on doctrinal matters marks the present day.

Multitudes hardly know what they believe, or why they believe what they do. In Reformation days people knew the ground on which they had become Protestants; but we have been so long sheltered behind the bulwarks erected by our fathers, that we have forgotten that we may have to defend our own civil and religious liberties, and neglected to furnish ourselves with arms for the conflict. It does not do however to be unprepared and defenseless in these perilous times. Let me urge you to read up carefully the history of the Reformation and something of the Romish controversy. Read up also the history of your country in the days of the Stuarts, when a dark conspiracy existed to enthrall England once more, and to force our free Protestant land back under the terrible tyranny of Rome. A similar conspiracy exists again now. Call at John Kensit’s, 18 Paternoster Row, and purchase some of his cheap and popular Protestant pamphlets.

They will open your eyes as to this great subject. Get some armor, and gird it on, for believe me, you will have to do battle for the liberties that have made England what she is this day. Ignorance is weakness; knowledge is power. When you know with some degree of fullness and accuracy what it is to be a Protestant, how you will prize the privilege of bearing the name, and resolve that none shall rob you of it!

Above all, ground yourselves firmly in a comprehension of the three Bible foreviews of Romanism to which I have directed your attention, for the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God.

Lastly, I would urge you to avoid all tampering with the bastard Romanism which is called RITUALISM, or High Churchism, and which abounds, alas! all over England. It is simply Romanism slightly diluted, Popery disguised with a thin veil. Wherever you have a “priest” instead of a preacher, an “altar” instead of a communion table, wax candles instead of the sunshine of divine truth, ceremonial instead of sound doctrine, sacraments instead of saving grace, intoned liturgies instead of spiritual worship, gorgeous vestments instead of gospel truth, tradition and “the Church” instead of “as it is written,” and crossings instead of Christ there you have Romanism, no matter what it may be called. Beware of it, however attractive the architecture and the incense, the music and the solemn ceremonial. Think of the apostles and their upper chamber; remember that Judaism gave us “a shadow of good things to come,” not a model to be imitated, and that all this outward show is not worship “in spirit and in truth,” such as God our Father seeks from His people now. The Apostle Paul styles this sort of thing a return to “the weak and beggarly elements,” to bondage, and says of those who in his day had been beguiled by ceremonies, “I am afraid of you,” etc. Let not these things beguile you from the simplicity in Christ. What! will you play with a poisonous snake because it has a gaily speckled back? Keep clear of all danger to your eternal interests. The pitfalls of Popery are concealed by fair flowers, but they will none the less be your ruin if you fall into them. The Bible brands it as antichristianity, and traces its origin to Satan. I warn you to stand aloof from the whole thing if you would not be involved in its solemn judgments. Remember that there is only “one Mediator between God and man”; that there is but “one sacrifice for sins,” offered “once” for all and “for ever.” Through the “one Mediator,” by the “one sacrifice,” “draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you.” You need no mediator between yourself and Christ. The priest is a false intruder there. Jesus calls you to come to Himself. He is both human and divine. He is bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh, yet without sin. God is in Him. He is one with us and one with God. Suffer nothing to come between your soul and Him. Suffer no saint, no angel, no virgin, no priest, to come between you and Jesus Christ. Go to Him for the pardon of all your sins. Make to Him your confessions. He can absolve you, and will, yea, does, if you truly believe in Him. Priestly absolution is a lie. It is a blasphemous pretense. The sentence, “I absolve thee,” whether from the mouth of Romish priest or Protestant minister, is profane. Be not deluded by it. Your fellow sinner cannot absolve you from the sins you have committed against God. Turn from these idols and vanities. Jesus is all you need. His blood is sufficient to atone, and cleanses those who simply trust in Him ‘from all sin.” “Search the Scriptures,” they testify of Him. Come to Him that you may have life. His heart is touched with the feeling of our infirmities; none can sympathize as He can; none can help as He. To you, to each one, He says, “Him that cometh unto ME I will in no wise cast out.” “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but MY WORDS shall not pass away.”

“Lord, to whom shall we go? THOU hast the words of eternal life.” Thou alone art ALL we need, for Thou alone art “ALL IN ALL.”

(End of article)

By David J. Meyer
(A True Story)

This is a testimonial from a Christian pastor who was raised by a family that practiced witchcraft.

Witchcraft is very real but greatly misunderstood. I know because witchcraft goes back on the paternal side of my family for over five generations to Chesterfield, Massachusetts in 1770.

My great grandmother became a well-known witch in Wisconsin in the early days of this century. Caroline was a blind witch and used her fingers to read palms and also became adept at putting “the hex” on people.

Many spooky things would happen in our family. Dishes would slide off from shelves, light bulbs would unscrew and fall to the floor, filmy apparitions would appear and vanish, and this sort of thing became a way of life.

In one instance, my father was riding with my grandfather in a horse-drawn wagon, when a filmy white apparition appeared in front of the horse, causing the horse to rear up on its hind legs. Surrounded by electrifying fear, my grandfather cracked the whip and the wagon lurched forward and on its way.

My father also watched in stunned amazement when, on another occasion, an unhitched wagon loaded with hay went up a steep hill by itself.

Halloween was a special time for me, as I was growing up in Clintonville, Wisconsin. I had given my heart and soul to that day called “Samhain” (pronounced Sow-en). I had learned that the pagan Sabot of Samhain was a time when the barrier between the mundane and astral planes was very thin and departed spirits easily crossed over.’

I also learned that the Roman Catholic Church copied and re-named all of the eight sabbots. Not only had Samhain become Halloween, but the Winter Solstice became Christmas, Imbolg became Candlemass, Beltaine became May Day, and Lughnasadh became Lammas.

The vernal equinox was celebrated as Easter, which is always the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Halloween was my special time, when I felt drawn to become like my great grandmother. I wasn’t interested in the silliness of the Catholic Halloween. I wanted real magic. The so-called “Christians” were cursing themselves and their children by copying the craft that their tenets forbade. I knew full well that so-called Christians were copying what my spiritual ancestors had done for many centuries.

The powerful witches, known as Grand Druids or men of the oaks, that lived in the ancient British Isles gathered at Stonehedge on October 31st. These ancient witches practiced human sacrifice, hollowed out pumpkins and turnips, carving faces in them, and then used candles made from human tallow to illuminate them.

The druids played games such as bobbing for apples, as they floated in a tub of October ale. The druids also practiced ritual sex known as the “Great Rite”, as the fires blazed forth in the darkness of the giant stone monoliths of Stonehenge near Salisbury, England.

The apple was thought to be sacred, because when cut in half cross-wise, the core would reveal the Pentacle or five pointed star. The five points of this star represented Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Spirit.

When I was 13 years old, I began to invite the spirits of my deceased great grandmother into myself. Soon I began to acquire powers and became an adept astrologer and palm reader. I also practiced numerology and was becoming a very powerful witch. Many people followed me — and the advice that I gave them. I had achieved a great measure of success.

By the time I was 19, I had reached my first goal. I was a powerful witch. Then, very suddenly, the realization hit me that I was making predictions without looking at my charts. I would blurt out predictions in minute detail, and they would come to pass. I became frightfully aware that I had become a sending station and was dispatching spirits to make my predictions come true. I predicted accidents and tragedies, and suddenly I became filled with overwhelming fear.

I did not know it at the time, but a dear old woman had been praying for me every day for a long time. She had known my grandparents, and God used her to pray me out of darkness. I was completely disabled by fear, which God, in His mercy, allowed to come upon me.

A friend that I knew in high school persuaded me to come to church with him. It was a small apostolic church. I soon found myself on my knees repenting, as I had now found a power far greater than all witchcraft. One week later I was baptized in water in the name of Jesus Christ. The next week I was baptized in the Holy Ghost.

I felt fifty pounds lighter, as many evil spirits fled from me as I yielded myself completely to my newfound friend, the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Now I have no fear and am a true minister of the Gospel.

This tract, that you are reading, has been prayed over. Now that you have read it, you will never be the same. You will not be able to get this out of your mind.

Most so-called “Christian” churches are phony, but the Lord Jesus is real. Why live in fear and end up in damnation? I can help you! Please write to the address below and we will contact you.

With a prayer for you,

David J. Meyer

Last Trumpet Ministries International
PO Box 806
Beaver Dam, WI 53916

http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org

The doctrine of a difference between the Kingdom Heaven and the Kingdom of God is connected to the doctrine of dispensationalism which John Nelson Darby taught and which was promoted by C. I. Scofield in the Scofield Reference Bible. That Bible has had a profound (and negative) influence on the thinking of millions of American Christians.

Scofield in the Scofield Reference Bible says:

“The kingdom of God is to be distinguished from the kingdom of heaven.”

A website, kjvbible.org says:

“Knowing the doctrinal difference between the terms “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Kingdom of God” is the key to understanding the complete timeline of Biblical history past, present, and future, the proper place of the Church and the prophetic future of Israel.” — quoted from https://www.kjvbible.org/thekingdoms.html

Is that really so? Pastor John MacArthur of “Grace to You” does not agree. He says,

“There is no significant difference between “the kingdom of God” and the kingdom of heaven. The one phrase emphasizes the sovereign Ruler of the kingdom and the other emphasizes the kingdom itself, but they are the same kingdom. Matthew 19:23–24 confirms the equality of the phrases by using them interchangeably.”

Matthew 19:23 ¶Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 19:24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Let’s make a comparison of the Scriptures in the synoptic Gospels that contain the phases Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, the verses that are the parallel passages of the same discourse of Christ.

Matthew	Mark	Luke
Matthew 5:3  ¶Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.		Luke 6:20  ¶And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
Matthew 8:11  And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.		Luke 13:28-29  There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out. And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God.
Matthew 11:11  Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.		Luke 7:28  For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
Matthew 13:11  He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.		Luke 8:10  And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
Matthew 18:3  And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.	Mark 10:15  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.	Luke 18:17  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.
Matthew 19:14  But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.		Luke 18:16  But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:23  ¶Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.	Mark 10:25  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.	Luke 18:25  For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

The Bible is its own best commentator and interpreter. All too often Bible teachers do not compare verses with other verses of the same subject. If they did, their pet doctrines such as the promotion of Zionism would fall flat.

The above comparison of the synoptic Gospels tells me the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven are the same thing!

As you see in the list of verses below, the phrase “kingdom of Heaven” is only found in the Book of Matthew and not found at all in the other two synoptic Gospels of Mark and Luke. A probable explanation for this is Matthew wrote his Gospel message to the Jews. Mark wrote his Gospel to the Romans and Luke wrote his Gospel to the Greeks. The Jews out of respect didn’t want to say the word meaning God, but Romans and Greeks used the word in their language meaning God.

What do you think? Doesn’t it make sense why Matthew would say the kingdom of Heaven rather than the kingdom of God seeing who he wrote his Gospel for? Matthew also says the Kingdom of God, but only in five verses.

The explanation Christian Zionists use to make their claim of a difference between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God is long and complicated. Unscriptural doctrines are always based on long complicated reasoning and convoluted arguments. Just look at https://www.kjvbible.org/thekingdoms.html for an example of that. Is that the type of reasoning God’s Word teaches? I find true biblical doctrines are simple and easy to understand. They don’t need a lot of explanation to understand them.

Preachers with doctorates in theology may teach true things that shed more light on certain Scriptures due to their knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, and secular history, but beware when they preach major doctrines you have never read for yourself from the Bible!

Here’s a meme that purports a difference between the Kingdom of Heaven and the body of Christ! It’s also false.

Scriptures with the Kingdom of Heaven

Matthew says kingdom of heaven 32 times in 31 verses. Only the Gospel of Matthew has the phrase “kingdom of heaven”.

Matthew 3:2  And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 4:17  From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 5:3  ¶Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:10  Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:19  Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:20  For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 7:21  ¶Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
Matthew 8:11  And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 10:7  And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 11:11  Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
Matthew 11:12  And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
Matthew 13:11  He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
Matthew 13:24  ¶Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:
Matthew 13:31  Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field:
Matthew 13:33  Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
Matthew 13:44  ¶Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.
Matthew 13:45  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:
Matthew 13:47  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind:
Matthew 13:52  Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.
Matthew 16:19  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Matthew 18:1  ¶At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
Matthew 18:3  And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:4  Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:23  Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants.
Matthew 19:14  But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 19:23  ¶Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 20:1  ¶For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard.
Matthew 22:2  The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
Matthew 23:13  ¶But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Matthew 25:1  ¶Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
Matthew 25:14  ¶For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods.

Scriptures with the Kingdom of God

The “kingdom of God” is found mainly in the Gospels of Mark and Luke. Matthew uses the phrase only five times.

Matthew 6:33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Matthew 12:28 But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.
Matthew 19:24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Matthew 21:31 Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.
Matthew 21:43 Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.

Mark says kingdom of God in 15 verses:

Mark 10:15  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
Mark 10:23  And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!
Mark 10:24  And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!
Mark 10:25  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Mark 12:34  And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.
Mark 14:25  Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.
Mark 15:43  Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.

Luke says kingdom of God 32 times in 31 verses.

Luke 4:43  And he said unto them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent.
Luke 6:20  ¶And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
Luke 7:28  For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
Luke 8:1  ¶And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him,
Luke 8:10  And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.
Luke 9:2  And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick.
Luke 9:11  And the people, when they knew it, followed him: and he received them, and spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and healed them that had need of healing.
Luke 9:27  But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.
Luke 9:60  Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.
Luke 9:62  And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
Luke 10:9  And heal the sick that are therein, and say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.
Luke 10:11  Even the very dust of your city, which cleaveth on us, we do wipe off against you: notwithstanding be ye sure of this, that the kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.
Luke 11:20  But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.
Luke 12:31  But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Luke 13:18  ¶Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it?
Luke 13:20  And again he said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God?
Luke 13:28  There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.
Luke 13:29  And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God.
Luke 14:15  ¶And when one of them that sat at meat with him heard these things, he said unto him, Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.
Luke 16:16  The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it.
Luke 17:20  ¶And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
Luke 17:21  Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 18:16  But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
Luke 18:17  Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.
Luke 18:24  And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!
Luke 18:25  For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Luke 19:11  ¶And as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable, because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear.
Luke 21:31  So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.
Luke 22:16  For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.
Luke 22:18  For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.
Luke 23:51  (The same had not consented to the counsel and deed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews: who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.

Conclusion

There is absolutely no doctrinal difference between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God.

Further reading: What’s the Difference Between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God?

-By Steve Rudd

Introduction:

1. Historically, Rapture false teachers are always scanning the news headlines for current events that are a sign that the second coming of Christ countdown clock has begun to tick.

2. For the 100 years after John Darby invented rapture in 1830 AD, more attention was paid to the pyramids and creative combinations of numbers to predict the second coming. None of them based their end of the world countdown clock on Israel becoming a nation in 1948.

3. All these failed predictions that were based on the pyramids an numerology appeared convincing at the time to those who sold everything they had, put on white clothes and waited at midnight on rooftops. After the “certain hour” had passed they were struck with disappointment and a feeling of self-stupidity. This always follows in the wake of failed rapture predictions.

4. However since Israel became a nation in 1948 AD, Rapturists got all excited and began to preach that the end would come within one generation (generally 40 years) of Israeli modern statehood.

5. For example, Harold Camping teaches that exactly 40 years after May 14, 1948, that the “church age” came to an end and ordered everyone to leave their churches in 1988. He then went on to predict the end of the world not once, but twice in 1994 and again on May 21, 2011.

6. Most “Rapture time charts” use the establishment of Israel as a nation in 1948 as the beginning of the countdown to the end, claiming it is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

7. The truth is that Israeli statehood in 1948 was and is irrelevant to Bible prophecy.

8. Paul said the hope of Israel was not physical restoration, but only in Christ:

a. “And now I am standing trial for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers; the promise to which our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly serve God night and day. And for this hope, O King, I am being accused by Jews. “Why is it considered incredible among you people if God does raise the dead? “So then, I thought to myself that I had to do many things hostile to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. ” (Acts 26:6–9)

b. “For this reason, therefore, I requested to see you and to speak with you, for I am wearing this chain for the sake of the hope of Israel.” (Acts 28:20)

A. Reverting back to Mosaic Judaism: “severed from Christ”

1. Premillennialists, at their foundation, are condemned, because they teach that God wants the Jews to again practice full Mosaic Old Testament Temple worship, complete with animal sacrifices.

a. “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. ” (Galatians 5:1–4)

b. “But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. … When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.” (Hebrews 8:6-7,13)

c. “When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.” (Hebrews 8:13)

d. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. ” (Galatians 5:4)

The whole idea of restoring temple worship, with a restored Aaronic priesthood, complete with ashes of the Red Heifer is to deny Christ as the true Passover lamb.

3. Those who believe in Rapture are in fact “severed from Christ” (Gal 5:4) because they are trying to do what the first century Jews wanted to do: practice Mosaic Judaism beside Christianity.

4. When a Jew converts to Christianity, he stops worshipping God according to Moses and takes all his instructions from Christ.

B. Reverting back to Mosaic Judaism:

1. In a complicated intertwining of false doctrines, the reason behind Israel becoming a nation again include two main reasons: to fulfill and land promise and to give Jews a second chance to “not reject Jesus” as their earthly king.

Giving Israel all the land promised by Abraham which they never got from 1400 BC – 70 AD. In fact they did get all the land, and the bible says they did. Israel got all the land they were promised!

3. To give the Jews a second chance at accepting Jesus as their earthly king. In fact, Jesus was never intended to be their earthly king. Jesus was prophesied to be Israel’s spiritual king. Jesus plainly told Pilate that he was not an earthly king who would compete with him, but a spiritual king in heaven:

a. “Therefore Pilate entered again into the Praetorium, and summoned Jesus and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” … Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting so that I would not be handed over to the Jews; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.” Therefore Pilate said to Him, “So You are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?” And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, “I find no guilt in Him. ” (John 18:33–38)

b. It just cannot get any clearer than what Jesus told Pilate above, but Rapturists won’t listen to Jesus and expect him to be a literal physical king on a physical throne in the physical land of Israel.

4. True Christians are in a state of shock that dispensationalists want to restore the Old Testament law along with Temple sacrifices because it is a denial of the sacrifice of Christ’s blood once for all to end all animal sacrifices.

C. The OT prophecies of Israel’s restoral are fulfilled in the church:

1. There are two classes of prophecies regarding the restoration of Israel:

a. Prophecies of the physical remnant who return from Babylonian captivity in 516 BC.

b. Prophecies of the spiritual remnant in the church that began in 33 A.D. on Pentecost.

2. The level of Bible knowledge of those who believe in the Rapture is very low. They just read an Old Testament passage by ripping it out of context and apply it to a still future event 3000 years later!

D. Prophecies of restoration from Babylonian captivity in 516 BC:

1. Jeremiah 29:10–14 “For thus says the Lord, ‘When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place. ‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. ‘Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. ‘You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. ‘I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile.’ ” (Jeremiah 29:10–14)

a. Jeremiah lived in 568 BC and prophesied the Babylonian captivity in many other texts misused by Rapture false teachers:

i. “‘For behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will restore the fortunes of My people Israel and Judah.’ The LORD says, ‘I will also bring them back to the land that I gave to their forefathers and they shall possess it.” (Jeremiah 30:3–9)

ii. “One basket had very good figs, like first-ripe figs, and the other basket had very bad figs which could not be eaten due to rottenness. Then the LORD said to me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?” And I said, “Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad figs, very bad, which cannot be eaten due to rottenness.” Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the captives of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans. ” (Jeremiah 24:2–5)

b. Applying Jeremiah’s prophecies to 1948 AD is an assault on good bible knowledge but those who believe in the Rapture cannot be persuaded by the word of God!

2. Ezekiel 36:24–35 “For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. “Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. “I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. “You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. “Moreover, I will save you from all your uncleanness; and I will call for the grain and multiply it, and I will not bring a famine on you. “I will multiply the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field, so that you will not receive again the disgrace of famine among the nations. “Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and your abominations. “I am not doing this for your sake,” declares the Lord GOD, “let it be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel!” ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places will be rebuilt. “The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. “They will say, ‘This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ ” (Ezekiel 36:24–35)

a. Ezekiel was contemporary with Jeremiah and prophecied the restoration of Israel from Babylonian captivity, not some far off future event in 1948 AD.

b. Ezekiel was exiled into Babylon with Daniel and both knew each other personally.

c. When Israel came out of Babylon, never again did they worship Idols. This was the new heart he put in Israel.

3. Daniel 9:2 “in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, observed in the books the number of the years which was revealed as the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet for the completion of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. ” (Daniel 9:2)

a. Daniel was one who was actually deported and lived in Babylon.

b. Daniel prophesied the four successive kingdoms of Babylon, Mede-Persia, Greece and Rome.

c. Daniel said that the Kingdom of God would be start during the days of the Roman Empire.

d. This was fulfilled in 30 AD on the Day of Pentecost.

e. The kingdom of prophecy is the church.

f. The “last days” prophesies of Daniel were fulfilled in the first century.

g. Learn that the first days began when Jesus walked the earth.

4. Zechariah 8:1-8 “Then the word of the LORD of hosts came, saying, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I am exceedingly jealous for Zion, yes, with great wrath I am jealous for her.’ “Thus says the LORD, ‘I will return to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the City of Truth, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts will be called the Holy Mountain.’ “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Old men and old women will again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each man with his staff in his hand because of age. ‘And the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing in its streets.’ “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘If it is too difficult in the sight of the remnant of this people in those days, will it also be too difficult in My sight?’ declares the LORD of hosts. “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘Behold, I am going to save My people from the land of the east and from the land of the west; and I will bring them back and they will live in the midst of Jerusalem; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God in truth and righteousness.’ ” (Zechariah 8:1–8)

a. Zechariah prophesied in 520 BC which is about the time Israel returned from Babylonian captivity.

b. Later Zech 14, Zechariah prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD (see below)

5. Deuteronomy 4:27–31 “The LORD will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the LORD drives you. “There you will serve gods, the work of man’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. “But from there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul. “When you are in distress and all these things have come upon you, in the latter days you will return to the LORD your God and listen to His voice. “For the LORD your God is a compassionate God; He will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them. ” (Deuteronomy 4:27–31)

a. In a shocking display of ignorance of even the most simple and fundamental teachings of the Bible, Rapture false teachers actually use Deut 4:27-31 as a proof text that Israel’s becoming a nation again in 1948 is a fullment of Moses’ words. Completely ignoring both the Assyrian captivity of 722 BC and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BC, they jump 3500 years forward and apply it to 1948 AD.

b. Clearly God’s words came true when they returned from Babylonian Captivity.

E. Prophecies of restoration in the church in 30 AD:

1. Isaiah 11:10–12 “Then in that day the nations will resort to the root of Jesse, Who will stand as a signal for the peoples; And His resting place will be glorious. Then it will happen on that day that the Lord will again recover the second time with His hand The remnant of His people, who will remain, From Assyria, Egypt, Pathros, Cush, Elam, Shinar, Hamath, And from the islands of the sea. And He will lift up a standard for the nations And assemble the banished ones of Israel, And will gather the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the earth. ” (Isaiah 11:10–12)

a. Isaiah wrote this in 730 BC

b. Notice the root of Jesse is Jesus Christ

c. The second gathering is in 30 AD.

d. On the day of Pentecost all nations were present: “And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born? “Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya around Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—we hear them in our own tongues speaking of the mighty deeds of God.” (Acts 2:8–11)

e. Pentecost is a perfect fulfillment of Isa 11.

Isaiah 66:19–24 “I will set a sign among them and will send survivors from them to the nations: Tarshish, Put, Lud, Meshech, Tubal and Javan, to the distant coastlands that have neither heard My fame nor seen My glory. And they will declare My glory among the nations. “Then they shall bring all your brethren from all the nations as a grain offering to the LORD, on horses, in chariots, in litters, on mules and on camels, to My holy mountain Jerusalem,” says the LORD, “just as the sons of Israel bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the LORD. “I will also take some of them for priests and for Levites,” says the LORD. “For just as the new heavens and the new earth Which I make will endure before Me,” declares the LORD, “So your offspring and your name will endure. “And it shall be from new moon to new moon and from sabbath to sabbath, All mankind will come to bow down before Me,” says the LORD. “Then they will go forth and look On the corpses of the men Who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die And their fire will not be quenched; And they will be an abhorrence to all mankind.” (Isaiah 66:19–24)

a. Isaiah lived in 730 BC, just before the Assyrian Captivity of the ten lost tribes in 722 BC.

b. Much of Isaiah is prophetic of Christ and the church in 30 AD. This is seen in chapters 40-55.

c. Isa 66:19-24 is a prophecy of the church.

d. Like Isa 2:1-4, it foresees the gentiles in union with the Jews as one body:

i. “Now it will come about that In the last days The mountain of the house of the Lord Will be established as the chief of the mountains, And will be raised above the hills; And all the nations will stream to it. ” (Isaiah 2:2)

ii. “Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “Uncircumcision” by the so-called “Circumcision,” which is performed in the flesh by human hands— remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. ” (Ephesians 2:11–16)

e. Although Sabbatrians misuse the text as badly as Rapturists, their suggestion that the Sabbath will be in the church or heaven is refuted by the fact that there will also be new moon festivals as well. All of it is figurative and not to be taken literally because we know the Ten Commandments were nailed to the cross: Col 2:14-17; Heb 8:6-7; 13.

i. “having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him. Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ. ” (Colossians 2:14–17)

ii. “But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second. ” (Hebrews 8:6–7)

iii. “When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. ” (Hebrews 8:13)

f. The grain offering is spiritualized in the church where Christians as priests (Rev 1:6) offer their own bodies as a spiritual sacrifice (Rom 12:1-2) or monetary gifts to the church ministry (Phil 4:17-18) or through prayers and songs and alms (Heb 13:15-16)

i. “and He has made us to be a kingdom, priests to His God and Father—to Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen. ” (Revelation 1:6)

ii. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. ” (Romans 12:1–2)

iii. “Not that I seek the gift itself, but I seek for the profit which increases to your account. But I have received everything in full and have an abundance; I am amply supplied, having received from Epaphroditus what you have sent, a fragrant aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well-pleasing to God. ” (Philippians 4:17–18)

iv. “Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name. And do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased. ” (Hebrews 13:15–16)

3. Joel 3:1–2 “For behold, in those days and at that time, When I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations And bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat. Then I will enter into judgment with them there On behalf of My people and My inheritance, Israel, Whom they have scattered among the nations; And they have divided up My land. ” (Joel 3:1–2)

a. Joel lived in 830 BC, which is before both the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities.

b. However, Joel 2:28ff is clearly a prophecy of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost in Acts 2

c. Therefore it is clear that this restoration is in the church in 30 AD.

4. Amos 9:11–15 “In that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, And wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins And rebuild it as in the days of old; That they may possess the remnant of Edom And all the nations who are called by My name,” Declares the Lord who does this. “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “When the plowman will overtake the reaper And the treader of grapes him who sows seed; When the mountains will drip sweet wine And all the hills will be dissolved. “Also I will restore the captivity of My people Israel, And they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them; They will also plant vineyards and drink their wine, And make gardens and eat their fruit. “I will also plant them on their land, And they will not again be rooted out from their land Which I have given them,” Says the Lord your God. ” (Amos 9:11–15)

a. Amos lived in 750 BC before both the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities.

b. Amos 9:11-15 is most certainly a prophecy of the restoration of Israel in the church. How can we be certain? Because Luke records the worlds of James in the Jerusalem council whose purpose was to determine if the Gentiles can be saved without keeping the Mosaic law and circumcision.

c. James quotes Amos 9:11-15 as proof the Gentiles can be saved!

i. “Simeon has related how God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name. “With this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written, ‘After these things I will return, And I will rebuild the tabernacle of David which has fallen, And I will rebuild its ruins, And I will restore it, So that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, And all the Gentiles who are called by My name,’ Says the Lord, who makes these things known from long ago. “Therefore it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, ” (Acts 15:14–19)

d. Obviously then, the rebuilt tabernacle of David is the church. If not, then James was a liar and no gentile can be saved yet until the tabernacle of David is rebuilt.

e. This kind of clear refutation is ignored by Rapture false teachers because they ignore the context in blissful ignorance.

F. Prophecies of destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD:

1. Zechariah 14 “Behold, a day is coming for the Lord when the spoil taken from you will be divided among you. For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city will be captured, the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city. Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle. In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south. You will flee by the valley of My mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel; yes, you will flee just as you fled before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the Lord, my God, will come, and all the holy ones with Him! In that day there will be no light; the luminaries will dwindle. For it will be a unique day which is known to the Lord, neither day nor night, but it will come about that at evening time there will be light. And in that day living waters will flow out of Jerusalem, half of them toward the eastern sea and the other half toward the western sea; it will be in summer as well as in winter. And the Lord will be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one. ” (Zechariah 14:1–9)

a. Zechariah prophesied in 520 BC which is about the time Israel returned from Babylonian captivity.

b. Jesus became king of the earth at his ascension in 30 AD.

c. Notice that the language of Zechariah is almost identical to that of Matthew 24.

d. This is a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Read more

Matthew 24:32–33 “Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near; so, you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. ” (Matthew 24:32–33)

a. This greatly abused text is always applied to Israel becoming a nation again in 1848 AD when in fact, it is prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

b. Of the 39 places in the Bible where “fig tree” is used, never is Israel called a Fig Tree.

c. In Romans 9, Israel is likened unto an “Olive Tree” but not a fig tree.

d. The Parable of the Fig tree is the only other possible place where Israel is connected with a fig tree:

i. “And He began telling this parable: “A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any. “And he said to the vineyard-keeper, ‘Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground?’ “And he answered and said to him, ‘Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, cut it down.” (Luke 13:6–9)

ii. Notice that if this is Israel as a nation, then it is a prophecy of it being replaced by the church at the end of Jesus’ three year ministry and/or the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

e. So the only two possible passages in the Bible where a fig tree is associated with Israel both describe Israel’s destruction, not restoration!

3. Luke 21:20-24 “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near. “Then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those who are in the midst of the city must leave, and those who are in the country must not enter the city; because these are days of vengeance, so that all things which are written will be fulfilled. “Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days; for there will be great distress upon the land and wrath to this people; and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled under foot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. ” (Luke 21:20–24)

a. Luke 21 prophecies the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD by Roman Armies, not its restoration!

b. This passage does not say Jerusalem will be restored or the temple will be rebuilt.

c. The “times of the Gentiles” correspond to the period when the Gentiles can be saved, obviously extending to the second coming.

Conclusion:

1. True Christians are in a state of shock that dispensationalists want to restore the Old Testament law along with Temple sacrifices because it is a denial of the sacrifice of Christ’s blood once for all to end all animal sacrifices.

2. Rapture false teachers want Israel to become a nation again mainly to fulfill the promise of inheriting the land. Problem is, the Bible clearly says Israel got the land long ago under Joshua and Solomon.

3. There is not a Jew alive today or anyone in the nation of Israel that knows which tribe they are from. It comes as a surprise to most people that the majority of Jews living in Israel today are gentile proselytes, being Russians who converted to Judaism.

by Steve Rudd taken from https://www.bible.ca/

This article is the testimonial of Joseph Spencer, a man who says he worked as a top-secret operative for the US government. It was given in an interview that was apparently conducted in the late 1990s. I don’t know who the interviewer was. It covers UFOs, US government deals with “aliens” to obtain technology, chemtrails, the “Pheonix Lights” sighting, MK-Ultra, CIA black projects, the Men in Black program, a fake alien invasion, depopulation programs, etc.!

The most interesting part of the talk for me is Mr. Spencer’s prediction of an artificially created flu-like virus. He said it will be part of the New World Order’s depopulation program! And he predicted the virus would be introduced to the world in late 2017 or early 2018! He was only two years off!!

Disclamer: Joseph Spencer may sound like he believes the “aliens” to be entities from other star systems/galaxies, but according to what I know from the Bible, they are most likely the Fallen Angels – Demons that that physical forms. One of their characteristics is to tell lies. And I have read testimonials of those who were abducted by aliens who were instantly delivered from the experience by calling on the Name of Jesus! That certainly confirms to me the so-called aliens are the Fallen Angels of Satan.

Text from the video

My name is Joseph Spencer. From May 1970 to October 1997, I served the United States government as a top-secret operative, but not in a category that is commonly known or understood. I was known as a Man in Black.

Following seven years, acting as a counterintelligence agent for the CIA, I was recruited for a new assignment that entailed working within above top-secret operations. I was aware of the black budget projects but never knew the context of them due to their high level of secrecy. Even the President was denied access to their inner workings.

Annually billions of dollars are poured into black projects which operate with that any supervision or intrusion. They have full autonomy. The operations deal primarily with advancing military technologies most of which have been reversed engineered from recovered alien spacecraft that had either crashed or were shut down by our military. The public sadly will never ever have knowledge of these operations.

This transition in my life happened in 1970. The senior black project director was William T. Latham who had worked under CIA executive director Richard Schlesinger. Latham stated that I was the perfect candidate for my new position. I was a foster child and I had no connections to existing relatives, had no friends or social life. It was easy for them to erase my past and provide me with a new identity. I gave myself to them as a priest would to his god. But first, my mind had to be erased. I was injected with various forms of mind-altering drugs LSD, heroin, mescaline, morphine, sodium pentathol, and more, drugged into sub-hypnosis followed with anti grade and retrograde amnesia. The goal was to program me to do two things: kill and forget.

After nine months of programming, I had become a Man in Black. What I later discovered was that not all the Men in Black were human. About 1/3 were alien hybrids. The distinctive feature was the absence of whites in their eyes given the impression of empty eye sockets. This unsettled me and it took months to adjust to the reality of alien integration.

My assignments largely dealt with UFO sightings and crash sites. In August of 1971, I witnessed my first UFO crash site just north of Edwards Air Force Base in California. Inside the craft were three grade humanoids. two dead one still alive. Also in the craft was a human female abductee. The alien humanoids are transported to the base, but two witnesses had arrived before us and took several photographs. The first surrendered his camera but the second fled. When we apprehended him he resisted, and I was ordered to silence him, which I did. The killing of witnesses was executed with a wand that acted very much like today’s taser. But the voltage from the wand would cause immediate cardiac arrest and the victim’s death would be attributed to natural causes.

We silenced countless victims, not only men, but women of all ages, and even teenagers. The following day after each kill our memories will reset so we would have no recollection of the murders. A good majority of the victims were Ufologists and whistleblowers. Among the Ufologists I personally silenced were Paul William Cooper, Milton Vigay, Claude Monroe, Anthony Vargas, and noted documentarian Samantha Willis.

When my wand malfunctioned with Samantha, I resorted to strangulation. She fought for her life for almost two minutes. Recalling this act I stared into her pleading eyes for the entire duration with absolutely no remorse, guilt, or feelings. That was how effective the mind conditioning was. And it’s her face that haunts my dreams more than anyone’s to this day.

(Interviewer:) So they stuffed out a documentarian?

Yep.

(Interviewer:) Well, that’s not good to hear.

We’re gonna move on. In 1954 Dwight Eisenhower signed what’s known as the Greada Treaty with the alien Gray Race. In exchange for shared alien technologies, the Greys were allowed to abduct a number of humans annually for medical examination. The Greys also demanded anonymity from the public. A short time later human technology took a giant leap forward with circuit chips, fiber optics, and lasers. The Greada Treaty is still active today, but the number of human abductions has increased despite objections from the world governments.

Now, the really interesting part. Every year at least 8 million children go missing in the world. I can attest that one-third of them are abducted by government operatives and transported to any one of the 1477 underground military installations on the planet, then imprisoned for the remainder of their lives. The children are subjected to biological and genetic experiments, dissections and mutilations performed not by human scientists but by an alien Gray species. During my stay at the Vanguard underground base north of Phoenix Arizona, I witnessed many of these procedures. Because there was no form of anesthesia they administered to the young patients, the halls reverberated with the screams of torture from morning till night. The ones that perished were incinerated in the installations crematorium. My point of contact at this base was Lieutenant Colonel Charles. T Lenninger and he was a human-alien hybrid.

And get ready for this. In 1994, the world population summit in Cairo Egypt had a hundred and sixty nations participate where they all agreed that the human population was out of control and must be stopped because the world is running out of resources. An agreement was formed that would mandate the reduction of humans from 6 billion to 800 million by the year 2030. This meant finding a method or methods to wipe out nearly 95% of the population. Solutions were discovered investigated tested then created and have been in full force since. The procedures have been inflicted onto the human race are as follows:

1. Toxic levels of chemically enhanced fluoride have been secretly added to our drinking water over the last 20 years in every city and community on the planet. I personally oversaw the delivery of fluoride barrels to Denver, Chicago, Tampa, and Minneapolis water departments. The adverse effects of fluoride poison to the human body are numerous and debilitating. The affects the children is damage to their neurological development among other serious ailments.

2. Manmade viruses and diseases. The AIDS virus which was a design a by-product of the American disease Institute was distributed through vaccines to the public in 1980. Instituted as a preliminary population control tactic, the results were successful and led to more lab-produced viruses that have since been unleashed on to the public. Among those is the development of a mutated version of the common flu to replicate the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 40 million people. The first strain of this new flu virus will be released to the public in late 2017 So if we see a flu outbreak in the late 2017 or early 2018 that’s killing people, we’ll know this is true.

(WOW! This prediction was only 2 years off!)

3. Killing us from the air with neurotoxins, barium chloride, cancer microbes, and viruses by way of chemtrails. Released into the skies daily well for all inhabited regions by military aircraft. The effects of these toxins are severe over time, lethal, causing respiratory ailments cancer, damage to the immune systems, and sterilization in men. Since the chemtrail plan was implemented, sperm count in men has dropped by nearly 50%. If this isn’t reversed soon the human race will face early extinction.

Now the grand finale. This is some scary s–t. In March 1997 an event known as the Phoenix lights became the most infamous UFO sighting in history. A mile-wide vessel clearly not man-made flew slowly and silently over the state of Arizona and was witnessed by 10,000 people including the governor of Arizona. To date, there has been no reasonable explanation. But for every witness interviewed the craft was as real as anything they’ve ever seen. Their lives were transformed. They now believe that we truly are not alone. However, there is another truth, for I know what they really saw. In 1986 while stationed at an underground installation near Boulder Colorado, I was introduced to project Sky Beam by Lieutenant General Andrew Garros. I was then led down a corridor and into a large hangar where a stealth bomber hovered only 20 feet above me. I stood there confused, and Garros looked over me and smiled, and then asked if I was certain of what I was seeing. I replied, of course, what else could it be? I was then shocked to find out that this wasn’t a real craft, it was a projected hologram that the early 1950s scientists have been developing holographic technology. And over the years improved it to a state that we can only imagine. They stood there staring at the bomber which looked so absolutely real and solid that they could reach up and touch it.

I contemplated the possibilities. What if this projection was a thousand feet up in the sky? How would anyone know that that was an illusion? The Phoenix Lights craft witnessed by 10,000 people was the first grand-scale sky hologram to be tested upon the public. They succeeded beyond expectations.

In October 1938, Orson Welles unleashed his War of the Worlds radio broadcast to the American public. So realistically portrayed, vast portions of the population he went into a panic. Terrified citizens scrambled to evacuate the cities in droves. America had been easily tricked by very simple means. To amplify this response, those who are truly empowered, not only our country, but all the countries on the planet, and who are the true purveyors of the depopulation process, have formulated the final stage of this sinister plan.

In the year 2024, a global event will alter the course of mankind’s future. The world will stand witness to a massive alien invasion. Thousands of projected holographic alien warships will blanket the skies sending people into a global panic. Real military crafts within the holograms will inflict actual damage to the surrounding areas to sell the beginning. As a result of the ensuing human chaos, a one-world government will immediately form without any resistance from the people. They will be the new world order. Once this happens, we as a people will be doomed to enslavement and accelerated depopulation.

With that said, the only hope for human salvation is to acquire and spread the knowledge of these activities and agendas. Resist, retaliate, then conquer this opposing enemy. The time is now as humanity is rapidly approaching its final days.

The knowledge of what’s coming is taking its toll on me. I see all these people living their lives, enjoying themselves, planning their futures, oblivious to the fact that it’s all going to end soon. Here I am at a park the children are playing and then the skies above I can see the chemtrails poisoning the air and slowly killing us, all in plain sight. I’ve never felt so helpless. I want to scream out to the world but I’d only be laughed at and ridiculed. When Claire said the memoirs were a fabrication. I secretly wish she was right. Then they could sleep at night. but I know beyond a reasonable doubt that it’s all true, that Joe was being completely forthwith. I saw it in his eyes and heard the tremor in his voice when he spoke about it. It didn’t come off as an admission, it’s more of a deeply concerned confession. He was scared for us all, and that says a lot coming from a man who was a government assassin.

(End of interview and testimonial.)

Only one prediction talked about is yet to happen: A fake alien invasion through the use of holographic images that Joseph Spencer predicts will happen in 2024. It’s not the first time I have heard of such things.

I’ve also heard of a fake rapture. If you believe the Lord is going to rapture all Christians out of the world when the Antichrist comes to power, what will happen to your faith if it doesn’t happen? The rapture doctrine started in the 19th century with John Nelson Darby. There is no Scripture that says Jesus will rescue the Church from the world before the Day of the Lord! That day will also be God’s judgment upon the wicked.

Only one point I would disagree with Mr. Spencer on. Our only hope is to call out to Jesus Christ and ask Him to be our Savior! Knowing Jesus as our God and Lord will release us from fear of death! Jesus is the Author of life! He promises us eternal life if we trust in Him! We will not fear any event when we know what the Bible as to say about this world and the wickedness of the earth of unregenerate people.

The eternal solution to all sicknesses and diseases, plagues and crises, is the Lord Jesus Christ. He got the victory over them 2,000 years ago at the Cross of Calvary!

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. – Isaiah 53:4-5

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. – John 19:30

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. – 2 Timothy 1:7

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. – John 16:33

WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BECAUSE GOD IS WITH US!
Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. – Isaiah 41:10

WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?

• Recognize you have violated in some way the laws of God. Violation of legal law is called a crime. Violation of God’s moral law is called a sin.
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; – Romans 3:23
As it is written (in the Bible), There is none righteous, no, not one: – Romans 3:10
Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. – John 16:7-11

• Recognize the penalty of sin
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. – Romans 6:23
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: – Romans 5:12

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. – Isaiah 53:6
Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. – James 1:15

• Recognize Jesus is the Saviour!
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. – John 14:6
Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. – Acts 4:12
And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. – Acts 16:31

• Recognize our lives our sinful by nature. We can do nothing of our own to merit eternal life. Salvation is completely by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ!
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: – Ephesians 2:8

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. – Isaiah 64:6
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; – Titus 3:5

• Recognize Christ paid the sin debt we owe!
But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. – Romans 5:8-9

• Recognize you must receive Christ as your personal Saviour!
For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. – Romans 10:13

• Ask Jesus to be your Saviour!

Dear Jesus:
I know I am a sinner. I know if I were to die right now, I could not go to Heaven. I ask you, right now, to come into my heart, forgive me of my sin, and be my Saviour. Thank you for saving me and giving me eternal life. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
If you prayed that prayer with all sincerity, you have passed from death to life and have been born again into the family of God!

Dr. John MacArthur cited a recent CDC report on causes of COVID-19 deaths (Here is the CDC report in question). Only 6% of people with COVID-19 died from COVID-19! The rest died with COVID-19 and from other underlining health conditions.

Click on the image to play it.

https://www.wthrockmorton.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/MacarthurPandemic.mp4

I received a question from a visitor on my other website:

I don’t believe in a pretrib rapture. But, what about the verse that tells us that one would be taken and the other left?

Hallelujah! I am rejoicing because this question has helped me get a better understanding of that Scripture based on its context with another Scripture in the same chapter!!

Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be TAKEN, and the other left. — Matthew 24:40

Just look at the verse immediately before it!

And knew not until the flood came, and TOOK them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. –Matthew 24:39

The popular interpretation of “taken” in Matthew 24:40 is based on speculation, not what the Word actually says. It is not talking about the Rapture, but about a person being killed by the Romans who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. The “took” of verse 39 is clearly referring to those who were destroyed in the great flood. And it’s interesting the word “flood” is also used metaphorically in Daniel’s prophecy of the same event.

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary (Jerusalem and the Temple), and the end thereof shall be with a FLOOD, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. — Daniel 9:26

Isn’t it amazing that the Lord used the word flood to describe the destruction of the wicked in 70 A.D.? The wicked were also destroyed by a flood in Noah’s time. Everyone who was not on the Ark, which is also symbolic of Christ, perished in the flood.

God’s Word explains itself! I mean, how clearer can it get than that? The only reason it took me decades to understand these verses correctly is because I was misled by popular eschatological teaching on the subject which said those verses are talking about the Rapture.

The “left” is talking about those who were not killed by the Romans, those who survived the Great Persecution. Who was left after the Great Flood? Only Noah, his wife, his three sons, and his son’s wives, eight people.

…so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

I believe this is referring to

Matthew 24:29  Immediately after the tribulation of those days (70 A.D.) shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken:
30  And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

This is not talking about the end of time. Jesus appeared in the sky during the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and those who had Him crucified 40 years before that saw Him! How do I know that? Because Jesus told the High Priest he would see Jesus again coming in power!

Mark 14:61  But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
62  And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

This interpretation of “taken” and “left” is confirmed by John Gill, (November 23, 1697 – October 14, 1771) an English Baptist pastor, biblical scholar, and Bible commentator.

John Gill’s Commentary about Matthew 24:40

Then shall two be in the field
About their proper business, of husbandry, ploughing, or sowing, or any other rural employment: the one shall be taken;
not by the preaching of the Gospel, into the kingdom of God, or Gospel dispensation; though such a distinction God makes, by the ministry of the word, accompanied by his Spirit and power; nor by angels, to meet Christ in the air, and to be introduced into his kingdom and glory; but by the eagles, the Roman army, and either killed or carried captive by them: and the other left;
not in a state of nature and unregeneracy, as many are, to whom the Gospel is preached; nor with devils at the last day, to be thrust down by them into the infernal regions; but by the Romans, being by some remarkable providence, or another, delivered out of their hands; which was the case of some few, and these of the meaner sort; and therefore persons of a rural life and occupation are instanced in.

Dr. Carrie Madej, DO is an Internal Medicine Specialist in McDonough, GA and has over 19 years of experience in the medical field. She graduated from Kansas City Univ Of Medicine Bioscience College Of Osteopathic Medicine medical school in 2001. She is affiliated with Southern Regional Medical Center. (Reference: https://www.healthgrades.com/physician/dr-carrie-madej-y7thx )

This article is all about the dangers of a new experimental vaccine for COVID-19 from a company called Moderna. Even if Youtube bans this video, the text will remain! And if the video is banned, if you tell me about it, I’ll post it directly on my own server.

So what do you think about going from Human 1.0 to Human 2.0? And what does that mean? Well, going from humans as we now know ourselves to human 2.0 has something to do with transhumanism. If you’re not familiar with that term, it’s about taking humans as we know ourselves and melding with artificial intelligence. It’s kind of like being in the matrix if you’ve ever seen that movie. And that may seem kind of cool to you. We might have some superhuman abilities, maybe be able to think of something and it happens, maybe have some physical abilities that would be almost super human-like. That’s the idea, that’s what you see in sci-fi movies.

And for myself, thinking about this topic I’m like, well I have some time I think that’s many years in the future. However, this question, this idea is now right at this moment. We need to make a decision. And I found out that we need to make a decision about this because I investigated the proposed COVID-19 vaccine. And this is my alarm call to the world.

I looked at the pros and cons and it frightens me. And I want you to know about this. You need to be very well informed because this new vaccine is not like your normal flu vaccine. This is something very different. This is something brand new. This is something completely experimental on the human race. And it’s not just about being a different vaccine there are technologies that are being introduced with this vaccine that can change the way we live, who we are, and what we are, and very quickly.

I think that you know some people that you might know these names Elon Musk who is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla automotive, as well as Ray Kurzweil who is one of the bigwigs of Google. These are self-proclaimed transhumanists. They believe that we should go to Human 2.0 and they are very big proponents of this. There’s a lot of other people that you might know their names, they’re also involved with this so you should look that up.

I think the easiest way to explain this to you is to go with one of the front runners for the vaccine and go into a little bit of the history and tell you how they want to make the vaccine, and I think that will speak volumes. So for instance Moderna is one of the front runners for the COVID-19 vaccine. You should know that Moderna was founded by a person from Harvard, Derrek Rossi, and this researcher actually was successful in taking some modified RNA and being able to reprogram a stem cell in the body and change the function of the stem cell. He actually made it genetically modified, okay? So you can – he proved – that you can genetically modify something by using modified RNA. So they founded the company Moderna on this concept. It’s kind of a new kid on the block, okay, it’s not been around that long. In fact, it hasn’t even made any vaccine for a human before. It’s made no medicine for a human before. This will be their first run.

You must know that Moderna was in the news recently because it really fast-tracked, it’s like the other companies, it’s fast-tracking the vaccine. It’s going from phase one to phase two very very quickly. In fact, it’s gone from phase one to phase three and its experiments from March of this year until currently. I mean that is unbelievable! It usually takes five or six years! How are they able to do this with the safety and efficacy data that we need?

And I want you to know that in phase 2 we only use between, they’re only using between 30 and 45 humans. In Moderna’s test study they only used 45 humans. And with the high dose vaccine group, they got 100 percent of those people got systemic side effects, 100! That’s only in the short side effect profile. In the low dose vaccine, 80 percent got systemic side effects. Now we don’t even know the long-term side effects from that. We would need a lot longer time, right? Maybe years. But we do know based on previous animal studies of using this technology that you can expect possibly increased cancer rates, increase mutant genes, mutagenesis, also increased autoimmune reactions. For instance, in some of the ferret studies they saw that when the ferret was introduced to the virus that they were trying to protect the ferret from after the ferret got the vaccine they actually had an exaggerated immune response, it actually hurt the ferret. They had more lung inflammation, more lung fluid, even some problems with their liver. It actually hurt them. They had a poorer response.

Okay, so this those are longer-term reactions and that could be seen with this vaccine, but we don’t know the data yet. So it’s not without risk. And how are they doing this? Well, they’re actually suggesting to use a platform, let me just explain how they would administer the vaccine. So the vaccine there’s an idea called micro-needle platform, okay, this was developed by MIT, and they said it could be very easily produced, okay, and mass-produced. This is why they’re proposing this technology, and many millions of vaccines could be made quickly. They could also be administered by yourself. So the idea is to get a band-aid, it looks like a band-aid that you buy in the drugstore, it’s shipped to you through Amazon or UPS or some other shipping service. You take it out of the package, you put it on your hand like this, and then you take the sticker off, and voila you’ve been vaccinated.

So how is that possible? Well in this band-aid, it has little tiny spicules little tiny needles. And this was designed after a snake viper fang bite, okay, or snake viper bangs, little snake bites. Anyway, in these tiny little spicules, they claim you won’t really feel it that much, there’s their little Hydrogel, it’s a material called Hydrogel. Inside the Hydrogel would be a Luciferase enzyme as well as the vaccine itself.

So what is all that? So first of all, you’re getting the vaccine. It’s modified RNA or modified DNA. Let’s take Moderna, modified RNA. So in that modified RNA, the idea is that the micro-needles would puncture into your cell membrane, and this synthetic piece of an RNA, it’s a code for the part of the virus, where they could use a synthetic DNA to code for the part of the virus would go into your nucleus. Your body would start transcribing it, would start reading it, and making more of that part of the virus. Well, why would we want to make more of the virus or part of the virus? The idea is your body would get used to seeing it, would know how to make antibodies, and would have an improved T-cell response. And the idea is then when you saw it in the future your body would already know how to fight it and it would be a better response, that’s the idea.

The problem with that is they’re using a process called transfection. And transfection is a way that we make genetically modified organisms. I think you know about those fruits and vegetables. They’re not as healthy as the normal wild type fruit and vegetables. So possibly you could extrapolate that to a human. If we become genetically modified, we would not be as healthy. We don’t have long-term studies on this anyway, this is unbelievable. And you know, the vaccine manufacturers have made the statement this will not alter our DNA, our genome. I say that is not true, because if we use this process to make a genetically modified organism, why would it not do the same thing to a human? I don’t know why they’re saying that.

Now if you look at the definition of transfection, it’ll tell you that it can be a temporary change in the cell, and I think that’s what the vaccine manufacturers are banking on, it’s temporary. Or, it’s a possibility for it to become stable, to be taken up into the genome, and so stable that it will start replicating when the genome replicates meaning, it is now a permanent part of your genome. That’s a chance that we’re taking. So it could be temporary, or it could be permanent. And we would never know that for years down the road, honestly.

So, here we go, we’ve got something that can alter our genome. It’s a possibility. And another thing on that, if they’re altering the genome, what would be the effects? I told you previously some of the side effects, but also we need to know that this is a synthetic piece of DNA or RNA, and if it becomes taken up into the genome of a human, it’s synthetic, it’s not from nature. And if you look at the Supreme Court justice ruling on synthetic DNA or genes, it can be patented. And patents have owners.

So what does that mean for us? What if this gets into our genome? Does that mean Moderna or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or the Department of Defence, all of these people who are involved in the patents, are they somehow going to own part of our genome? It’s a possibility. You need to know that.

So that’s one part of this delivery system, just one. Now let me go to the next. The next part of the delivery system is a Luciferase enzyme. They named it, they patented it Luciferase. I don’t like that name Luciferase, because it has bioluminescent qualities which means it can produce a light or has a light source. And all of this would be under your skin and you cannot see it. Now the Luciferase is an idea because they want to make sure that you’re vaccinated. They don’t trust medical records, they don’t trust you saying that you got vaccinated, they want to make sure, they want to make sure it was successful, a successful transfection, a successful gene modification. So when you get the Luciferase enzyme if you have an iPhone or special app on the iPhone, you can scan over that area and it will give a digital code, a digital imprint, a digital pattern, something that will identify that you were vaccinated. It holds your vaccination record. It also gives you an ID, a number, a bar code, a branding, whatever you want to call it, a tattoo, it’s all the same thing. You now become like a product.

So we have that. Now the third thing I mentioned was Hydrogel. So Hydrogel is actually an invention from DARPA, the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is kind of a sci-fi kind of a group from the Department of Defense, Pentagon, of the US government. They make these fantastic inventions. So one of them is Hydrogel.

Hydrogel, you can look on Youtube, look at PROFUSA, it is one of the companies, DARPA, as well as Hydrogel, and you’ll find some little two-minute clips that they describe. So Hydrogel’s nanotechnology: microscopic little robots, and these little robots, actually I know it sounds crazy, it’s still crazy to me, but it’s possible, they can disassemble, reassemble, assemble, into and make different things. So with this Hydrogel, it’s really nano technology, so that’s something you know robotic or something that’s artificial intelligence, it has the ability to connect with artificial intelligence.

So this means that a human can now connect to directly and gather information from our bodies, and gather it and connect with your Smartphone, with the cloud, with some other smart device. And once this is done, this is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Think about that. think about how immediately that could change our privacy, immediately can change our autonomy, immediately change our freedoms. That can gather data like your blood sugar, your oxygen, your blood pressure, those sound great, but it also can gather many other things. It can gather they say your emotions, or your menstrual cycle, your activity, if you’ve fallen, your nutrients in your body, if you took medicines. It’s a potential to see if you took illicit drugs, it’s got a potential to see almost anything that goes on in your body. And all of this information is going where? That has not been addressed. Who’s protecting this information? What are they using it for? This is really serious stuff, guys! This is all being proposed to being unveiled in the next vaccine.

The other thing to know is with this nanotechnology, Hydrogel, artificial intelligence, you know, hook up just like your cell phone. You can send a text message you can send an email but also you can receive them back. So that means we could receive information. What information would be coming back into us? Would it affect our mood? Our behavior? Would it affect how we think or our memories? If you haven’t watched the movie Matrix, I think you should. I think there’s some truth in that movie. I see so many wrong things with this vaccine. And I see that we are not talking about it in the major media. And I see that I feel that these companies are outright lying to us when they say they cannot affect our DNA, because by all definitions that they are using, this can affect our DNA.

So guys I wanted to make this video short because I wanted to get the point across. I wanted you to really do your own research. So know that there are many risks that we’re seeing here and there is some we really need to know if we really want to go from human 1.0 to human 2.0.

And let me also tell you that there are some major names behind these vaccines. You’re always going to see like the Department of Defense from the US government, sometimes DARPA like I told you. Why is the military involved with our vaccines? You see the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation everywhere with this. If you look you’ll find that name almost always.

And let’s go back to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I want you to look up, what, let’s look at the track record, let’s look at what that man stands for. His family comes from a family of eugenics. What does eugenics mean? Population control, meaning there are too many people on the planet. It’s important to know. He’s been on video stating that he thinks with a very good new vaccine we could get the earth’s population to be decreased by 10 to 15 percent. Well, who’s going to stay and who’s going to go? And who is he to decide? He doesn’t have a medical background, no epidemiology background, no science background. He’s not a doctor. A software tech that’s what he is.

I’d also like you to realize I always look at who has a vested interest. What are their motivations? What is his motivation? Right? We already know his family background. Well, what’s great concerning to me is that DARPA, this military agency, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is very interested in something called gene drive research or technology, or gene extinction technology. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. By using genetic mutations, by use of transfection, for instance, you can exterminate an entire species from the planet. They are proposing to use this for mosquitoes, for instance, in Africa. But guys, our world is a delicate ecosystem. Who is saying one species goes? You destroy one species, you could affect an entire ecosystem. So when you exterminate an entire species you will affect an entire ecosystem. It’s a very delicate balance. And who is to say who’s going to stay and who’s going to go? Who’s got that knowledge? Why aren’t we talking about this? And guys, if we can do it to an insect, we can do it to an animal, we can do it to a human. I bring this up because if these agencies that are behind the vaccine also stand for that, do you trust them with your health? Do you trust them with your family? Do you trust them with our children?

The other thing is we’re rushing this to production. What is the motivation behind that? We need to really think about this.

I’ve also stated in the past that we need to know that there are at least in the United States there are mandates passed that make the vaccine manufacturers have no liability, zero liability for any harm done to any human. If people are killed, if they’re hurt, if they’re paralyzed, if they’re maimed for life, it doesn’t matter. You have no recourse. And they still make all their profit. So there’s no incentive for them to make it safe anyway.

I also want you to know that one of the mandates the emergency preparedness act that’s that says they can force a vaccine on us. They cannot force a vaccine if there is a viable treatment for the COVID-19. And I want you to know that doctors around the world are being censored about treatment options for COVID-19 or prevention for COVID-19. Because if there’s a true treatment or prevention then they can’t force this vaccine on us. I want to bring that up because what in the world is the motivation of doing this? Is it really in the health of all of us? As a doctor, I can’t see how this is in the true health of the entire world. I think there’s another motive, another agenda going on. The more I look at this the more that comes up.

So I’ll leave you with this. I want to make this short and sweet, sweet so that you can digest this and think about it. Do you really want to go to Human 2.0? I don’t think it’s the fantasy you see in the movies. We need to come together, and we need to unify our voices because people in positions of power taking care of our health are not in our best interests. But together we have power. Together united our voice is strong. So I encourage you to do critical thinking. Do your own research. Join groups in your State. Go to your state legislature and you tell them no, no to these experiments on humans, no to an invasion of privacy, no to censorship. We are sovereign human souls and we need to take our rights back.

Thank you for listening. And you know, I always say my videos with the greatest of love and the greatest of peace. Thank you.

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Matthew Henry (18 October 1662 – 22 June 1714) was a nonconformist minister and author, born in Wales but spent much of his life in England. He is best known for the six-volume biblical commentary Exposition of the Old and New Testaments. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

Are the Two Witnesses of the Book of Revelation two literal people? Or can the passages about them be interpreted figuratively? Here is what Matthew Henry has to say:

In this time of treading down (of Jerusalem by the Gentiles), God has reserved to himself his faithful witnesses, who will not fail to attest the truth of his word and worship, and the excellency of his ways. Here observe,

I. The number of these witnesses: it is but a small number and yet it is sufficient. 1. It is but small. Many will own and acknowledge Christ in times of prosperity who will desert and deny him in times of persecution; one witness, when the cause is upon trial, is worth many at other times. 2. It is a sufficient number; for in the mouth of two witnesses every cause shall be established. Christ sent out his disciples two by two, to preach the gospel. Some think these two witnesses are Enoch and Elias, who are to return to the earth for a time: others, the church of the believing Jews and that of the Gentiles: it should rather seem that they are God’s eminent faithful ministers, who shall not only continue to profess the Christian religion, but to preach it, in the worst of times.

II. The time of their prophesying, or bearing their testimony for Christ. A thousand two hundred and threescore days; that is (as many think), to the period of the reign of antichrist; and, if the beginning of that interval could be ascertained, this number of prophetic days, taking a day for a year, would give us a prospect when the end shall be.

III. Their habit, and posture: they prophesy in sackcloth, as those that are deeply affected with the low and distressed state of the churches and interest of Christ in the world.

IV. How they were supported and supplied during the discharge of their great and hard work: they stood before the God of the whole earth, and he gave them power to prophesy. He made them to be like Zerubbabel and Joshua, the two olive-trees and candlestick in the vision of Zechariah, ch. 4:2, etc. God gave them the oil of holy zeal, and courage, and strength, and comfort; he made them olive-trees, and their lamps of profession were kept burning by the oil of inward gracious principles, which they received from God. They had oil not only in their lamps, but in their vessels-habits of spiritual life, light, and zeal.

V. Their security and defence during the time of their prophesying: If any attempted to hurt them, fire proceeded out of their mouths, and devoured them, v. 5. Some think this alludes to Elias’s calling for the fire from heaven, to consume the captains and their companies that came to seize him, 2 Ki. 1:12. God promised the prophet Jeremiah (ch. 5:14), Behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people shall be wood, and it shall devour them. By their praying and preaching, and courage in suffering, they shall gall and wound the very hearts and consciences of many of their persecutors, who shall go away self-condemned, and be even terrors to themselves; like Pashur, at the words of the prophet Jeremiah, ch. 20:4. They shall have that free access to God, and that interest in him, that, at their prayers, God will inflict plagues and judgments upon their enemies, as he did on Pharaoh, turning their rivers into blood, and restraining the dews of heaven, shutting heaven up, that no rain shall fall for many days, as he did at the prayers of Elias, 1 Ki. 17:1. God has ordained his arrows for the persecutors, and is often plaguing them while they are persecuting his people; they find it hard work to kick against the pricks.

VI. The slaying of the witnesses. To make their testimony more strong, they must seal it with their blood. Here observe, 1. The time when they should be killed: When they have finished their testimony. They are immortal, they are invulnerable, till their work be done. Some think it ought to be rendered, when they were about to finish their testimony. When they had prophesied in sackcloth the greatest part of the 1260 years, then they should feel the last effect of antichristian malice. 2. The enemy that should overcome and slay them—the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit. Antichrist, the great instrument of the devil, should make war against them, not only with the arms of subtle and sophistical learning, but chiefly with open force and violence; and God would permit his enemies to prevail against his witnesses for a time. 3. The barbarous usage of these slain witnesses; the malice of their enemies was not satiated with their blood and death, but pursued even their dead bodies. (1.) They would not allow them a quiet grave; their bodies were cast out in the open street, the high street of Babylon, or in the high road leading to the city. This city is spiritually called Sodom for monstrous wickedness, and Egypt for idolatry and tyranny; and here Christ in his mystical body has suffered more than in any place in the world. (2.) Their dead bodies were insulted by the inhabitants of the earth, and their death was a matter of mirth and joy to the antichristian world, v. 10. They were glad to be rid of these witnesses, who by their doctrine and example had teased, terrified, and tormented the consciences of their enemies; these spiritual weapons cut wicked men to the heart, and fill them with the greatest rage and malice against the faithful.

VII. The resurrection of these witnesses, and the consequences thereof. Observe, 1. The time of their rising again; after they had lain dead three days and a half (v. 11), a short time in comparison of that in which they had prophesied. Here may be a reference to the resurrection of Christ, who is the resurrection and the life. Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Or there may be a reference to the resurrection of Lazarus on the fourth day, when they thought it impossible. God’s witnesses may be slain, but they shall rise again: not in their persons, till the general resurrection, but in their successors. God will revive his work, when it seems to be dead in the world. 2. The power by which they were raised: The spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet. God put not only life, but courage into them. God can make the dry bones to life; it is the Spirit of life from God that quickens dead souls, and shall quicken the dead bodies of his people, and his dying interest in the world. 3. The effect of their resurrection upon their enemies: Great fear fell upon them. The reviving of God’s work and witnesses will strike terror into the souls of his enemies. Where there is guilt, there is fear; and a persecuting spirit, though cruel, is not a courageous, but a cowardly spirit. Herod feared John the Baptist.

VIII. The ascension of the witnesses into heaven and the consequences thereof, v. 12, 13. Observe, 1. Their ascension. By heaven we may understand either some more eminent station in the church, the kingdom of grace in this world, or a high place in the kingdom of glory above. The former seems to be the meaning: They ascended to heaven in a cloud (in a figurative, not in a literal sense) and their enemies saw them. It will be no small part of the punishment of persecutors, both in this world and at the great day, that they shall see the faithful servants of God greatly honoured and advanced. To this honour they did not attempt to ascend, till God called them, and said, Come up hither. The Lord’s witnesses must wait for their advancement, both in the church and in heaven, till God calls them; they must not be weary of suffering and service, nor too hastily grasp at the reward; but stay till their Master calls them, and then they may gladly ascend to him. 2. The consequences of their ascension—a mighty shock and convulsion in the antichristian empire and the fall of a tenth part of the city. Some refer this to the beginning of the reformation from popery, when many princes and states fell off from their subjection to Rome. This great work met with great opposition; all the western world felt a great concussion, and the antichristian interest received a great blow, and lost a great deal of ground and interest, (1.) By the sword of war, which was then drawn; and many of those who fought under the banner of antichrist were slain by it. (2.) By the sword of the Spirit: The fear of God fell upon many. They were convinced of their errors, superstition, and idolatry; and by true repentance, and embracing the truth, they gave glory to the God of heaven. Thus, when God’s work and witnesses revive, the devil’s work and witnesses fall before him.

Introduction

This talk by Celeste Bishop Solum about Wicked Problems is confirmed by a Wikipedia article entitled, Wicked Problems. The text was transcribed from her YouTube. Someday Celeste’s YouTube may be taken down, but as long as I am around, this text will remain online.

The bold emphasis in the text is mine. I added some clarifications to the text that you won’t find in the video, such as links to external resources.

Celeste Bishop Solum’s Bio

Celeste has worked as a contractor for Homeland Security and FEMA. Her training and activations include the infamous day of 911, flood and earthquake operations, mass casualty exercises, and numerous other operations. Celeste is FEMA certified and has completed the Professional Development Emergency Management Series. Read more about Celeste from her website.

Celeste Solum – “Wicked Problems” in Text Format

Hi, this is Celeste and this is the Celestial Report for July 23rd, 2020. And we are going to discuss something that I learned about maybe 10 years ago, and I haven’t talked a lot about it, but I think these are the days, and it’s called “wicked problems”.

So why are we witnessing wickedness across the globe? So I am going to humbly present to you that it is a social tool called “wicked problems”. And they have been loosed upon the earth to prepare for the evil global tyrant.

So in planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because it is either incomplete, it’s contradictory and it changes requirements, and it’s often very difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or a problem that cannot be fixed and that there is no single solution to the problem. And it being wicked denotes resistance to the resolution such as the masks, rather than being an evil. I would propose to you that it is an evil, but that’s what the social engineers say that there is resistance to the various solutions that they are proposing.

So another definition of it is that it is a problem whose social complexity means that it has no stopping point. That’s interesting. Moreover, because of the complex interdependencies, for instance, the one health agenda which is multi-discipline, the effort to solve one aspect of the wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. So let’s take for instance the current pathogen. If you treat it one way it may actually cause a plethora of other health problems. And so that is an example of a wicked problem.

So the phrase was originally used in social planning, and it was introduced by a C. West Churchman, how ironic, in 1967, in management science. And it was in relation to operations research. And remember, we’re operationalizing everything to inform the manager in what respect our solutions have failed to tame his wicked problem. And in 1973 there was a wicked problem, a treatise, and they were trying to tame it and solve problems such as mathematics, chess, and puzzle-solving. They were using those types of things to try and solve these wicked problems, but it didn’t work.

So what are the characteristics of a wicked problem? So there is no definitive formulation for a wicked problem. So wicked problems they don’t have any stopping rules, so they can go on for in perpetuity forever. The solutions to wicked problems are not true and false but only better or worse.

So think of our election system right now. We have to choose between the lesser of two evils, not really absolutes. Absolutes such as true and false are disappearing from our culture and from the world. There is no immediate or ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. And every solution to a wicked problem is a one-shot operation because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error because every attempt counts significantly. That’s because it’s all metric out, and you either get it right the first time or you’re out.

Wicked problems do not have an enumerable or exhaustive describability or a set of potential solutions. There is not a well-described set of permissible operations that could be incorporated into the plan. Think of it as like a cake and you’re making a cake mix and it calls for water and eggs and that type of stuff and then you beat it. There’s nothing like that for a wicked problem. Wicked problems are essentially unique. And we hear that term being used over and over again, unique, unique, unique, especially with global governance. Every wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem, so that’s the interdependencies that we were just talking about.

And then there is a discrepancy representing the wicked problem that can be explained in numerous ways. And that choice of an explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution. So say for instance, if climate change, if you’re on one side of the debate, you would explain it one way, if you’re on the other side of the climate debate, you would explain it a different way. And a social planner has no right to be wrong. They are liable for the consequences of the actions that they generate. And with this great call for social and civil activism right now, what the young people especially, and people that are heeding the call to action, is they don’t realize that there are consequences for the actions that they generate. So later Conklin (Conklin, Jeffrey (2006). Dialogue mapping : building shared understanding of wicked problems. Chichester, England: Wiley Publishing. ISBN 978-0-470-01768-5) generalized some other concepts of the wickedness in their planning and their policies.

So it’s not well understood until after the solution or formulation of the solution. So they’re basically putting the cart before the horse. And once again it doesn’t have a stopping rule, it is not right or wrong, it is novel and unique. So whenever you hear the words novel and unique you know you are dealing with a wicked problem.

Every solution for the wicked problem is a one-shot operation, and stakeholders have different worldviews and different frames for understanding the problem. And the constraints of that problem are subject to the resources needed to solve the problem over time. And the problem is never solved definitively. It always a living document, it is always changing.

So what are some examples of wicked problems that you’re probably seeing in the headlines today? They can be economic, they can be environmental, they can be political, they can even be religious. There are also climate change, natural hazards, health care system, (interesting!) aids, epidemic, the novel coronavirus, international drug trafficking, nuclear weapons, waste, and also social justice. Those are all wicked problems. And so they are identified and worked out in knowledge management, business strategies, and even space debris.

So biblically speaking what does wicked mean when we encounter it in the bible? So basically wicked in the Strongs (concordance) is Strong 7563 which is arussia which means wicked, criminal, evil, evil men, offender, ungodly, arisha which means wickedness, evildoer, the guilty. And then from Ezekiel 3: 18 and 19 we learn a few additional things, that if Ezekiel fails to give the warning to the wicked, and this is the Lord speaking:

Ezekiel 3:18  When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

And this, my friends, is why we need to be telling people about the Quantum Dot, and the Hydrogel the potential link with the Mark (of the Beast) the deeper spiritual implications. And we cannot be shy. We must be bold, we must be courageous, because otherwise if we do not warn of this wickedness especially to the ones that are perishing, their blood is gonna be on our hand. So therefore as watch men and women we must warn the wicked. Because you were wicked you will die physically by divine judgment if you do not repent. God does not speak directly to the wicked, but He speaks to the wicked through you and I. You receive the word from God that such and such a wicked man or city or nation is going to die physically as a result of divine judgment, and if you fail to warn him or the city or whatever so that they have an opportunity to repent from their wicked way, that wicked one will die physically because of their sin, and the verse goes on, but his blood I will require at your hand. And this means that your life would also be forfeit.

This does not mean that you will lose your salvation. Salvation is not based upon works. The issue here is your physical life. And so warning the wicked was not in order that he might attain salvation, but to save his physical life. And then there is a change in verse 19.

Ezekiel 3:19  Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul.

So basically that you will live physically but the wicked person shall die in his iniquity. On the other hand, if you warn the wicked one and he does not repent, he will die physically as a result of the Divine judgment. The wicked one will die whether he is warned or not. The distinction is not how warning affects the wicked one who does not repent, the distinction is strictly on how warning a wicked one affects you, and as basically a prophet of Jesus Christ, because you, the revelation of Jesus Christ is prophecy, you deliver your soul.

We can find wickedness in,

Isaiah 57:21  There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

,

Psalms 92:7  ¶When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever:

,

Isaiah 57:20  But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

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Psalm 37:38 But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of the wicked shall be cut off.

,

Proverbs 21:12 The righteous man wisely considereth the house of the wicked: but God overthroweth the wicked for their wickedness.

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Psalms 94:3  LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?

,

Proverbs 29:12  If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants are wicked.

Psalm 119:53, and Job 21:7. So there’s a lot of different places that we can find wickedness. So the term is often in a general sense of wrong, and specifically to evil, and it’s always or more often used in its active form as in mischief. So some other things to just keep in mind about wickedness are that it denotes a perversity of the mind which by the natural man surrenders himself to evil impulses. And this comes to us from Proverbs 15:26, Romans 1:29, and Psalms 10:1-11. Wickedness has its seat in the heart Jeremiah 17:9 and Mark 7:21-23, and we need to think that the heart is like a throne that we’re studying in the book of Esther, and also we saw Pharaoh on his throne, and the antichrist coming will sit on the throne.

And so wickedness is in the seat of your heart. It is inspired by Satan, Matthew 13:19, and First John 3:12. It is progressive, Genesis 6:5. Get this one, wicked news is contagious in its manifestation! First Samuel
24:13. All these people are concerned about the contagion of this pathogen, but not concerned about the contagiousness of wickedness, imagine that!

In the Psalms, we learned that the contrast of the richest righteous and the wicked raises the question of the prosperity of the wicked, and we see this in the Psalms like Psalm 37. There is a punishment for all who are wicked, and we see this in Psalm 9:17, Jeremiah 16:4, and Matthew 13:49. And it is never applied to believers in First Corinthians 5:13. Wicked works of unbelievers who are alienated from God. And we find this in Colossians 1:21. And those who are progressing in their faith have overcome the wicked one, First John 2:13. And that is a really good and encouraging verse. And it is the shield of faith, a sure defense against his attack. And we find that in Ephesians 6:16.

Wicked people are conceptualized as chaff, and being wicked is conceptualized as being dead physically and spiritually. So there’s in the physical realm and the policymakers, there’s no prescribed way to move forward. We are stuck in the muck of wicked problem management, and therefore we need this global government to take care of us.

So some of the world’s strategies to cope with wicked problems are an authoritative government that seeks to tame wicked problems by vesting the responsibility for solving the problems into the hands of a few people or the elite. It is competitive. The strategies attempt to solve the wicked problems by pitting opposing points of view against each other. And I would propose to you that this is creeping into the church. So we need to be especially careful that it’s not creeping into our life.

It is collaborative. These strategies aim to engage all stakeholders, pagans, and Christians alike in order to find the best solution for all stakeholders. And I can tell you it’s not going to be for your benefit. It’s a process, and there’s something, a technique called dialogue mapping which is not what we just learned about on Tuesday night, which is miracle mapping, which is a good thing, but dialogue mapping is a collaboration approach to mapping out wicked problems.

If you want to learn more about wicked problems, there was a paper written by Robert Knapp called the Wholesome Design for Wicked Problems. And basically he said, that you first shift the goal of action on the significant problems from the solution to an intervention. And this is where we see these legal interventions of the ICD 10 codes for our execution, and but they don’t tell you that upfront, and people are getting paid to make wicked problems governable is the goal of what they want to do with their wicked problem structuring method. And they actually have something called in their operations research collaboration consensus negotiations of soft system methodology called SODA. So that’s a heck of a mess of a soda! And they actually call wicked problems a social mess of interrelated problems and other messes. It is the complexity or the system of systems, think the internet of things, is among the factors that make social messes so resistant to analysis and more importantly to resolution. And the reason it can’t be resolved is because it doesn’t have the living God in there to bring resolution.

So I’ll just wrap up about the social mess. There are some other characteristics about it. There is no correct view of the problem. That’s why everybody can have … it’s free for all. Different views of the problem can be contradictory. Most problems are connected with other problems. It’s like that old thing, like trying to find the end of a ball of yarn. I’ve been there, done that. Most problems, there’s data uncertain or missing, there are multiple value conflicts, there are ideological and cultural constraints because of course, they purge God out of it, there are political constraints, there are economic constraints, there is a logical and an illogical and a multi-value thinking. And if that’s not where we are folks, I don’t know where we are. There’s numerous possible interventions — think execution — and the consequences are very difficult to imagine. And that my friends is why everybody’s having such a struggle trying to come to grips with this pathogen. It is uncertain and there’s lots of ambiguity which we’re seeing with the pathogen and there is great resistance to change.

And so there is one last thing and I’m gonna wrap it up for today, there are also super wicked problems. And a super wicked problem first surfaced in 2007 in a conference paper and it was followed up in a 2012 journal in policy science. And they definitely use climate change as a super wicked problem. And it has four characteristics,

that time is running out,
there is no perceived central authority,
and those seeking the problem are causing it,
and policies discount the future irrationally.

So you know there’s no rationality to the whole thing at all. So anyway I just wanted to bring this to you so that as you’re perusing the news you’re looking at your bible be aware that wickedness is afoot and it is in the form of wicked problems.

See you next time on the Celestial Report.

John Gill (23 November 1697 – 14 October 1771) was an English Baptist pastor, biblical scholar, and theologian. Born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, he attended Kettering Grammar School where he mastered the Latin classics and learned Greek by age 11. He continued self-study in everything from logic to Hebrew, his love for the latter remaining throughout his life. (Quoted from Wikipedia.) John Gill was also the first Baptist pastor to write a commentary on the entire Bible! His interpretation of the prophecies of the Books of Daniel and the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 are in agreement with most of his contemporaries who held to the Historicist school of interpretation. Sad to say not very many Christians today know what John Gill and his fellows had to say. Their voices have been drowned out by John Nelson Darby’s futurism. Why would Darby be promoted over John Gill? Undoubtedly it was because of the insidious work of the Jesuit Order! The Jesuit’s plan is to bring the “separated brethren” back to the fold of the Pope. Will you follow them? I’m not. That’s why I want to promote the true interpretation of Matthew 24 and the significance of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD bought about by none other than the Messiah Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ!

I compiled this article from https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/gills-exposition-of-the-bible/matthew-24/ in order to make it easier to read John Gill’s entire commentary of Matthew 24 without having to click 51 times. In my opinion, David Nikao Wilcoxson’s articles on Olivet Discourse Decoded are the best 21st-century commentary on Matthew 24, and he himself quotes extensively from John Gill’s 18th-century commentary. Why do Bible teachers today teach a futuristic interpretation of Matthew 24 when John Gill and other Protestant / Baptist writers clearly explained how it was all fulfilled in 70 A.D.? Answer: Jesuits promoted John Nelson Darby’s false futurist interpretation of Matthew 24 in order to mislead 20th and 21st century Christians to accept the heretical doctrine of Christian Zionism and to take their eyes off the Popes of Rome and the biblical Antichrist.

Matthew 24:1

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple
He not only went out of it for that time, but took his final leave of it, never to return more to it; having foretold its desolation, which he, in part, by so doing, immediately fulfilled: this the disciples observing, and being intent on the outward splendour, and worldly grandeur of it, were concerned that so beautiful a structure should be deserted; and almost thought it incredible, that so strong, and firm a building could be destroyed. And his disciples came unto him:
as he went, and as soon as he was come out of the temple, and whilst in view of it: for to show him the buildings of the temple;
the walls of it, and courts adjoining to it, how beautiful and firm they were: whether this was done by them to raise in him admiration or commiseration, in hopes he might change the sentence he had passed upon it, is not easy to say; or whether this did not express their incredulity about the desolation of it; which Christ’s answer, in the next verse, seems to imply. Mark says, it was “one of the disciples” that observed these to him, who might be accompanied with the rest, and in their name address him; and who, probably, might be Peter, since he was generally their mouth; and that he should speak to him in this manner: “master, see what manner of stones, and what buildings are here!” Luke says, “how it was adorned with goodly stones, and gifts.” The Jews give very great encomiums of the second temple, as repaired by Herod; and it was undoubtedly a very fine structure. They say ^F16, that he built the house of the sanctuary, “an exceeding beautiful building”; and that he repaired the temple, in beauty “greatly exceeding” that of Solomon’s ^F17. They moreover observe ^F18, that

“he who has not seen the building of Herod, has never seen, (han Nyynb) , “a beautiful building.” With what is it built? says Rabbah, with stones of green and white marble. And there are others say, that it was built with stones of spotted green and white marble.”

These, very likely, were the very stones the disciples pointed to, and admired; and were of a prodigious size, as well as worth. Some of the stones were, as Josephus ^F19 says,

“forty five cubits long, five high, and six broad.”

Others of them, as he elsewhere affirm ^F20,

“were twenty five cubits long, eight high, and twelve broad.”

And he also tells us, in the same place, that there were,

“in the porches, four rows of pillars: the thickness of each pillar was as much as three men, with their arms stretched out, and joined together, could grasp; the length twenty seven feet, and the number of them an hundred and sixty two, and beautiful to a miracle.”

At the size of those stones, and the beauty of the work, it is said ^F21, Titus was astonished, when he destroyed the temple; at which time his soldiers plundered it, and took away “the gifts”, with which it is also said to be adorned. These were rich and valuable things which were dedicated to it, and either laid up in it, or hung upon the walls and pillars of it, as it was usual in other temples ^F23. These may, intend the golden table given by Pompey, and the spoils which Herod dedicated; and particularly the golden vine, which was a gift of his ^F24; besides multitudes of other valuable things, which were greatly enriching and ornamental to it. Now the disciples suggest, by observing these, what a pity it was such a grand edifice should be destroyed; or how unaccountable it was; that a place of so much strength, could easily be demolished.

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FOOTNOTES:

F16 Juchasin, fol. 139. 1.
F17 Ganz Tzemach David, par. 1. fol. 24. 2.
F18 T. Bab. Bava Bathra, fol. 4. 1. & Succa, fol. 51. 2.
F19 De Bello Jud. l. 5. c. 5.
F20 Antiq. Jud. l. 15. c. 14.
F21 Egesippus, l. 5. c. 43.
F23 Vid. Ryckium de Capitol. Rom. c. 21
F24 Joseph. Antiq. l. 15.

Matthew 24:2

And Jesus said unto them, see ye not all these things?
&c.] “These great buildings”, as in Mark; all these goodly stones, so beautiful and large, and so firmly put together: verily, I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon
another, that shall not be thrown down;
or broken, as Munster’s Hebrew Gospel reads it: which prediction had a full and remarkable accomplishment; and which is not only attested by Josephus ^F25, who relates, that both the city and temple were dug up, and laid level with the ground; but also by other Jewish writers; who tell us ^F26 that

“on the ninth of Ab, a day prepared for punishments, Turnus Rufus the wicked, (lkyhh ta vrx) , “ploughed up the temple”, and all round about it, to fulfil what is said, “Zion shall be ploughed as a field”.”

Yes, and to fulfil what Christ here says too, that not one stone should be left upon another, which a plough would not admit of.

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FOOTNOTES:

F25 De Bello Jud. l. 7. c. 7.
F26 Maimon. Hilch. Taaniot, c. 5. sect. 3. T. Bab. Taanith, fol. 23. 1. & Gloss. in ib.

Matthew 24:3

And as he sat upon the Mount of Olives
Which was on the east of the city of Jerusalem ^F1, “over against the temple”, as Mark says, and where he could sit and take a full view of it; for the wall on the east side was lower than any other, and that for this reason; that when the high priest burnt the red heifer on this mount, as he did, and sprinkled the blood, he might have a view of the gate of the temple. It is said ^F2,

“all the walls which were there, were very high, except the eastern wall; for the high priest, when he burned the heifer, stood on the top of the mount of Olives, and directed himself, and looked to the gate of the temple, at the time he sprinkled the blood.”

This place, very probably, our Lord chose to sit in, that he might give his disciples an occasion to discourse more largely with him on this subject; and that he might take the opportunity of acquainting them with what would be the signs and forerunners of this desolation, and so it proved:

the disciples came to him privately;
these four at least, Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, as Mark relates; and that either separately from the rest of the disciples, or from the multitude: it might not be thought so proper, to ask the following questions before them, and they might suppose that Christ would not be so ready to give an answer to them plainly, before the common people; when they might hope to be indulged with one by him, in private:

saying, tell us, when shall these things be?
That this house will be left desolate, these buildings will be destroyed, and not one stone left upon another? This first question relates purely to the destruction of the temple, and to this Christ first answers, from ( Matthew 24:4-23 ) .

And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the
world?
Which two are put together, as what they supposed would be at the same time, and immediately follow the destruction of the temple. That he was come in the flesh, and was the true Messiah, they firmly believed: he was with them, and they expected he would continue with them, for they had no notion of his leaving them, and coming again. When he at any time spake of his dying and rising from the dead, they seemed not to understand it: wherefore this coming of his, the sign of which, they inquire, is not to be understood of his coming a second time to judge the world, at the last day; but of his coming in his kingdom and glory, which they had observed him some little time before to speak of; declaring that some present should not die, till they saw it: wherefore they wanted to be informed, by what sign they might know, when he would set up his temporal kingdom; for since the temple was to be destroyed, they might hope a new one would be built, much more magnificent than this, and which is a Jewish notion; and thai a new state of things would commence; the present world, or age, would be at a period; and the world to come, they had so often heard of from the Jewish doctors, would take place; and therefore they ask also, of the sign of the end of the world, or present state of things in the Jewish economy: to this Christ answers, in the latter part of this chapter, though not to the sense in which they put the questions; yet in the true sense of the coming of the son of man, and the end of the world; and in such a manner, as might be very instructive to them, and is to us.

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FOOTNOTES:

F1 Bartenora in Misn. Middot, c. 1. sect. 3.
F2 Misn. lb. c. 2. sect. 4.

Matthew 24:4

And Jesus answered and said unto them
Not to indulge their curiosity, but to instruct them in things useful to be known, and which might be cautions to them and others, against deceivers; confirm them in the faith of himself, when they should see his predictions accomplished; and be directions to them, of what might shortly be expected.

Take heed that no man deceive you:
by pretending to come from God with a new revelation, setting himself up for the Messiah, after my departure; suggesting himself to be the person designed by God to be the deliverer of Israel, and to be sent by him, to set up a temporal kingdom, in great worldly splendour and glory; promising great names, and high places of honour and trust in it; things which Christ knew his disciples were fond of, and were in danger of being ensnared by; and therefore gives them this suitable and seasonable advice, and caution.

Matthew 24:5

For many shall come in my name
by his orders, or with delegated powers and authority from him; but should assume the name of the Messiah, which was peculiarly his, to themselves; and take upon them his office, and challenge the honour and dignity which belonged unto him:

saying, I am Christ, and shall deceive many.
This is the first sign, preceding the destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem; as there was a general expectation among the Jews of a Messiah; that is, of one that should arise and deliver them from the Roman yoke, which was the common idea tacked to that word; in this period of time, many set up themselves to be deliverers and redeemers of the people of Israel: who had each of them their followers in great numbers, whom they imposed upon, and brought to destruction. Of this sort was Theudas, not he that Gamaliel speaks of, ( Acts 5:36 ) for he was before this time; but one that was in the time of Claudius Caesar, when Cuspius Fadus was governor of Judea; who persuaded a great number to follow him to the river Jordan, which he promised to divide, by a word of command, and give them a passage over; and thereby, as the historian observes ^F3, (pollouv hpathshn) , “he deceived many”; which is the very thing that is here predicted: but he and his company were routed Fadus, and his head cut off. There was another called the Egyptian, mentioned in ( Acts 21:38 ) who made an uproar, and led four thousand cut-throats into the wilderness; and this same man persuaded thirty thousand men to follow him to Mount Olivet, promising a free passage into the city; but he being vanquished by Felix, then governor of Judea; fled, and many of his followers were killed and taken ^F4: and besides, there were many more magicians and impostors, that pretended to signs and wonders, and promised the people deliverance from their evils, by whom they were imposed upon to their ruin. There were others also besides these, that set up for deliverers, who called themselves by the name of the Messiah. Among these, we may reckon Simon Magus, who gave out that he was some great one; yea, expressly, that he was the word of God, and the Son of God ^F5, which were known names of the Messiah; and Dositheus the Samaritan, asserted himself to be Christ ^F6; and also Menander affirmed, that no man could be saved, unless he was baptized in his name ^F7; these are instances before the destruction of Jerusalem, and confirm the prophecy here delivered.

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FOOTNOTES:

F3 Joseph. Antiq. l. 20. c. 2.
F4 Joseph. Antiq. l. 20. c. 6.
F5 Jerom in loc. Iren. adv. Haeres. l. 1. c. 20.
F6 Origen contr. Cels. l. 1. p. 44.
F7 Tertull. de prescript. Haeret. c. 46.

Matthew 24:6

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars
This is the second sign of the destruction of Jerusalem: it is observable that this, and some of the following signs, are given by the Jews, as signs of the Messiah’s coming; whereas they were forerunners of their ruin, for the rejection of him who was already come. They suppose the Messiah will come in the seventh year, or the year of rest and release:

“On the seventh year (they say ^F8) will be (twmxlm) , “wars”: and in the going out, or at the close of the seventh year, the son of David will come.”

Which wars, the gloss says, will be between the nations of the world, and Israel. Here wars may mean the commotions, insurrections, and seditions, against the Romans, and their governors; and the intestine slaughters committed among them, some time before the siege of Jerusalem, and the destruction of it. Under Cureanus the Roman governor, a sedition was raised on the day of the passover, in which twenty thousand perished; after that, in another tumult, ten thousand were destroyed by cut-throats: in Ascalon two thousand more, in Ptolemais two thousand, at Alexandria fifty thousand, at Damascus ten thousand, and elsewhere in great numbers ^F9. The Jews were also put into great consternation, upon hearing the design of the Roman emperor, to put up his image in their temple:

see that ye be not troubled;
so as to leave the land of Judea as yet, and quit the preaching of the Gospel there, as if the final destruction was just at hand;

for all these things must come to pass;
these wars and the reports of them and the panic on account of them; these commotions and slaughters, and terrible devastations by the sword must be; being determined by God, predicted by Christ, and brought upon the Jews by their own wickedness; and suffered in righteous judgment, for their sin:

but the end is not yet;
meaning not the end of the world, but the end of Jerusalem, and the temple, the end of the Jewish state; which were to continue, and did continue after these disturbances in it.

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FOOTNOTES:

F8 T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 97. 1. & Megilia, fol. 17. 2. Zohar in Exod. fol. 3. 3, 4.
F9 Vid. Joseph. Antiq. l. 20. c. 6. & de Bello Jud. l. 2

Matthew 24:7

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom
This seems to be a distinct and third sign, foreboding the general calamity of the Jews; that there should be not only seditions and intestine wars, in the midst of their country, but there should be wars in other nations, one with another; and with the Jews, and the Jews with them: and this also is made a sign of the Messiah’s coming by them, for so they say ^F11;

“when thou seest, (wlab wla twrgtm twyklm) , “kingdoms stirred up one against another”, look for the feet of the Messiah: know thou that so it shall be; for so it was in the days of Abraham: by the means of kingdoms stirred up one against another, redemption came to Abraham.”

Poor blinded creatures! when these very things were the forerunners of their destruction. And so it was, the Jewish nation rose up against others, the Samaritans, Syrians, and Romans: there were great commotions in the Roman empire, between Otho and Vitellius, and Vitellius and Vespasian; and at length the Romans rose up against the Jews, under the latter, and entirely destroyed them; compare the writings in 2 Esdras:

“And one shall undertake to fight against another, one city against another, one place against another, one people against another, and one realm against another.” (2 Esdras 13:31)

“the beginning of sorrows and great mournings; the beginning of famine and great death; the beginning of wars, and the powers shall stand in fear; the beginning of evils! what shall I do when these evils shall come?” (2 Esdras 16:18)

“Therefore when there shall be seen earthquakes and uproars of the people in the world:” (2 Esdras 9:3)

And there shall be famines:
a fourth sign of the desolation of the city and temple, and which the Jews also say, shall go before the coming of the Messiah:

“in the second year (of the week of years) in which the son of David comes, they say ^F12, there will be “arrows of famine” sent forth; and in the third year, (lwdg ber) , “a great famine”: and men, women, and children, and holy men, and men of business, shall die.”

But these have been already; they followed the Messiah, and preceded their destruction: one of these famines was in Claudius Caesar’s time, was foretold by Agabus, and is mentioned in ( Acts 11:28 ) and most dreadful ones there were, whilst Jerusalem was besieged, and before its utter ruin, related by Josephus.

And pestilences:
a pestilence is described by the Jews after this manner ^F13:

“a city that produces a thousand and five hundred footmen, as Cephar Aco, and nine dead men are carried out of it in three days, one after another, lo! (rbd hz) , “this is a pestilence”; but if in one day, or in four days, it is no pestilence; and a city that produces five hundred footmen, as Cephar Amiko, and three dead men are carried out of it in three days, one after another, lo! this is a pestilence.”

These commonly attend famines, and are therefore mentioned together; and when the one was, the other may be supposed sooner or later to be:

and earthquakes in divers places
of the world; as, at Crete ^F14, and in divers cities in Asia ^F15, in the times of Nero: particularly the three cities of Phrygia, Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colosse; which were near to each other, and are all said to perish this way, in his reign ^F16;

“and Rome itself felt a tremor, in the reign of Galba ^F17.”

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FOOTNOTES:

F11 Bereshit Rabba, sect. 42. fol. 37. 1.
F12 T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 97. 1. Misn. Sota, c. 9. sect. 15.
F13 T. Bab. Taanith, fol. 21. & 19. 1. Maimon. Hilch. Taaniot, c. 2. sect. 5.
F14 Philostrat. in vit. Apollon. l. 4. c. 11.
F15 Sueton. in vit. Nero, c. 48.
F16 Orosius, l. 7. c. 7.
F17 Sueton. in vit. Galba, c. 13.

Matthew 24:8

All these are the beginning of sorrows
They were only a prelude unto them, and forerunners of them; they were only some foretastes of what would be, and were far from being the worst that should be endured. These were but light, in comparison of what befell the Jews, in their dreadful destruction. The word here used, signifies the sorrows and pains of a woman in travail. The Jews expect great sorrows and distresses in the times of the Messiah, and use a word to express them by, which answers to this, and call them, (xyvmh ylbx , “the sorrows of the Messiah”; (ylbx) , they say ^F18, signifies the sorrows of a woman in travail; and the Syriac version uses the same word here. These they represent to be very great, and express much concern to be delivered from them. They ^F19 ask,

“what shall a man do, to be delivered from “the sorrows of the Messiah?” He must employ himself in the law, and in liberality.”

And again ^F20,

“he that observes the three meals on the sabbath day, shall be delivered from three punishments; from “the sorrows of the Messiah”, from the judgment of hell, and from Gog and Magog.”

But alas there was no other way of escaping them, but by faith in the true Messiah, Jesus; and it was for their disbelief and rejection of him, that these came upon them.

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FOOTNOTES:

F18 Gloss. in T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 118. 2.
F19 T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 98. 2.
F20 T. Bab. Sabbat, fol. 118. 2.

Matthew 24:9

Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted
Our Lord proceeds to acquaint his disciples, what should befall them in this interval; and quite contrary to their expectations, who were looking for a temporal kingdom, and worldly grandeur, assures them of afflictions, persecutions, and death; that about these times, when these various signs should appear, and this beginning of sorrows take place; whilst these will be fulfilling in Judea, and other parts of the world; the Jews continuing in their obstinacy and unbelief, would deliver them up to the civil magistrates, to be scourged and imprisoned by them; either to their own sanhedrim, as were Peter and John; or to the Roman governors, Gallio, Festus, and Felix, as was the Apostle Paul.

And shall kill you;
as the two James’, Peter, Paul, and even all the apostles, excepting John, who suffered martyrdom, and that before the destruction of Jerusalem:

and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake;
as the apostles and first Christians were, both by Jews and Gentiles; the latter being stirred up against them by the former, wherever they came, and for no other reason, but because they professed and preached in the name of Christ, as the Acts of the Apostles show: and their hatred proceeded so far, as to charge all their calamities upon them; as war, famine, pestilence, earthquakes as the apologies of the first Christians declare.

Matthew 24:10

And then shall many be offended
That is, many who had been hearers of the apostles, and professors of the Christian religion; who were highly pleased with it, and were strenuous advocates for it, whilst things were tolerably quiet and easy; but when they saw the apostles, some of them beaten, and imprisoned; others put to death, and others forced to fly from place to place; and persecutions and affliction, because of Christ and his Gospel, likely to befall themselves, would be discouraged hereby, and stumble at the cross; and fall off from the faith of the Gospel, and the profession of it:

and shall betray one another;
meaning, that the apostates, who would fall off from the Christian religion, would prove treacherous to true believers, and give in their names to the persecutors, or inform them where they were, that they might take them, or deliver them into their hands themselves: these are the false brethren, the Apostle Paul was in perils among:

and shall hate one another;
not that the true Christians should hate these false brethren, any more than betray them; for they are taught to love all men, even their enemies; but these apostates should hate them, in whose communion they before were, and to whom they belonged; and even to a very great degree of hatred, as it often is seen, that such who turn their backs on Christ, and his Gospel, prove the most bitter enemies, and most violent persecutors of its preachers and followers.

Matthew 24:11

And many false prophets shall rise
Out of, from among the churches of Christ; at least under the name of Christians; for false teachers are here meant, men of heretical principles, pretending to a spirit of prophecy, and to new revelations, and a better understanding of the Scriptures; such as Simon Magus, Ebion, and Cerinthus, who denied the proper deity, and real humanity of Christ; Carpocrates, and the Gnostics his followers, the Nicolaitans, Hymcneus, Philetus, and others:

and shall deceive many:
as they all of them had their followers, and large numbers of them, whose faith was subverted by them; and who followed their pernicious ways, being imposed upon and seduced by their fair words, specious pretences, and licentious practices.

Matthew 24:12

And because iniquity shall abound
Meaning, either the malice and wickedness of outrageous persecutors, which should greatly increase; or the treachery and hatred of the apostates; or the errors and heresies of false teachers; or the wickedness that prevailed in the lives and conversations of some, that were called Christians: for each of these seem to be hinted at in the context, and may be all included, as making up the abounding iniquity here spoken of; the consequence of which would be,

the love of many shall wax cold.
This would be the case of many, but not of all; for in the midst of this abounding iniquity, there were some, the ardour of whose love to Christ, to his Gospel, and to the saints, did not abate: but then there were many, whose zeal for Christ, through the violence of persecution, was greatly damped; and through the treachery of false brethren, were shy of the saints themselves, not knowing who to trust; and through the principles of the false teachers, the power of godliness, and the vital heat of religion, were almost lost; and through a love of the world, and of carnal ease and pleasure, love to the saints was grown very chill, and greatly left; as the instances of Demas, and those that forsook the Apostle Paul, at his first answer before Nero, show. This might be true of such, who were real believers in Christ; who might fall under great decays, through the prevalence of iniquity; since it does not say their love shall be lost, but wax cold.

Matthew 24:13

But he that shall endure to the end
In the profession of faith in Christ, notwithstanding the violent persecutions of wicked men; and in the pure and incorrupt doctrines of the Gospel, whilst many are deceived by the false teachers that shall arise; and in holiness of life and conversation, amidst all the impurities of the age; and shall patiently bear all afflictions, to the end of his life, or to the end of sorrows, of which the above mentioned were the beginning:

the same shall be saved;
with a temporal salvation, when Jerusalem, and the unbelieving inhabitants of it shall be destroyed: for those that believed in Christ, many of them, through persecution, were obliged to remove from thence; and others, by a voice from heaven, were bid to go out of it, as they did; and removed to Pella, a village a little beyond Jordan ^F21, and so were preserved from the general calamity; and also with an everlasting salvation, which is the case of all that persevere to the end, as all true believers in Christ will.

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FOOTNOTES:

F21 Euseb. Eccl. Hist. l. 3. c. 5.

Matthew 24:14

And this Gospel of the kingdom
Which Christ himself preached, and which he called and sent his apostles to preach, in all the cities of Judah; by which means men were brought into the kingdom of the Messiah, or Gospel dispensation; and which treated both of the kingdom of grace and glory, and pointed out the saints’ meetness for the kingdom of heaven, and their right unto it, and gives the best account of the glories of it:

shall be preached in all the world;
not only in Judea, where it was now confined, and that by the express orders of Christ himself; but in all the nations of the world, for which the apostles had their commission enlarged, after our Lord’s resurrection; when they were bid to go into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature; and when the Jews put away the Gospel from them, they accordingly turned to the Gentiles; and before the destruction of Jerusalem, it was preached to all the nations under the heavens; and churches were planted in most places, through the ministry of it:

for a witness unto all nations;
meaning either for a witness against all such in them, as should reject it; or as a testimony of Christ and salvation, unto all such as should believe in him:

and then shall the end come;
not the end of the world, as the Ethiopic version reads it, and others understand it; but the end of the Jewish state, the end of the city and temple: so that the universal preaching of the Gospel all over the world, was the last criterion and sign, of the destruction of Jerusalem; and the account of that itself next follows, with the dismal circumstances which attended it.

Matthew 24:15

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation,
&c.] From signs, Christ proceeds to the immediate cause of the destruction of Jerusalem; which was, “the abomination of desolation”, or the desolating abomination; or that abominable thing, which threatened and brought desolation upon the city, temple, and nation: by which is meant, not any statue placed in the temple by the Romans, or their order; not the golden eagle which Herod set upon the temple gate, for that was before Christ said these words; nor the image of Tiberius Caesar, which Pilate is said to bring into the temple; for this, if true, must be about this time; whereas Christ cannot be thought to refer to anything so near at hand; much less the statue of Adrian, set in the most holy place, which was an hundred and thirty years and upwards, after the destruction of the city and temple; nor the statue of Titus, who destroyed both, which does not appear: ever to be set up, or attempted; nor of Caligula, which, though ordered, was prevented being placed there: but the Roman army is designed; see ( Luke 21:20 ) which was the (Mmvm Myuwqv Pnk) , “the wing”, or “army of abominations making desolate”, ( Daniel 9:27 ) . Armies are called wings, ( Isaiah 8:8 ) and the Roman armies were desolating ones to the Jews, and to whom they were an abomination; not only because they consisted of Heathen men, and uncircumcised persons, but chiefly because of the images of their gods, which were upon their ensigns: for images and idols were always an abomination to them; so the “filthiness” which Hezekiah ordered to be carried out of the holy place, ( 2 Chronicles 29:5 ) is by the Targum called, (aqwxyr) , “an abomination”; and this, by the Jewish writers ^F23, is said to be an idol, which Ahaz had placed upon the altar; and such was the abomination of desolation, which Antiochus caused to be set upon the altar:

“Now the fifteenth day of the month Casleu, in the hundred forty and fifth year, they set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and builded idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side;” (1 Maccabees 1:54)

And so the Talmudic writers, by the abomination that makes desolate, in ( 9:27 ) to which Christ here refers, understand an image, which they say ^F24 one Apostomus, a Grecian general, who burnt their law, set up in the temple. Now our Lord observes, that when they should see the Roman armies encompassing Jerusalem, with their ensigns flying, and these abominations on them, they might conclude its desolation was near at hand; and he does not so much mean his apostles, who would be most of them dead, or in other countries, when this would come to pass; but any of his disciples and followers, or any persons whatever, by whom should be seen this desolating abomination, spoken of by Daniel the prophet:
not in ( Daniel 11:31 ) which is spoken of the abomination in the times of Antiochus; but either in ( Daniel 12:11 ) or rather in ( Daniel 9:27 ) since this desolating abomination is that, which should follow the cutting off of the Messiah, and the ceasing of the daily sacrifice. It is to be observed, that Daniel is here called a prophet, contrary to what the Jewish writers say ^F25, who deny him to be one; though one of ^F26 no inconsiderable note among them affirms, that he attained to the end, (yyawbnh lwbgh) , “of the prophetic border”, or the ultimate degree of prophecy: when therefore this that Daniel, under a spirit of prophecy, spoke of should be seen,

standing in the holy place;
near the walls, and round about the holy city Jerusalem, so called from the sanctuary and worship of God in it; and which, in process of time, stood in the midst of it, and in the holy temple, and destroyed both; then

whoso readeth, let him understand:
that is, whoever then reads the prophecy of Daniel; will easily understand the meaning of it, and will see and know for certain, that now it is accomplished; and will consider how to escape the desolating judgment, unless he is given up to a judicial blindness and hardness of heart; which was the case of the greater part of the nation.

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FOOTNOTES:

F23 R. David Kimchi, & R. Sol. ben Melech, in 2 Chron. xxix. 5.
F24 T. Bab. Taanith, fol. 28. 2. & Gloss. in ib.
F25 T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 94. 1. & Megilla, fol. 3. 1. & Tzeror Ham, mor, fol. 46. 4. Zohar in Num. fol. 61. 1.
F26 Jacchiades in Dan. i. 17.

Matthew 24:16

Then let them which be in Judea
When this signal is given, let it be taken notice of and observed; let them that are in the city of Jerusalem, depart out of it; or who are in any other parts of Judea, in any of the towns, or cities thereof; let them not betake themselves to Jerusalem, imagining they may be safe there, in so strong and fortified a place, but let them flee elsewhere; seeLuke 21:21 ) and accordingly it is observed, that many did flee about this time; and it is remarked by several interpreters, and which Josephus ^F1 takes notice of with surprise, that Cestius Gallus having advanced with his army to Jerusalem, and besieged it, on a sudden, without any cause, raised the siege, and withdrew his army, when the city might have been easily taken; by which means a signal was made; and an opportunity given to the Christians, to make their escape: which they accordingly did, and went over Jordan, as Eusebius says ^F2, to a place called Pella; so that when Titus came a few mouths after, there was not a Christian in the city, but they had fled as they are here bidden to

flee into the mountains;
or any places of shelter and refuge: these are mentioned particularly, because they are usually such; and design either the mountains in Judea, or in the adjacent countries. The Syriac and Persic versions read in the singular number, “into the mountain”; and it is reported that many of them did fly, particularly to Mount Libanus ^F3.

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FOOTNOTES:

F1 De Bello Jud. l. 2. c. 19. sect. 7.
F2 Eccl. Hist. l. 3. c. 5. p. 75.
F3 Joseph. ib.

Matthew 24:17

Let him which is on the housetop
Who should be there either for his devotion or recreation; for the houses of the Jews were built with flat roofs and battlements about them, which they made use of both for diversion and pleasure, and for private meditation and prayer, for social conversation, and sometimes for public preaching; see ( >Matthew 10:27 ) ( Acts 10:9 )

not come down to take anything out of his house:
that is, let him not come down in the inner way, but by the stairs, or ladder, on the outside of the house, which was usual. They had two ways of going out of, and into their houses; the one they call ^F4, (Myxtp Krd) , “the way of the doors”; the other, (Nygg Krd) , “the way of the roof”: upon which the gloss is,

“to go up on the outside, (Mlwp Krd) , “by way” or “means” of a ladder, fixed at the entrance of the door of the upper room, and from thence he goes down into the house by a ladder;”

and in the same way they could come out; see ( Mark 2:4 ) and let him not go into his house to take any of his goods, or money, or food along with him necessary for his sustenance in his flight; lest, whilst he is busy in taking care of these, he loses his life, or, at least, the opportunity of making his escape; so sudden is this desolation represented to be.

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FOOTNOTES:

F4 T. Bab. Bava Metzia, fol. 117. 1.

Matthew 24:18

Neither let him which is in the field
Ploughing, or sowing, or employed in any other parts of husbandry, or rural business,

return back to take clothes;
for it was usual to work in the fields without their clothes, as at ploughing and sowing. Hence those words of Virgil ^F5.

“Nudus ara, sere nudus, hyems ignava colono.”

Upon which Servius observes, that in good weather, when the sun warms the earth, men might plough and sow without their clothes: and it is reported by the historian ^F6 of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, that the messengers who were sent to him, from Minutius the consul, whom he had delivered from a siege, found him ploughing naked beyond the Tiber: not that he was entirely naked, but was stripped of his upper garments: and it is usual for people that work in the fields to strip themselves to their shirts, and lay their clothes at the corner of the field, or at the land’s end; and which we must suppose to be the case here: for our Lord’s meaning is not, that the man working in the field, should not return home to fetch his clothes, which were not left there; they were brought with him into the field, but put off; and laid aside in some part of it while at work; but that as soon as he had the news of Jerusalem being besieged, he should immediately make the best of his way, and flee to the mountains, as Lot was bid to do at the burning of Sodom; and he might not return to the corner of the field, or land’s end, where his clothes lay, as Lot was not to look behind; though if his clothes lay in the way of his flight, he might take them up, but might not go back for them, so sudden and swift should be the desolation. The Vulgate Latin reads, in the singular number, “his coat”; and so do the Syriac, Persic, and Ethiopic versions, and Munster’s Hebrew Gospel; and so it was read in four copies of Beza’s, in three of Stephens’s, and in others; and may design the upper coat or garment, which was put off whilst at work.

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FOOTNOTES:

F5 Georgic. l. 1.
F6 Aurel Victor. de illustr. viris, c. 20.

Matthew 24:19

And woe unto them that are with child
Not that it should be criminal for them to be with child, or a judgment on them; for it was always esteemed a blessing to be fruitful, and bear children: but this expresses the miserable circumstances such would be in, who, by reason of their heavy burdens, would not be able to make so speedy a flight, as the case would require; or would be obliged to stay at home, and endure all the miseries of the siege: so that these words, as the following are not expressive of sin, or punishment, but of pity and concern for their misery and distress:

and to them that give suck in those days;
whose tender affection to their infants will not suffer them to leave them behind them; and yet such their weakness, that they will not be able to carry them with them; at least, they must be great hindrances to their speedy flight. So that the case of these is much worse than that of men on the house top, or in the field, who could much more easily leave their goods and clothes, than these their children, as well as had more agility and strength of body to flee. So (twqynymw twrbwe) , “women with child, and that give suck”; are mentioned together in the Jewish writings, as such as were excused from certain fasts, though obliged to others ^F7.

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FOOTNOTES:

F7 T. Hieros. Taanioth, fol. 64. 3. Maimon. Hilch. Taanioth, c. 5. sect. 10.

Matthew 24:20

But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter
When days are short, and unfit for long journeys, and roads are bad, and sometimes not passable, through large snows, or floods of water; and when to dwell in desert places, and lodge in mountains, must be very uncomfortable: wherefore Christ directs to pray to God, who has the disposal of all events, and of the timing of them, that he would so order things in the course of his providence, that their flight might not be in such a season of the year, when travelling would be very difficult and troublesome. Dr. Lightfoot observes, from a Jewish writer ^F8, that it is remarked as a favour of God in the destruction of the first temple, that it happened in the summer, and not in winter; whose words are these:

“God vouchsafed a great favour to Israel, for they ought to have gone out of the land on the tenth day of the month Tebeth; as he saith ( Ezekiel 24:2 ) “son of man, write thee the name of the day, even of this same day”: what then did the Lord, holy and blessed? If they shall now go out in the winter, (saith he,) they will all die; therefore he prolonged the time to them, and carried them away in summer.”

And since therefore they received such a favour from him at the destruction of the first temple, there was encouragement to pray to him, that they might be indulged with the like favour when Jerusalem should be besieged again:

neither on the sabbath day:
the word “day” is not in the Greek text; and some ^F9 have been of opinion, that the “sabbatical year”, or the seventh year, is meant, when no fruits would be found in the fields, and a great scarcity of provisions among people; who would not have a sufficiency, and much less any to spare to strangers fleeing from their native places; but rather the sabbath day, or “day of the sabbath”, as the Persic version reads it, is designed; and Beza says, four of his copies read it in the genitive case: and so four of Stephens’s. And the reason why our Lord put them on praying, that their flight might not be on the sabbath day, was, because he knew not only that the Jews, who believed not in him, would not suffer them to travel on a sabbath day more than two thousand cubits; which, according to their traditions ^F11, was a sabbath day’s journey; and which would not be sufficient for their flight to put them out of danger; but also, that those that did believe in him, particularly the Jerusalem Jews, would be all of them fond of the law of Moses, and scrupulous of violating any part of it, and especially that of the sabbath; see ( Acts 21:20 ) . And though the Jews did allow, that the sabbath might be violated where life was in danger, and that it was lawful to defend themselves against an enemy on the sabbath day; yet this did not universally obtain; and it was made a question of, after the time of Christ, whether it was lawful to flee from danger on the sabbath day; of which take the following account ^F12.

“Our Rabbins teach, that he that is pursued by Gentiles, or by thieves, may profane the sabbath for the sake of saving his life: and so we find of David, when Saul sought to slay him, he fled from him, and escaped. Our Rabbins say, that it happened that evil writings (or edicts) came from the government to the great men of Tzippore; and they went, and said to R. Eleazar ben Prata, evil edicts are come to us from the government, what dost thou say? (xrbn) , “shall we flee?” and he was afraid to say to them “flee”; but he said to them with a nod, why do you ask me? go and ask Jacob, and Moses, and David; as it is written, of Jacob, ( Hosea 12:12 ) “and Jacob fled”; and so of Moses, ( Exodus 2:15 ) “and Moses fled”; and so of David, ( 1 Samuel 19:18 ) “and David fled, and escaped”: and he (God) says, ( Isaiah 26:20 ) “come my people, enter into thy chambers”.”

From whence, it is plain, it was a question with the doctors in Tzippore, which was a town in Galilee, where there was an university, whether it was lawful to flee on the sabbath day or not; and though the Rabbi they applied to was of opinion it was lawful, yet he was fearful of speaking out his sense plainly, and therefore delivered it by signs and hints. Now our Lord’s meaning, in putting them on this petition, was, not to prevent the violation of the seventh day sabbath, or on account of the sacredness of it, which he knew would be abolished, and was abolished before this time; but he says this with respect to the opinion of the Jews, and “Judaizing” Christians, who, taking that day to be sacred, and fleeing on it unlawful, would find a difficulty with themselves, and others, to make their escape; otherwise it was as lawful to flee and travel on that day, as in the winter season; though both, for different reasons, incommodious.

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FOOTNOTES:

F8 Taachuma, fol. 57. 2.
F9 Vid. Reland. Antiq. Heb. par. 4. c. 10. sect. 1. & Hammond in loc.
F11 Maimon. Hilch. Sabbat, c. 27. sect. 1.
F12 Bemidbar Rabba, sect. 23. fol. 231. 4.

Matthew 24:21

For then shall be great tribulation
This is urged as a reason for their speedy flight; since the calamity that would come upon those who should remain in the city, what through the sword, famine, pestilence, murders, robberies would

be such as was not since the beginning of the world, to this time,
no, nor ever shall be.
The burning of Sodom and Gomorrha, the bondage of the children of Israel in Egypt, their captivity in Babylon, and all their distresses and afflictions in the times of the Maccabees, are nothing to be compared with the calamities which befell the Jews in the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. Great desolations have been made in the besieging and at the taking of many famous cities, as Troy, Babylon, Carthage but none of them are to be mentioned with the deplorable case of this city. Whoever reads Josephus’s account will be fully convinced of this; and readily join with him, who was an eyewitness of it, when he says {m}, that

“never did any city suffer such things, nor was there ever any generation that more abounded in malice or wickedness.”

And indeed, all this came upon them for their impenitence and infidelity, and for their rejection and murdering of the Son of God; for as never any before, or since, committed the sin they did, or ever will, so there never did, or will, the same calamity befall a nation, as did them.

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FOOTNOTES:

F13 De Bello Jud. l. 6. c. 11.

Matthew 24:22

And except those days should be shortened
That is, those days of tribulation which commenced at the siege of Jerusalem; and therefore cannot refer to the times before it, and the shortening of them by it, which were very dreadful and deplorable through the murders and robberies of the cut-throats and zealots; but to those after the siege began, which were very distressing to those that were within; and which, if they had not been shortened, or if the siege had been lengthened out further,

there should no flesh be saved;
not one Jew in the city of Jerusalem would have been saved; they must everyone have perished by famine, or pestilence, or sword, or by the intestine wars and murders among themselves: nor indeed, if the siege had continued, would it have fared better with the inhabitants of the other parts of the country, among whom also many of the same calamities prevailed and spread themselves; so that, in all likelihood, if these days had been continued a little longer, there had not been a Jew left in all the land.

But for the elect’s sake;
those who were chosen in Christ, before the foundation of the world, to believe in him, and to be saved by him with an everlasting salvation; both those that were in the city, or, at least, who were to spring from some that were there, as their immediate offspring, or in future ages, and therefore they, and their posterity, must not be cut off; and also those chosen ones, and real believers, who were at Pella, and in the mountains, and other places, for the sake of these, and that they might be delivered from these pressing calamities,

those days shall be shortened:
for otherwise, if God had not preserved a seed, a remnant, according to the election of grace, that should be saved, they had been as Sodom and as Gomorrha, not one would have escaped. The shortening of those days is not to be understood literally, as if the natural days, in which this tribulation was, were to be shorter than usual. The Jews indeed often speak of the shortening of days in this sense, as miraculously done by God: so they say ^F14, that

“five miracles were wrought for our father Jacob, when he went from Beersheba to go to Haran. The first miracle was, that (amwyd ywev hyl wruqta) , “the hours of the day were shortened for him”, and the sun set before its time, because his word desired to speak with him.”

They also say ^F15,

“that the day in which Ahaz died, was shortened ten hours, that they might not mourn for him; and which afterwards rose up, and in the day that Hezekiah was healed, ten hours were added to it.”

But the meaning here is, that the siege of Jerusalem, and the calamities attending it, should be sooner ended: not than God had determined, but than the sin of the Jews deserved, and the justice of God might have required in strict severity, and might be reasonably expected, considering the aggravated circumstances of their iniquities. A like manner of speech is used by the Karaite Jews ^F16, who say,

“if we walk in our law, why is our captivity prolonged, and there is not found balm for our wounds? and why are not (Mhymy wjemtn) , “the days” of the golden and silver kingdom “lessened”, for the righteousness of the righteous, which were in their days?”

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FOOTNOTES:

F14 Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel, & Targum Hieros. in Gem xxviii. 10.
F15 R. Sol. Jarchi in Isa. xxxviii. 8.
F16 Chilluk M. S. apud Trigland. de sect. Karaeorum, c. 9. p. 147.

Matthew 24:23

Then if any man shall say unto you
Either at the time when the siege shall be begun, and the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place; or during the days of tribulation, whilst the siege lasted; or after those days were shortened, and the city destroyed, and the Roman army was gone with their captives: when some, that were scattered up and down in the country, would insinuate to their countrymen, that the Messiah was in such a place: saying,

lo! here is Christ, or there, believe it not;
for both during the time of the siege, there were such that sprung up, and pretended to be Messiahs, and deliverers of them from the Roman power, and had their several abettors; one saying he was in such place, and another that he was in such a place; and so spirited up the people not to fly, nor to deliver up the city; and also, after the city was taken and destroyed, one and another set up for the Messiah. Very quickly after, one Jonathan, a very wicked man, led many into the desert of Cyrene, promising to show them signs and wonders, and was overthrown by Catullius, the Roman governor ^F17; and after that, in the times of Adrian, the famous Barcochab set up for the Messiah, and was encouraged by R. Akiba, and a multitude of Jews ^F18.

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FOOTNOTES:

F17 Joseph. Antiq. l. 7. c. 12.
F18 Ganz. Tzemach David, par. 1. fol. 28. 2.

Matthew 24:24

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets,
&c.] Such as the above mentioned: these false Christs had their false prophets, who endeavoured to persuade the people to believe them to be the Messiah, as Barcochab had Akiba, who applied many prophecies to him. This man was called Barcochab, which signifies the son of a star, in allusion to ( Numbers 24:17 ) he was crowned by the Jews, and proclaimed the Messiah by Akiba; upon which a Roman army was sent against him, and a place called Bitter was besieged, and taken, and he, and a prodigious number of Jews were destroyed. This deceiver was afterwards, by them, called Barcoziba, the son of a lie:

and shall show great signs and wonders;
make an appearance of doing them, though they really did them not: so that Jonathan, before mentioned, pretended to show signs and sights; and Barcochab made as if flame came out of his mouth; and many of the Jewish doctors in these times, and following, gave themselves up to sorcery, and the magic art; and are, many of them, often said ^F19 to be (Myonb Mydmwlm) , “expert in wonders”, or miracles:

if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
By whom we are to understand, not the choicest believers, or the persevering Christians: not but that such who are truly converted, are choice believers in Christ, and persevering Christians are undoubtedly the elect of God; but then the reason why they are elect, and why they are so called, is not because they are converted, are choice believers, and persevering Christians; but, on the contrary, the reason why they are converted, become true believers, and persevere to the end, is, because they are elected; conversion, faith, and perseverance being not the causes or conditions, but the fruits and effects of election: besides to talk of the final seduction of a persevering Christian, is a contradiction in terms. Such an interpretation of the phrase must be absurd and impertinent; for who knows not that a persevering Christian cannot be finally and totally deceived? But by the elect are meant, a select number of particular persons of Adam’s posterity, whom God, of his sovereign goodwill and pleasure, without respect to their faith, holiness, and good works, has chosen, in Christ, before the foundation of the world, both to grace and glory: and to deceive these finally and totally, is impossible, as is here suggested; not impossible, considering their own weakness, and the craftiness of deceivers, who, if left to themselves, and the power of such deception, and the working of Satan with all deceivableness of unrighteousness, might easily be seduced; but considering the purposes and promises of God concerning them, the provisions of his grace for them, the security of them in the hands of Christ, and their preservation by the mighty power of God, their final and total deception is not only difficult, but impossible. They may be, and are deceived before conversion; this is one part of their character whilst unregenerate, “foolish, disobedient, deceived”, ( Titus 3:3 ) yea, they may be, and oftentimes are, deceived after conversion; but then this is in part only, and not totally; in some lesser, and not in the greater matters of faith; not so as to let go their hold of Christ their head, and quit the doctrine of salvation by him, or fall into damnable heresies: they may be seduced from the simplicity of the Gospel, but not finally; for they shall be recovered out of the snare of the devil, and not to be left to perish in such deceivings. This clause, as it expresses the power of deceivers, and the efficacy of Satan, so the influence and certainty of electing grace and the sure and firm perseverance of the saints, to the end, notwithstanding the cunning and craft of men and devils; for if these, with all their signs and wonders, could not deceive them, it may be pronounced impossible that they ever should be finally and totally deceived.

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FOOTNOTES:

F19 T. Bab. Meila, fol. 17. 2. Juchasin, fol. 20. 1, 2. & 42. 2. & 56. 2. & 77. 1. & 96. 2.

Matthew 24:25

Behold, I have told you before.
] Meaning not before in this discourse, though he had in ( Matthew 24:5 Matthew 24:11 ) signified also, that false Christs, and false prophets should arise, but before these things came to pass; so that they had sufficient notice and warning of them, and would be inexcusable if they were not upon their guard against them; and which, when they came to pass, would furnish out a considerable argument in proof of him, as the true Messiah, against all these false ones, showing him to be omniscient; and so would serve to establish their faith in him, and be a means of securing them from such deceivers.

Matthew 24:26

Wherefore if they shall say unto you
Any of the false prophets, or the deluded followers of false Christs:

behold, he is in the desert, go not forth:
that is, should they affirm, that the Messiah is in such a wilderness, in the wilderness of Judea, or in any other desert place, do not go out of the places where you are to see, or hear, and know the truth of things; lest you should, in any respect, be stumbled, ensnared, and brought into danger. It was usual for these impostors to lead their followers into deserts, pretending to work wonders in such solitary places: so, during the siege, Simon, the son of Giora, collected together many thousands in the mountainous and desert parts of Judea ^F20; and the above mentioned Jonathan, after the destruction of the city, led great multitudes into the desert:

behold, he is in the secret chambers, believe it not;
or should others say behold, or for certain, the Messiah is in some one of the secret and fortified places of the temple; where, during some time of the siege, were John and Eleazar, the heads of the zealots ^F21; do not believe them. Some reference may be had to the chamber of secrets, which was in the temple ^F23;

“for in the sanctuary there were two chambers; one was called (Myavx tkvl) , “the chamber of secrets”, and the other the chamber of vessels.”

Or else some respect may be had to the notions of the Jews, concerning the Messiah, which they imbibed about these times, and ever since retained, that he was born the day Jerusalem was destroyed, but is hid, for their sins, in some secret place, and will in time be revealed ^F24. Some say, that he is hid in the sea; others, in the walks of the garden of Eden; and others, that he sits among the lepers at the gates of Rome ^F25. The Syriac version here reads in the singular number, “in the bedchamber”; in some private apartment, where he remains till a proper time of showing himself offers, for fear of the Romans: but these are all idle notions, and none of them to be believed. The true Messiah is come, and has showed himself to Israel; and even the giving out these things discovers a consciousness, and a conviction that the Messiah is come.

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FOOTNOTES:

F20 Joseph de Bello. Jud. l. 5. c. 7.
F21 Ib. c. 6. l. 4.
F23 Misn. Shekalim, c. 5. sect. 6.
F24 Aben Ezra in Cant. vii. 5. Targum in Mic. iv. 8.
F25 Vid. Buxtorf. Synag. Jud. c. 50.

Matthew 24:27

For as the lightning cometh out of the east
The eastern part of the horizon, and shineth even unto the west;
to the western part of it, with great clearness; in a moment; in the twinkling of an eye, filling the whole intermediate space; so shall also the coming of the son of man be;
which must be understood not of his last coming to judgment, though that will be sudden, visible, and universal; he will at once come to, and be seen by all, in the clouds of heaven, and not in deserts and secret chambers: nor of his spiritual coming in the more sudden, and clear, and powerful preaching of the Gospel all over the Gentile world; for this was to be done before the destruction of Jerusalem: but of his coming in his wrath and vengeance to destroy that people, their nation, city, and temple: so that after this to look for the Messiah in a desert, or secret chamber, must argue great stupidity and blindness; when his coming was as sudden, visible, powerful, and general, to the destruction of that nation, as the lightning that comes from the east, and, in a moment, shines to the west.

Matthew 24:28

For wheresoever the carcass is
Not Christ, as he is held forth in the Gospel, crucified and slain, through whose death is the savour of life, and by whom salvation is, and to whom sensible sinners flock, encouraged by the ministry of the word; and much less Christ considered as risen, exalted, and coming in great glory to judgment, to whom the word “carcass” will by no means agree, and but very poorly under the former consideration: but the people of the Jews are designed by it, in their fallen, deplorable, miserable, and lifeless state, who were like to the body of a man, or any other creature, struck dead with lightning from heaven; being destroyed by the breath of the mouth, and brightness of the coming of the son of man, like lightning, just as antichrist will be at the last day: there will the eagles be gathered together:
not particular believers here, or all the saints at the day of judgment; though these may be, as they are, compared to eagles for many things; as their swiftness in flying to Christ, their sagacity and the sharpness of their spiritual sight, soaring on high, and renewing their spiritual strength and youth: but here the Roman armies are intended, whose ensigns were eagles; and the eagle still is, to this day, the ensign of the Roman empire: formerly other creatures, with the eagle, were used for ensigns; but C. Marius, in his second consulship, banished them, and appropriated the eagle only to the legions: nor was it a single eagle that was carried before the army, but every legion had an eagle went before it, made of gold or silver, and carried upon the top of a spear ^F26: and the sense of this passage is this, that wherever the Jews were, whether at Jerusalem, where the body and carcass of them was, in a most forlorn and desperate condition; or in any other parts of the country, the Roman eagles, or legions, would find them out, and make an utter destruction of them. The Persic version, contrary to others, and to all copies, renders it “vultures”. Though this creature is of the same nature with the eagle, with respect to feeding on carcasses: hence the proverb,

“cujus vulturis hoe erit cadaver?”

“what vulture shall have this carcass?” It has a very sharp sight, and quick smell, and will, by both, discern carcasses at almost incredible distance: it will diligently watch a man that is near death; and will follow armies going to battle, as historians relate ^F1: and it is the eagle which is of the vulture kind, as Aristotle ^F2 observes, that takes up dead bodies, and carries them to its nest. And Pliny ^F3 says, it is that sort of eagles only which does so; and some have affirmed that eagles will by no means touch dead carcasses: but this is contrary not only to this passage of Scripture, but to others; particularly to ( Job 39:30 ) “her young ones also suck up blood, and where the slain are, there is she”: an expression much the same with this in the text, and to which it seems to refer; see also ( Proverbs 30:17 ) . Though Chrysostom

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FOOTNOTES:

F4 says, both the passage in Job, and this in Matthew, are to be understood of vultures; he doubtless means the eagles that are of the vulture kind, the Gypaeetos, or vulture eagle. There is one kind of eagles, naturalists say ^F5, will not feed on flesh, which is called the bird of Jupiter; but, in common, the eagle is represented as a very rapacious creature, seizing, and feeding upon the flesh of hares, fawns, geese and the rather this creature is designed here; since, of all birds, this is the only one that is not hurt with lightning ^F6, and so can immediately seize carcasses killed thereby; to which there seems to be an allusion here, by comparing it with the preceding verse: however, the Persic version, though it is literally a proper one, yet from the several things observed, it is not to be overlooked and slighted.
F26 Plin. Nat. Hist. l. 10. c. 4. Alex. ab Alex. Genial. Dier. l. 4. c. 2.
F1 Aelian. de Animal. Natura, l. 2. c. 46.
F2 De Hist. Animal. l. 9. c. 32.
F3 Hist. Nat l. 10. c. 3.
F4 In Matt. Homil. 49.
F5 Aelian. de Animal. l. 9. c. 10.
F6 Plin. Nat. Hist. l. 2. c. 55.

Matthew 24:29

Immediately after the tribulation of those days
That is, immediately after the distress the Jews would be in through the siege of Jerusalem, and the calamities attending it; just upon the destruction of that city, and the temple in it, with the whole nation of the Jews, shall the following things come to pass; and therefore cannot be referred to the last judgment, or what should befall the church, or world, a little before that time, or should be accomplished in the whole intermediate time, between the destruction of Jerusalem, and the last judgment: for all that is said to account for such a sense, as that it was usual with the prophets to speak of judgments afar off as near; and that the apostles often speak of the coming of Christ, the last judgment, and the end of the world, as just at hand; and that one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, will not answer to the word “immediately”, or show that that should be understood of two thousand years after: besides, all the following things were to be fulfilled before that present generation, in which Christ lived, passed away, ( Matthew 24:34 ) and therefore must be understood of things that should directly, and immediately take place upon, or at the destruction of the city and temple. Shall the sun be darkened:
not in a literal but in a figurative sense; and is to be understood not of the religion of the Jewish church; nor of the knowledge of the law among them, and the decrease of it; nor of the Gospel being obscured by heretics and false teachers; nor of the temple of Jerusalem, senses which are given into by one or another; but of the Shekinah, or the divine presence in the temple. The glory of God, who is a sun and a shield, filled the tabernacle, when it was reared up; and so it did the temple, when it was built and dedicated; in the most holy place, Jehovah took up his residence; here was the symbol of his presence, the mercy seat, and the two cherubim over it: and though God had for some time departed from this people, and a voice was heard in the temple before its destruction, saying, “let us go hence”; yet the token of the divine presence remained till the utter destruction of it; and then this sun was wholly darkened, and there was not so much as the outward symbol of it: and the moon shall not give her light;
which also is to be explained in a figurative and metaphorical sense; and refers not to the Roman empire, which quickly began to diminish; nor to the city of Jerusalem; nor to the civil polity of the nation; but to the ceremonial law, the moon, the church is said to have under her feet, ( Revelation 12:1 ) so called because the observance of new moons was one part of it, and the Jewish festivals were regulated by the moon; and especially, because like the moon, it was variable and changeable. Now, though this, in right, was abolished at the death of Christ, and ceased to give any true light, when he, the substance, was come; yet was kept up by the Jews, as long as their temple was standing; but when that was destroyed, the daily sacrifice, in fact, ceased, and so it has ever since; the Jews esteeming it unlawful to offer sacrifice in a strange land, or upon any other altar than that of Jerusalem; and are to this day without a sacrifice, and without an ephod: and the stars shall fall from heaven;
which phrase, as it elsewhere intends the doctors of the church, and preachers falling off from purity of doctrine and conversation; so here it designs the Jewish Rabbins and doctors, who departed from the word of God, and set up their traditions above it, fell into vain and senseless interpretations of it, and into debates about things contained in their Talmud; the foundation of which began to be laid immediately upon their dispersion into other countries: and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken;
meaning all the ordinances of the legal dispensation; which shaking, and even removing of them, were foretold by ( Haggai 2:6 ) and explained by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ( Hebrews 12:26 Hebrews 12:27 ) whereby room and way were made for Gospel ordinances to take place, and be established; which shall not be shaken, so as to be removed, but remain till the second coming of Christ. The Jews themselves are sensible, and make heavy complaints of the great declensions and alterations among them, since the destruction of the temple; for after having taken notice of the death of several of their doctors, who died a little before, or after that; and that upon their death ceased the honour of the law, the splendour of wisdom, and the glory of the priesthood, they add ^F7;

“from the time that the temple was destroyed, the wise men, and sons of nobles, were put to shame, and they covered their heads; liberal men were reduced to poverty; and men of violence and calumny prevailed; and there were none that expounded, or inquired, or asked. R. Elezer the great, said, from the time the sanctuary were destroyed, the wise men began to be like Scribes, and the Scribes like to the Chazans, (or sextons that looked after the synagogues,) and the Chazans like to the common people, and the common people grew worse and worse, and there were none that inquired and asked;”

that is, of the wise men there were no scholars, or very few that studied in the law.

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FOOTNOTES:

F7 Misn. Sotah, c. 9. sect. 15.

Matthew 24:30

And then shall appear the sign of the son of man in heaven,
&c.] Not the sound of the great trumpet, mentioned in the following verse; nor the clouds of heaven in this; nor the sign of the cross appearing in the air, as it is said to do in the times of Constantine: not the former; for though to blow a trumpet is sometimes to give a sign, and is an alarm; and the feast which the Jews call the day of blowing the trumpets, ( Numbers 29:1 ) is, by the Septuagint, rendered (hmera shmasiav) , “the day of signification”; yet this sign is not said to be sounded, but to appear, or to be seen, which does not agree with the sounding of a trumpet: much less can this design the last trumpet at the day of judgment, since of that the text does not speak; and, for the same reason, the clouds cannot be meant in which Christ will come to judgment, nor are clouds in themselves any sign of it: nor the latter, of which there is no hint in the word of God, nor any reason to expect it, nor any foundation for it; nor is any miraculous star intended, such as appeared at Christ’s first coming, but the son of man himself: just as circumcision is called the sign of circumcision, ( Romans 4:11 ) and Christ is sometimes called a sign, ( Luke 2:34 ) as is his resurrection from the dead, ( Matthew 12:39 ) and here the glory and majesty in which he shall come: and it may be observed, that the other evangelists make no mention of the sign, only speak of the son of man, ( Mark 13:26 ) ( Luke 21:27 ) and he shall appear, not in person, but in the power of his wrath and vengeance, on the Jewish nation which will be a full sign and proof of his being come: for the sense is, that when the above calamities shall be upon the civil state of that people, and there will be such changes in their ecclesiastical state it will be as clear a point, that Christ is come in the flesh, and that he is also come in his vengeance on that nation, for their rejection and crucifixion him, as if they had seen him appear in person in the heavens. They had been always seeking a sign, and were continually asking one of him; and now they will have a sign with a witness; as they had accordingly. And then shall the tribes of the earth,
or land, mourn;
that is, the land of Judea; for other lands, and countries, were not usually divided into tribes, as that was; neither were they affected with the calamities and desolations of it, and the vengeance of the son of man upon it; at least not so as to mourn on that account, but rather were glad and rejoiced: and they shall see the son of man coming in the clouds of heaven,
with power and great glory.
The Arabic version reads it, “ye shall see”, as is expressed by Christ, in ( Matthew 26:64 ) . Where the high priest, chief priests, Scribes, and elders, and the whole sanhedrim of the Jews are spoken to: and as the same persons, namely, the Jews, are meant here as there; so the same coming of the son of man is intended; not his coming at the last day to judgment; though that will be in the clouds of heaven, and with great power and glory; but his coming to bring on, and give the finishing stroke to the destruction of that people, which was a dark and cloudy dispensation to them: and when they felt the power of his arm, might, if not blind and stupid to the last degree, see the glory of his person, that he was more than a mere man, and no other than the Son of God, whom they had despised, rejected, and crucified; and who came to set up his kingdom and glory in a more visible and peculiar manner, among the Gentiles.

Matthew 24:31

And he shall send his angels
Not the angels, i.e. ministering spirits, so called, not from their nature, but their office, as being sent forth by God and Christ; but men angels, or messengers, the ministers and preachers of the Gospel, whom Christ would call, qualify, and send forth into all the world of the Gentiles, to preach his Gospel, and plant churches there still more, when that at Jerusalem was broken up and dissolved. These are called “angels”, because of their mission, and commission from Christ, to preach the Gospel; and because of their knowledge and understanding in spiritual things; and because of their zeal, diligence, and watchfulness. With a great sound of a trumpet,
meaning the Gospel; see ( Isaiah 27:13 ) so called in allusion either to the silver trumpets which Moses was ordered to make of one piece, and use them for the calling of the assembly, the journeying of the camps, blowing an alarm for war, and on their solemn and festival days, ( Numbers 10:1-10 ) . The Gospel being rich and precious, all of a piece, useful for gathering souls to Christ, and to his churches; to direct saints in their journey to Canaan’s land; to encourage them to fight the Lord’s battles; and is a joyful sound, being a sound of love, grace, and mercy, peace, pardon, righteousness, life and salvation, by Christ: or else so called, in allusion to the trumpet blown in the year of “jubilee”; which proclaimed rest to the land, liberty to prisoners, a release of debts, and restoration of inheritances; as the Gospel publishes rest in Christ, liberty to the captives of sin, Satan, and the law, a payment of debts by Christ, and a release from them upon that, and a right and title to the heavenly inheritance. The Vulgate Latin reads it, “with a trumpet, and a great voice”; and so does Munster’s Hebrew Gospel; and so it was read in four of Beza’s copies: and they shall gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of
heaven to the other;
that is, by the ministration of the Gospel; the Spirit of God accompanying it with his power, and grace, the ministers of the word should gather out of the world unto Christ, and to his churches, such persons as God had, before the foundation of the world, chosen in Christ, unto salvation, through sanctification of the Spirit, and belief of the truth; wherever they are under the whole heavens, from one end to another; or in any part of the earth, though at the greatest distance; for in ( Mark 13:27 ) it is said, “from the uttermost part of the earth, to the uttermost part of the heaven”. The Jews ^F8 say, that

“in the after redemption (i.e. by the Messiah) all Israel shall be gathered together by the sound of a trumpet, from the four parts of the world.”

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FOOTNOTES:

F8 Zohar in Lev. fol. 47. 1.