;E r; rANTS ; ' ■ :■;■/;-_ Class : Book Copyright^ COHfRIGHT DEPOSIK Protestants 2freliebe BY C. W. WINCHESTER, A.M., D.D. Author of "The Gospel Kodak Abroad," "The Welle of Salvation" and "The Victories of Wesley Cattle. THE CHRISTIAN WITNESS COMPANY CHICAGO. ILLINOIS 2V Copyright. 1915. BY The Christian Witness Company JUL -2 1915 CLA401630 PREFACE This book does not need a long preface, if it needs any. The title tells what it is. The Prot- estant Church in America had almost ceased to protest against the false doctrines and evil prac- tices of Rome. It had become the prevalent notion that the Roman religion was about as good as the religion of the so-called Protestant churches; that the Romanists and the Protestants were on the way to heaven in parallel roads; that their aims and spirit were essentially one; that there ought to be no antagonism between them; and that Protestants should be careful not to say any- thing unbrotherly of the system which has its headquarters on the banks of the Tiber. That is not the prevalent opinion now. Protestants are waking up to the fact that there is a radical and everlasting difference between what they call Christianity and the thing to which Rome gives that name; that Christianity and Romanism are essentially separate and distinct religions. This awakening began only about three years ago. It is increasing every day. To help it on, this book was written. Rome boldly and arrogantly declares that it is her purpose to make this country wholly "Cath- olic." In view of that fact, all Protestants ought to know what the system, falsely called "Cath- olicism" is. To help them to such knowledge is the aim of this volume. They ought to know where they stand and be as ready to defend their position as Rome is to assail. I have written in no spirit of hatred toward individual Romanists, but with a strong desire to "contend earnestly for the faith once for all de- livered to the saints." C. W. Winchester. Buffalo, N. Y,, April 29, 1915, CHRIST IS THE ONLY HEAD OF THE CHURCH " * * * * The Lord is gracious, to whom com- ing, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices, ac- ceptable to God by Jesus Christ" — I Peter ii 13-5. That Christ is the only head of the Church is so clearly and constantly taught in the Holy Scriptures that no intelligent and honest student of the Bible can doubt the fact for a moment. To quote the scriptures which say that Christ is the head of the Church would seem unnecessary. If he is not the head and lord and ruler and supreme teacher of the Church, who is? But let us have a few words from Holy Writ on this subject. Jesus himself says : "I am the true vine." Here he hints at the fact, which must have been known to him, that men would arise claiming authority to teach and rule the Church. "I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I 5 6 What Protestants Believe in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing." Paul, writing to the Church at Ephesus, says that God "raised" Christ "from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things unto the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all." Again, to the same Church he writes: "Christ is the head of the Church." To the Colossians he writes: "He" — meaning Christ, as you will see if you look at the 18th verse of the first chapter — "is the head of the body the Church." In the book of Revelation the Apostle John describes a beautiful vision which he had on the Isle of Patmos* He saw Jesus, in his glorified body, standing in the center of a circle of seven golden candlesticks, holding seven stars in his right hand. John wondered what it all meant, and so Jesus himself explained the mystery. He said : "The seven stars are the angels" — I think he meant pastors — "of the seven churches ; and the What Protestants Believe 7 seven candlesticks are the seven churches." What a beautiful conception of the relation of the blessed Savior to his people here on the earth. Each church is a candlestick, or lampstand, shed- ding forth the light of truth on the darkness of the world. Jesus walks around among the churches, trimming the lights and supplying fresh oil. At the same time, he holds and carries the pastors in his right hand. How absurd and blasphemous for any one of those stars, no matter how brilliant, to claim to be anything but a star in the hand of him who is the Head of the Church. Christ is the only Head of the Church. The Church is not any sect, or denomination, or organ- ized body of men. It is that great company which includes all who have saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the Holy Catholic, or Univer- sal Church, which we mention every Sunday morning, when we recite the Apostles' Creed. That Church has no head but Christ. Of course, when any number of Christians organize them- selves into a denomination, like the Roman Catholics, or the Baptists, or the Methodists, or into a local society, like St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church of Blanktown, or the First 8 What Protestants Believe Methodist Episcopal Church of the same city, for the purpose of carrying on the work of God and converting the world, there must be officers to preside over the organization. But no one of those officers is the head of the Church of God. No one of them has any authority to say what Christians shall believe or do, except as he can show, from the Bible, that Jesus, speaking with his own lips, or through the mouth of an inspired apostle or prophet, taught this or that, or gave this or that command. Along the course of the centuries there have been many persons who have claimed to be the only head of the Church on earth and the special and sole representative of God among men. Ann Lee, about 1780, professed to be the Universal Mother of the Church, and the incarnation of divine power as fully as Jesus Christ was at his first appearing. On that assumption she founded the sect of Shakers. Joe Smith founded the Mor- mon sect, in 1830, and claimed to be the only Head of God's Church on earth. There was no salvation to any man who did not obey him, and his teachings were of equal authority with those of Jesus Christ. John Alexander Dowie of Chi- What Protestants Believe 9 cago, a few years ago, started a new religion, and commanded all Christians to look to him as their teacher and to put all their property and their lives in his hands. A man in the State of Maine, named Sanford, made a similar claim and is now in State prison because of the unlawful means he took to assert his authority. "Mother" Eddy has been exalted by herself and her followers to the headship of the Church, and her writings are read with the Bible, on the Sabbath Day, as of equal authority with that Book. Indeed, the Bible has no value except as it is explained, or explained away, by Mrs. Eddy's book, which all her followers must purchase, at five dollars a copy. But of all men who have ever claimed to be the Head of the Church, the Pope of Rome is most worthy of our consideration. Our Roman Cath- olic friends declare that the Bishop of Rome is the Vicegerent of the Almighty, the Representative of Jesus Christ on the earth, the sole earthly head of the Church, the Ruler and Lawgiver and Ad- ministrator of the Church. He is the infallible teacher of truth. When he sits in his official chair as Pope and tells Christians what they ought to believe and do, his words are the very words of 10 What Protestants Believe God and must be accepted as such on pain of eternal damnation. He is above all human rulers and all human laws. The supreme allegiance of every human being is due to him. He has the right from God to dethrone, or unseat, or disrobe any king, or emperor, or president, or judge. If his will and the will of any human magistrate con- flict, every person on earth is bound to obey him. In a word, he is the supreme ruler of the human race, in everything. If any human magistrate or law is binding on us, it is because the Pope has given his sanction or silent consent. He can, at any time, suspend or abolish any human law and put down any and every human ruler and govern- ment. Whoever denies these statements shall be everlastingly damned in hell. Our Roman Cath- olic friends have given their Pope such titles as these "His Holiness," "Most Holy," "Bishop of Bishops," "Universal Bishop," "Supreme Pon- tiff," "Vicar of Christ," "God on Earth" and "The Lord God." They have placed a triple crown upon his head, three crowns in one. They repre- sent earth, Heaven and Hell; and they call him "King of Earth," "King of Heaven" and "King of Hell." Whenever he goes abroad, he is borne What Protestants Believe 11 on the shoulders of men, surrounded by a band of soldiers fully armed, and the people fall pros- trate on their faces. When he gives private audiences, the persons thus honored kneel and kiss his toe. Were he the very eternal God, clothed in human flesh, he could not receive higher honors than are freely accorded to him. The Roman Catholic theologians say that the Papacy was established by God himself ; that it is as divine as the Church, as the Christian religion, as the throne of Jehovah itself. They insist that it is essential to the existence of Christianity; that it is the very center and heart and soul of God's kingdom on the earth. The Papacy stands on a tripod. Its first foot is the primacy of Peter. The Romish theologians declare that Jesus Christ made the Apostle Peter the supreme head of the Church on earth; that he clothed him with full power to rule the Church, to fix its creed at every point, to dictate the conduct of all its members, to appoint its ministers, to open and shut the gates of Heaven and to act, in all respects, as the Vice- gerent of the Almighty. The only Scripture foundation for this doctine, which its advocates pretend to show, is the words of Christ to Peter : 12 What Protestants Believe "Thou are Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not pre- vail against it. 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." Let us see what Jesus actually said. If we turn to the orig- inal Greek, we find that the words of Jesus were: *Th u art Petros, and on this petra will I build my Church." We cannot believe that our Saviour would use two different words in one sentence, intending that they should have the same meaning. He used two words. Therefore, he intended to convey two thoughts. The word petros means a stone, or a piece of rock broken off from a larger mass. Petra means a massive, living rock, a part of the great, united frame- work of the globe. What Jesus really said was, "Thou art (or shall be; Christ's words were prophetic) a stone, a rock, in thy character; and on this great underlying, immutable truth, which thou hast just declared, namely that I am the Christ, the Son of the living God, will I build my Church." If he had meant that he was go- What Protestants Believe 13 ing to build his Church on Peter personally, he would have made it clear beyond all doubt by say- ing: "Thou art Peter, and on thee, Peter, will I build my Church." The Apostle Peter is not the foundation on which the Church of Christ has been built. That notion is utterly repugnant to the whole tenor of New Testament teaching. The foundation is the truth which the Holy Spirit revealed to Peter that day — the Messiahship and divinity of Jesus Christ — or the personification of that truth, Christ himself. He who puts Peter in the place of Christ commits the sin of sacri- lege. Paul says : "Other foundation can no man lay than is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Writing to the Ephesians, Paul says : "Ye are laid upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone." The expression "the foundation of the apostles and prophets" does not mean the foundation which is composed of the apostles and prophets ; but the foundation which the apostles and prophets have laid by preaching the truth concerning Christ. This Republic is built on the foundation of Franklin and Adams and Jeffer- son and Washington and Hamilton and others like 14 What Protestants Believe them. But that foundation is not Franklin and Adams and Jefferson and Washington and Ham- ilton themselves, but the great political truths which they proclaimed to the world. The Chris- tian Church, like the American Republic, has a better foundation than any mere man, or score of men. How beautifully and clearly our first quota- tion explains the matter. "The Lord Jesus Christ is gracious, to whom coming, as to a stone, dis- allowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as living stones, are built up into a spiritual house, an holy priesthood to offer spir- itual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ/' This language is figurative. It represents the Church of God as a building, a temple. The stones of which it is built are living stones. "Ye also" are the "living stones." This epistle is ad- dressed to the "strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithinia." Every Christian is a stone in God's Temple, the Church. According to our Roman Catholic friends, Peter, who wrote these words, was the first Pope, the one stone on which the Church was built. Yet he says nothing about himself; but does say that all Christians are stones, and What Protestants Believe 15 then goes on, after our text, to say that Christ is the chief corner stone. All the stones Peter knew anything about were Christ and all Chris- tians. Peter was one of those stones; but Peter personally is no more the stone on which the Church is built than the humblest Christian man, or woman, or child in all the lands and all the ages. As we pass along, I want you to notice who are the real priests in God's Church. The "priests" of Rome claim to be the only priests and to hold the keys to Heaven. But Peter, Rome's "Supreme Pontiff," says ye, all Chris- tians, are "a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God." Christ is our Great High Priest. Under him every believer is a priest. The sacrifices which he offers are "spir- itual sacrifices," the "sacrifice of praise to God," as we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The man who preaches the gospel, whether it be in the Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Roman Cath- olic Church, is no more a priest than the hum- blest believer who sits in the pew. We, gospel preachers, are not the successors of the Jewish priests ; but rather of the ancient prophets. 16 What Protestants Believe If Jesus intended to say to Peter what our Roman Catholic friends say he did, he was guilty of the literary sin of using a mixed metaphor of a very bad kind. According to the Romanist expounders, he said : "Thou, Peter, art the foun- dation of my Church and to the foundation of the edifice will I give the keys of the same." How absurd to talk about giving the keys of a building to the foundation of the building ! Who believes that the Great Teacher would make such a silly blunder ? The other part of Christ's words to Peter need a little attention. "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." There is not enough in those words to warrant all the monstrous and blasphemous claims of the Papacy. The Master addressed almost the same words to all the apostles and, I think, to all Christians. In speak- ing of Church discipline, Jesus said: "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven. What Protestants Believe 17 Again I say imto you, That if two or three of you agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven." We may not understand all that those words mean (although they seem to authorize the Church to expell unworthy mem- bers, and to promise answers to united prayer) ; but there is no shadow of reason to believe that they give to any man, or set of men, the right to shut or open the gates of eternal life. The fathers of the Church interpreted Christ's words to Peter in the manner in which they have just been explained. Augustine, one of the very highest authorities, according to Rome herself, says : "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock which thou hast confessed, upon this which thou hast acknowledged, saying, Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God/ I will build my Church : that is upon myself, the Son of the living God, I will build my Church." An unanswerable argument against the doc- trine of the primacy of Peter is the fact that it is nowhere hinted at in the New Testament, if not in the passage under consideration. I do not forget the words of the risen Christ to Peter at 18 What Protestants Believe the lake, "Feed my sheep ; feed my lambs/' But Christ has given that commission to all ministers of the gospel. He singled out Peter on that oc- casion because he had proven false to his trust and needed to be re-commissioned. The doctrine that Peter is the head of the Church and the vice- gerent of Jehovah is so very important, and has so close a connection with the supreme question, "What must I do to be saved ?" that it would cer- tainly be found in the book of Acts and in the Epistles. Everybody knows that not the slightest trace of it can be found anywhere in those writ- ings. Paul wrote two long letters for the pur- pose of explaining the way of salvation. Why did he not tell us that there is no salvation outside of the fellowship of Peter, and that the keys to Heaven and everlasting life are hung to Peter's girdle? The Epistle to the Colossians is full of the thought of the pre-eminence of Christ. Why did not Paul add this : "But I would remind you of the very important fact that my fellow apostle, Peter, is head over all under Christ, and I would have you all listen to what he says." In his first letter to the Church at Corinth he refers to the sad divisions in that congregation and says : What Protestants Believe 19 "Everyone of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ; and I of Christ/' What a grand opportunity that was to impress upon the minds of those dear brethren the exceedingly important truth that we are all of Cephas; that he is the head of the Church, the vicegerent of Christ. Why did he not? There can be only one reason: Paul had never thought of such a thing. The primacy of Peter was never dreamed of in apostolic times. Peter wrote two letters. The first begins, "Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ." The other begins, "Simon Peter, a serv- ant and an apostle of Jesus Christ." Why did he not write, "Peter, the first of the apostles, the head of the Church, the Vicegerent of the Al- mighty?" There is not a word in either letter which suggests the thought that he was a whit above his brother apostles, or the humblest be- liever in all the world. Can we imagine the pres- ent pope writing a letter to the Church and not alluding to himself as the Supreme Bishop and Head of the Kingdom of God? If Peter was a pope, he had a very different spirit from all his successors. 20 What Protestants Believe Not only do not the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles teach the doctrine of the primacy of Peter, directly or indirectly, but they plainly dis- prove it. When Peter came back to Jerusalem, after preaching in the house of Cornelius, he was called to an account for eating with gentiles. How could the other apostles and Christians question the action of an infallible pope? When the first Ecumenical Council (as the Papists call it) was held at Jerusalem, who presided? According to Papal doctrine, it should have been Peter ; nobody else had any right to occupy the chair. But it was not Peter. It was a man who was not even one of the Twelve. It was James, the brother of Jesus. Who settled the question under discus- sion ? It ought to have been Peter. Indeed, since the proclamation of the doctrine of Papal Infalli- bility, a Church Council has no authority, and can never be held, except to receive and register the pope's decree; and, according to Rome, that was the belief and practice of the apostolic Church. But, as a matter of fact, Pope Peter was as silent as though he had been nothing but the janitor of the building, while Brother James said : "Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble What Protestants Believe 21 not them which from among the gentiles are turned to God/' Where was the doctrine of the primacy of Peter that day? It had never been thought of. If Peter had been pope, he would have spoken right out in the meeting (he was that sort of a man) and would have said : "Hold on there, Brother James, I am the head of the Church. Jesus told me at Ceasarea Philippi that he would found the Church on me and give me the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. You sit down while I settle this question." How was it that Paul dared to speak out against the Supreme Pontiff at Antioch? He says: "When Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed." Who dares to withstand the pope in these days and blame him to the face ? No ! The primacy of Peter is a lie, the pestiferous growth of the dark ages, foisted upon the Church through the ambition of selfish and wicked men. The first foot of the Roman tripod is nowhere and nothing. The second foot of the papal tripod is that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. For this claim there is no proof. Certainly there is no Scripture proof. The New Testament nowhere 22 What Protestants Believe says that Peter was the Bishop or Pastor of the Church at Rome. In the first place, it cannot be shown that Peter was ever in Rome. Ireneaus, in the second century, is the only authority that supports the assertion that Peter visited the capi- tal of the world. There are later writers who re- peat what he said. All that Ireneaus says is that "the Church at Rome was the greatest and most ancient and was founded by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul." But we know that the good man was mistaken. We know that Paul had nothing to do with the founding of the Church at Rome, for it was founded and estab- lished long before he wrote the Epistle to the Ro- mans, and he had never been there up to that time. Ireneaus also convicts himself of error in saying that the Church of Rome was the most ancient of all the churches. Jerusalem had a church long before Rome did. Ireneaus gives tradition as his authority. He caught up a float- ing, apocryphal story, and gave it the credit of his name. As he was in error on these points, we cannot accept what he says about Peter. Peter may have visited Rome; he may have lost his head there (for it is exhibited, once a year, along What Protestants Believe 23 with Paul's, in the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano). But his stay there must have been very brief, and he could not have been Pastor of the Church. If he was Bishop of Rome, his epis- copate must have covered the period in which Paul wrote to the Romans and endured two ex- tended terms of imprisonment. To Rome he wrote one letter, and from Rome he wrote six. In those seven letters he sends greetings to and from forty-eight different persons. Is it not strange that Peter, the Pastor of the Church, is not even mentioned ? In the letter to the Romans Paul sends his love to twenty-seven persons, most of them very obscure. How do you account for the fact that a man so thoughtful, so affectionate, so courteous does not mention his brother-apostle, the Pastor of the Church, the Head and Teacher of the Church Universal, the Vicar of Christ and Vicegerent of Almighty God. There is one very easy answer — and there can be no other — Peter was not the Vicar of Christ. He was not the Bishop of Rome. He was not even in Rome. Peter's Roman episcopate rests on the most shadowy evidence possible ; and yet we must be- lieve it or be everlastingly damned. 24 What Protestants Believe But there is one more foot to the Roman tripod. Even if the first and second were solid and good, the whole structure of the Papacy must fall with- out the third ; for no tripod can stand on two feet. The third foot is this : Peter, the first pope, the infallible Teacher and absolute Autocrat of the Universal Church, was authorized to transmit all his authority and power to each of his successors, the bishops of Rome, so that every bishop Rome has ever had, no matter what his character was, was all that, they say, Peter became when Jesus said: "Thou art Peter, and on this rock will I build my church." For the sake of the argument we will admit that Peter was the Head of the Church and the first Bishop of Rome. But what proof is there that every subsequent bishop of that church, no matter what his character or how his election was brought about, was, by virtue of his office, the supreme pastor of all Christians and the infallible spokesman of the Holy Ghost? There is absolutely no proof. It is the most base- less of assumptions. There is not a syllable of Scripture that can be tortured into its support; it was not thought of during the first five hundred years of the Christian era; it was utterly repu-* What Protestants Believe 25 diated by the Church generally, when first sug- gested; and it involves absurdities the most glar- ing and monstrous. Would the Almighty bind himself in advance to commit all the authority he possesses over the Church into the hands of any man who might happen to be selected for that pur- pose by the electorate of a rotten municipality or by a secret cabal of licentious and drunken priests or by a tyrannical and unprincipled em- peror ? Such are the methods by which many of the Roman Pontiffs have been chosen. For long centuries no man could become Pope of Rome without the consent of the King of France and the Emperor of Austria. Can you believe that Almighty God would leave the appointment of one who should be his sole representative and the infallible expounder of his truth to men more vile, in some cases, than the worst criminal or the keeper of the lowest house of ill-fame ? You have got to believe that, if you accept the Roman Catholic doctrine about the pope. There is no end to the absurdities which you must accept if you believe the papal doctrine that every Bishop of Rome is the divinely-appointed Head of the Church. In the fourteenth century 26 What Protestants Believe the cardinals elected Urban to the pontificate. This election, as they afterward affirmed, was in- valid, because they acted under the compulsion of a mob. So they retired to Fundi and elected an- other, Clement So Christendom had two infalli- ble Vicars of Christ ; and nobody could tell which was the real one. Each had his successor. The schism was kept up for a long time, till the Coun- cil of Pisa assumed to depose the two and elected a third, Alexander. Another council was called at Constance, which deposed the three and elected a fourth. So the Holy Catholic Church had four heads, each cursing and damning and consigning to hell the other three. It was exceedingly diffi- cult, if not impossible, for an intelligent and con- scientious Catholic to determine which one was the representative of God and which three were the tools of the Devil; and yet his eternal salva- tion depended upon his decision. There is no sal- vation for any human soul, unless he be in com- munion with Christ's true Vicar and representa- tive ; and what is a poor sinner going to do when he cannot tell which of four men is the true Vicar and sole Head of the only true Church ? Half a century was spent in the settlement of these dis- What Protestants Believe 27 putes. How many millions of souls went to hell in the meantime, because they could not tell who was the real pope, nobody can tell. But the num- ber must have been very great. The utmost corruption and violence have at- tended the election of popes, and some of the vilest of men have been made the vicars of Christ and the vicegerents of the Almighty. I am not slandering the Roman Catholic Church. I am only repeating what all Roman Catholic his- torians record. In 893 Formosus secured the popedom by bribery and the help of the King of the Goths. His successor, infallible like himself, had his body dug up and tried and condemned by a council and flung into the River Tiber. A Ro- man Catholic historian, Genebrand by name, says : "For almost one hundred years about fifty popes, having departed from virtue, were apostate rather than apostolic; at which time they entered in not by the door, but by a back door, that is to say, by the power of the emperor s." Baronius, a Papal writer, says : "Hast thou heard of the most de- plorable state of things at this time, when Theo- dora, a strumpet of noble family, obtained su- preme control in the City of Rome? She prosti- 28 What Protestants Believe tuted her daughters to the popes, by which means the dominion of such wicked women became so absolute that they removed at pleasure the law- fully created popes and, having expelled them, introduced violent and most wicked men in their places." Some of the vilest and most beastly and devilish men who ever lived have occupied the Papal chair; and yet everyone of them was the infallible teacher of divine truth, without whose mediation no one could enter the kingdom of God. That is a necessary part of the doctrine of the papacy which I feel it my duty to combat. Peter was the infallible Head of the Church ; and every Pope of Rome has all the power and authority of Peter and of Christ simply because he is the Bishop of Rome. Believe that, or be damned. I know well the Romish answer to this argu- ment. They tell us that the office is one thing and the officer another ; that there have been bad men in the ministry of the Protestant Churches ; that one of the Twelve Apostles was corrupt. That is well spoken. But Judas was not pope; no Protestant minister professes to be anything more than a fallible expounder of the Word ; and an office endowed with such supreme and excep- What Protestants Believe 29 tional prerogatives as the Papacy claims for it- self ought to be divinely protected (as it certainly is not) against the accidents of human ignorance and selfishness and lust. If Christ wanted a vicar on earth, clothed with all the authority which he himself possesses, would he not be likely to se- lect his own man, whenever there is a vacancy in the office, as he is said to have done in the case Of Peter ? There are many other absurdities which you must believe, if you accept the doctrine of the Papacy. Would an infallible teacher of divine truth lay down as a doctrine, which you must believe in order to be saved, that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it every twenty- four hours ? One of the popes did that very thing, and pronounced Galileo, the inventor of the clock, the microscope, the thermometer and the tele- scope a heretic because he declared that the earth moves. Would an infallible teacher of morals declare that to rob a heretic of everything is an innocent act ? A pope did that. Would the Vicar of Christ sanction that horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which a hundred thousand in- nocent men and women were murdered with the 30 What Protestants Believe greatest treachery and cruelty simply because they were Protestants, and go to church and thank God for it and have a gold medal made to commemorate the hellish butchery ? Eminent Ro- man Catholic writers admit that one of the popes did that, and all the world knows it. Would an infallible successor of the meek and lowly Jesus order whole nations of honest and law-abiding men and women to be butchered in the most bar- brous fashion just because they would not kiss his toe? A Roman Catholic priest, in good and regular standing, says very many of the popes did that, in a book which I have just been read- ing. Have you read of that hell on earth called "The Holy Inquisition/' set up in hundreds of cities in Europe to inflict the most horrible tor- tures that human and satanic cunning could in- vent on the very best of the people for no crime but claiming the right to think for themselves? Would you suppose that the Vicar of Christ would sanction such unspeakable an abomination as that ? Every student of history knows that a pope founded the Inquisition and many of his succes- sors kept it going and made it much worse than they found it. So says the Roman Catholic priest What Protestants Believe 31 to whom I just alluded. I am not talking against the good people who worship God according to the forms of the Roman Catholic Church ; I have no quarrel with them. I am showing you why I cannot accept the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. It will be said that Protestants have persecuted Roman Catholics. That is true. But the persecu- tions which Protestants have inflicted have been comparatively few and mild; and we have no Protestant pope to tell us that we must believe that it is right to murder all heretics, or we de- serve to go to hell ourselves. A succession of infallible popes have declared that all heretics (which includes Protestants) ought to be put to death, and that the reason why they are permitted to live is because the Vicar of Christ has not the power to do what he has the right to perform. I do not repeat this familiar truth to make you dislike your Roman Catholic neighbors, but to make you see that the doctrine of the Papacy is not true. A church officer who would condemn the members of all other Christian denominations to death cannot be the head of the true Church of Jesus Christ. 32 What Protestants Believe The Papacy is not a divine institution. It was born of human greed and love of power. It was unknown to the early Church. It has always been repudiated by the Greek Church, which is older than the Roman and now numbers ninety million members. It has grown to its present propor- tions from a little seed of priestly ambition. The Papacy is based upon a stupendous lie. It has been an awful incubus upon humanity. It has been, and is, the inveterate enemy of religious and civil liberty. It has always withstood the progress of science and civilization. Every step of advancement which the world has made has been against its most determined and virulent op- position. My subject seems to be endless. I have only begun its discussion. "The Lord is gracious, to whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sac- rifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ/' The living stone, on which God's "spiritual house," the Church, is built, is not Peter but Christ. He is the only Head of the Church. His teachings, What Protestants Believe 33 from his own lips and from the pens of his in- spired apostles, are our only standard of doctrine. Every honest student of the New Testament can find the truth, and the truth will make him free. We have no need of a priest or minister but to help us to understand what Jesus has spoken. The priest has no authority over our faith. Best of all, the Holy Spirit will take of the things of Christ and show them unto us. These are Christ's own words, 34 What Protestants Believe Priests generally discountenance the reading of Scriptures by the laity. They quote II Peter 3:16, "some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own de- struction/' But Christ says John 5 :39 : "Search the scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eter- nal life : and they are they which testify of me." St Peter says (I Peter 2:2) "As newborn babes desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby," "But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," II Peter 3:18, or Rev. 2:17, "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches ; To him that overcometh will / give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone, a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that re- ceiveth it." Samuel McGerald, D. D. GOD IS THE ONLY PROPER OBJECT OF WORSHIP ********* Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Matthew iv:io. These are the words of Jesus to the Devil. In the wilderness Satan made three assaults upon Christ. In the second he took him up to the sum- mit of a lofty "mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them." When the Saviour had taken in all the wonderful panorama, the tempter said : "I will give you all this, if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus' instant answer was : "Get thee hence, Sa- tan ; for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." In re- peating that Old Testament command, the Great Teacher reaffirmed one of the great fundamental laws of the kingdom of God. It is universally and everlastingly true that God is the only proper object of worship. To worship any other person or being, or anything which exists or is imagined 35 36 What Protestants Believe to exist, or to do anything which leads to, or ap- proaches, such worship, is a monstrous and dam- ning crime. Under all human governments high treason is the greatest of crimes. To worship anything but God is high treason against the gov- ernment of the universe. This is the crime which is denounced in the first and second commandments of the Decalogue. Hear what God himself said to Israel, in an au- dible voice, amid the thunders and lightnings of Sinai: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visit- ing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments/' Idolatry, the worship of anything but the one true God who created all things, is the great root sin of the ages, from which nearly all other sins have sprung. Idolatry is the cause of the largest por- What Protestants Believe 37 tion of all the crimes and miseries under which the human family has groaned for six thousand years. Nine hundred millions of men are in dark- ness and degradation and barbarism, or semi- barbarism — why? Chiefly because they worship other gods beside the one God who made the world. No nation can rise into the light and lib- erty of true civilization till it learns to worship one God, and nobody and nothing else. The four hundred and fifty millions of China are idolaters ; they worship their ancestors and a great variety of other objects of thought and imagination. The three hundred and fifteen millions of India are mostly idolaters ; they worship five million differ- ent gods. They worship monkeys and snakes and crocodiles and the most hideous-looking images of gold and brass and stone and wood. The one hundred and thirty millions of darkest Africa are idolaters. They have carried idolatry to its low- est depths. They worship the Devil himself and other things too vile to be named. To his Church Christ has committed the work of expelling idola- try from the world. She ought to be very care- ful to keep her own hands entirely free from the, pollution of that sin. 38 What Protestants Believe At the beginning the whole human family knew and worshiped the true God. Very soon the ma- jority began to turn their backs on Him. Being so constituted that they had to worship some- thing, they looked around to find a substitute for the God who made them and justly claimed their supreme adoration and love. If I mistake not, the first thing they worshiped was the sun. That seemed more like its Maker than anything else. Then, when the sun was out of sight, they gave their offerings and said their prayers to the moon. They called the sun the King of Heaven; and the moon, the Queen. Next the stars became ob- jects of adoration, and were called the Princes of Heaven, the sons and daughters of the sun and moon. Then it seemed to men that the winds were persons, and the rivers and the mountains and the seasons and all the powers of nature; and they worshiped them. At every step they were getting farther and farther away from the Only One who deserves to be worshiped. Next some great man, some powerful ruler and bene- factor, died. They imagined that he had gone to Heaven and become a god, and they worshiped him. In process of the generations and the cen- What Protestants Believe 39 turies the deified heroes multiplied, till there was a whole senate of Celestials, like Jupiter and Mars and Apollo and Vulcan and Neptune and all the rest. Meanwhile the people clamored for some- thing to worship which they could see and have before their eyes all the time. So certain animals were chosen to represent the different powers and attributes of the celestial beings — the lion for courage ; the ox for patient strength ; the serpent for wisdom ; the eagle for swiftness ; the peacock, with its many eye-spots on its plumage, for om- niscience. And images were made to stand for the different gods which human imagination had created. At first the people worshiped the un- seen powers and persons whom the beasts and birds and reptiles and images represented. But, after a time, they forgot the unseen and wor- shiped the animals and images themselves. Idola- try spread wider and wider and grew blacker and blacker, till no one in all the world knew the true God but Abraham and his little circle of friends and, possibly, a few other families, scat- tered here and there among the nations. About thirty-eight hundred years ago God started a new movement to cure the world of 40 What Protestants Believe idolatry. He sent Abraham into the land of Pal- estine to found a new nation. After the lapse of four hundred years the new nation was born. The foundation of that nation was the doctrine that there is only one God in all the universe and that no kind of worship whatever should be paid to any other being or any other object of thought or imagination. God was so strict with the Chil- dren of Israel that he would not allow them to have statues or pictures of any kind, lest they should be tempted to worship them. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them." The golden cherubs over the ark, in the most holy place of the Tabernacle, was absolutely the only image or pictorial representation which was al- lowed to exist in all Israel ; and nobody ever saw that but the high priest, and he only once a year. For eight hundred and fifty years the only bright spot, in the midst of the darkness of idolatry which covered the earth, was the land of Israel, a country not as large as our State of Vermont. God had hard work to keep his people clean. What Protestants Believe 41 Again and again they turned from Him to the idols of the heathen. Again and again he whipped them back into the path of obedience. At last he rooted them out of their own land and sent them into captivity in Babylon for seventy years. When they came back to Judea and Jerusalem, they were entirely cured of idolatry, and have re- mained so till today. In founding his Church, Christ reaffirmed the First of the old Ten Commandments in these words: "Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and with all thy strength." The early Christians worshiped nothing but the one triune God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. You cannot find in all the New Testament the slightest trace of any kind of worship, or adoration, or veneration, or homage, or service paid to any angel, or saint, or man, or woman, or relic, or statue, or bust, or picture, or sacred place, or any- thing whatsoever except Almighty God. The Twelve Apostles and all the first Christians were Jews, and the Jews had the most utter loathing and abhorence for everything that looked or smelt 42 What Protestants Believe like idolatry. If! you search the Gospels and Epistles with a microscope, you will not find any indication that any Christian ever prayed to, or knelt before, or kissed, or venerated any image or picture, or asked any angel or saint to act as a go-between for him with the Almighty. But, after several centuries had passed, the Church became corrupt and conformed herself to the notions of the pagan world. She adopted all the gods of Greece and Rome, and gave them the names of dead saints, and put them all around the throne of God, and told the people that they must reach God through the saints. At the same time she filled her places of worship with images and pictures and told the people to say their prayers before them. And she hunted up a great quantity of real, or pretended relics of the saints and apostles and Christ — rags and skulls and nails and pieces of wood — and told the ignorant people that they possessed saving virtue for body and soul. And so, when Luther began to preach salva- tion by faith, the Christianity of the world was hardly anything but baptized paganism ; and the work of curing the world of Idolatry had to be begun over again. Mohammedanism was a re- What Protestants Believe 43 coil from the idolatry which had covered the so- called Christian world and hidden the true Christ from the eyes of the people Mohammedanism has been, and is, a great curse. But Mohammedanism would never have been if the Church had not put the worship of angels and saints and relics and images and pictures in the place of the true wor- ship of God. This idolatry was not the idolatry of China or India or Africa, but the idolatry of the Roman Catholic Church. I have no ill feeling toward any of my Roman Catholic neighbors. I want to be considered their friend, as I am. But it is my duty to show that they have, unconsciously and honestly, as I trust, been led into the violation of the First and Second Commandments. First, the Roman Catholic Church worships angels. There is a little book of devotion, called "The Ursuline Manual/' endorsed by the highest authorities in the Church of Rome, which con- tains this prayer: "O blessed angel! to whose holy care I am committed by the supreme clem- ency, illuminate, defend and govern me this day ; preserve me particularly from sin, and watch over me at the awful moment of death." The priests 44 What Protestants Believe of Rome will tell us that this is not idolatrous worship; that it is a different worship from that which is accorded to the Almighty. But I am too stupid to see the difference. It is not a prayer to the angel to intercede with God for the one who prays. It is a request to a created being to give what only Almighty power can bestow — ''illuminate, defend and govern me this day and preserve me particularly from sin." If that is not worshiping an angel, then nobody could wor- ship an angel. And yet, St. John, when he fell down to worship the angel who had been show- ing him about through the celestial regions, while he was on the isle of Patmos, was rebuked by his guide, who said : "See thou do it not ; for I am thy fellow servant. Worship God." The angels are our fellow servants. It is a sin to worship, or pray to, them. We should worship their God and ours, and no one else. In the second place our Roman Catholic friends worship the departed saints. I know that they say — the more thoughtful ones — that they do not worship the saints in the same way they do God ; that all they intend, is to ask the saints to use their influence with God to give them the bless- What Protestants Believe 45 ings which they need. That is too nice a distinc- tion for ordinary mortals to understand. I be- lieve that the great mass of these who pray to St. Michael and St. Bridget and St. Nicholas and St. Patrick, and all the other saints real and imaginary, actually worship the saint and get no farther with their thought and their faith. Pray- ing to a creature, whether you expect him to help and bless you himself or to go to God in your be- half, is dangerous business. We do not need the saints to go to God for us. We can go direct to God ourselves, through Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Saviour. You cannot find any hint of praying to the saints in the Bible. Why did not Jesus and the apostles teach us to pray to the saints? The only prayer offered to a saint, of which we have any account in Scripture, was made in hell. Dives prayed to Abraham ; but he prayed in vain. Jesus said: "Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it." "In my name" in the name of Jesus, not in the name of any angel or saint or the Virgin Mary. 46 What Protestants Believe I know what our Roman Catholic friends say to this. They say : "You ask your pious friends on earth to pray to God for you. Why not ask your pious friends in heaven to pray to God for you?" There is a great difference between ask- ing a Christian friend on earth to join his prayers to God with yours and praying to a dead saint to intercede for you. If you begin by praying to a saint in glory to go to God for you, you will end by praying to that saint and forgetting all about God. You will make a god of the saint. That is what the saints of the Roman calendar are. They are little gods, surrounding the throne of the Infinite and hiding Him from the thoughts and faith of the worshipers. At all events, God commands us to pray directly to him in the name of his Son Jesus Christ. He has never commanded us to pray to the saints or in the name of the saints. Praying to the saints is not only contrary to the Scriptures, but it is contrary to reason. That any saint can hear the invocation, and attend to the requests of millions of worshipers at the same time, no sane person can believe. There are mil- lions of Irishmen in Ireland and in America and all over the world, praying at the same time to What Protestants Believe 47 St. Patrick and St. Bridget. It is impossible that those saints could hear and answer all those prayers. If they can, they are omnipresent and omniscient. If they can, they are gods. As was said a moment ago, to invoke the saints is to put many other gods on the throne with the Almighty. In the third place, the Roman Catholic Church worships images and pictures. The walls of their places of worship are hung with statues and paintings before which the faithful kneel and say their prayers. The more thoughtful ones say that they do not worship the image or the picture but the Saviour or saint whom it represents. That is exactly what the educated Hindu says when you reprove him for saying his prayers to a monkey or a crocodile. He does not worship the beast or the reptile, but the divine being whom they represent. That may be true in some cases. But the adoration and faith of most idolaters never get any farther than the object before which they bend the knee. God knew that it was not safe for the average worshiper to say his prayers to an image or a picture. For he says, in the sacred Second Commandment, 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any 48 What Protestants Believe likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God," God is so jealous of the love and worship of his children that he will not tolerate anything that looks like the worship of the creature, or tends in that direction. The Roman Catholic Church does exactly what God forbids. Most Roman Catholics do not know that any such command has been given. In their list of the Ten Commandments the second is usually left out ; and the number Ten is preserved by dividing the last into two. As long as our Roman Catholic friends bow down before images and pictures of Christ and the angels and saints and say their prayers, they cannot deny that they violate the Second Commandment and do what Christ forbids in our text : "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve/ 9 In the fourth place the Roman Church worships relics. They say that they do not worship, but only venerate, them. But that is a distinction without any real difference. I will give you the facts and you may judge for yourself. According What Protestants Believe 49 to a recent writer, an American Roman Catholic priest in good standing, who loves his Church but wants to see it reformed, there are in various Roman Catholic churches and sacred places the following relics, among many others, "a wrist- bone of St. Ann, the rod of Moses, the window through which the Angel Gabriel entered the house of Mary, twenty-five bodies of John the Baptist, six heads of St. Ignatius, sixty fingers of St. Jerome, forty holy shrouds in which the body of Christ was wrapped and seven hundred thorns from the Saviour's crown." Then there is a handkerchief which an imaginary Saint Veronica loaned to Jesus, on the way to the cross, to wipe the sweat from his brow. When he handed it back to the good woman, it had his portrait, which it bears today. At Naples is a bottle of the blood of St. Januarius, shed fifteen hundred years ago, which liquefies in the hands of a priest on the 19th day of every September. There are many cords of wood from the cross on which the Re- deemer died ; and tons of spikes which were driven through his hands and feet. A complete catalogue of the sacred relics which have been gathered would fill a large book. The Roman 50 What Protestants Believe Church teaches that there is real virtue in all this rubbish. The Council of Trent, than which there is no higher authority says, 'The holy bodies of holy martyrs, which bodies were the living mem- bers of Christ, and the temples of the Holy Ghost, are to be venerated by the faithful, through which (bodies) many benefits are bestowed by God on men." What do the faithful do with those relics ? They fall before them, and kiss them, and pray and expect healing to come through them to their bodies and their souls. The naked savage in Africa prays to his fetish — a stone, or a feather, or a piece of wood — believing that a spirit, mighty to save and protect, dwells within. The credulous Romanist kneels before a glass case containing the finger-bone of a supposed saint who died a thousand years ago, and prays, and expects his diseases to be cured or his sins to be forgiven through the virtue which God has lodged in the venerated relic. What is the difference between the two cases? If you call that heathen an idol- ater, how can you help calling the Christian an idolater too? Again, the Romanists seem to worship living men. What is it but worship when they fall What Protestants Believe 51 prostrate before the Pope and call him "Most Holy Father/' "God on Earth" and "The Lord God?" Does not the penitent in the confessional worship the priest when, on his knees, he bows his head, smites his breast and says: "I confess to Almighty God, to the blessed Virgin Mary, to the blessed Michael the Archangel, to the blessed St. John the Baptist, to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, to all the saints in heaven, and to you, my father, that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grevious fault." After a brief pause, he says: "For these and all the sins of my life I humbly beg pardon of God, and penace and absolution of you, my father/' If that is not worshiping men, it comes perilously near it. Finally the Roman Catholic Church worships the Virgin Mary. The Roman theologians say that Mary died ; but that she arose from the dead a few days after her burial and ascended to heaven, Christ and the angels and heavenly hosts coming to meet her. They call that the assump- tion. They have exalted her almost to an equality with the Most high God. Hear some of the titles 52 What Protestants Believe they have given this mere woman: "Queen of Mercy," "Queen of Heaven/' "Queen of the Universe," "Mother of God," "The Mother^ of Life," "Wife of the Holy Ghost," "The Advo- cate," "The Treasurer of All Divine Grace," "The Omnipotent." What blasphemy! If Mary is the Queen of Heaven, she must be divine. God is the King of Heaven. If Mary is the Queen, she must be far more than human. "Mother of God !" That is horrible. Mary was the mother of Christ's humanity; she was not the mother of God. It is almost blasphemous to repeat such language. I have a book of over eight hundred pages, purchased in a Roman Catholic bookstore, en- titled "The Glories of Mary," written by a priest named Ligouri, translated from the Italian. It bears the endorsement of the Archbishop of New York. One edition which I have seen bears the imprimatur of the Pope himself. All it contains is good Roman Catholic doctrine. It is the teach- ing of the infallible Head of the Church. I will read from the book, that you may hear what you must believe about the Virgin Mary, or lose your soul. "God has ordained that all graces should come to us through the hands of Mary." "All What Protestants Believe 53 graces are dispensed by the hand of Mary alone, and all those who are saved, are saved solely by means of this divine mother." "Mary so loved the world that she gave her only-begotten-son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "Listen all ye who desire the kingdom of God ; honor the Virgin Mary, and ye shall have life and eternal salvation." "All the mercy and pardon which sinners received under the Old Law was granted them by God solely for the sake of this blessed Virgin." "Blessed is the man, says Mary, that heareth me, and that watcheth daily at my gates, and waiteth at the posts of my doors." "The Church requires all the clergy and all religious persons to raise their voices, and in the name of all the faithful, invoke and call Mary by the sweet name of hope, the hope of all : 'Hail, our hope P " "Under the mantle of Mary all offenders may find protection, whatever crimes they have committed." "Fly, O Adam, O Eve, and ye, their children, who have offended God; fly and take refuge in the bosom of this good mother. Do you not know that she is the only city of refuge and the only hope of sin- ners ?" "She is the only Advocate of sinners, and 54 What Protestants Believe of those who are deprived of every help. 'Hail, Refuge and retreat of sinners, to whom alone they can flee with confidence/ And this is what David intended to express when he said, 'In the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me/ And what is this tabernacle, if not Mary ? " When we have recourse to this divine mother, we may not only be sure of her protection, but that some- times we shall sooner be heard and saved by in - voking her holy name than that of Jesus our Saviour, because it belongs to Christ to punish, but to Mary, as our Advocate to pity. We sooner find salvation by recurring to the mother than to the Son." "The pillar of cloud and fire which guided the people of the Lord out of Egypt was a type of Mary and her double office, which she exercises continually in our behalf ; as a cloud she protects us from the heat of divine justice, and as a fire she protects us from demons." "We acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the only mediator of justice, who by his merits obtains for us grace and salva- tion ; but we affirm that Mary is the mediator of grace, and although whatever she obtains, she obtains through the merits of Jesus Christ, and because she prays and asks for it in the name of What Protestants Believe 55 Jesus Christ, yet whatever favors we ask are all obtained through her intercession." "Mary is called the Gate of Heaven, because no one can enter Heaven, if he does not pass through Mary, who is the door." "God has chosen to bestow no grace upon us but by the hands of Mary." "The salvation of all men is dependent upon the good pleasure of Mary." "Jesus is never found but with and through Mary. He seeks Jesus in vain who does not look for him with Mary. He can never be a servant of the Son who is not the servant of the mother." "All obey the commands of Mary, even God himself." "As the mother must have the same power as the Son, justly was Mary made omnipotent by Jesus, who is omnipo- tent." "Take heart, O miserable sinners, this great Virgin, who is the mother of your judge, is the advocate of the human race." "Mary becomes all things to all men, and opens to all the bowels of her mercy, that all may receive of her ; the captive his freedom; the sick man health; the afflicted consolation ; the sinner pardon ; and God glory. Hence there is no one, since she is the sun, who does not partake of her warmth." "The gate of heaven will be opened to receive all those 56 What Protestants Believe who trust in the protection of Mary/' "God has made Mary a bridge of salvation, by which we are enabled to pass over the waves of this world, and reach the blessed port of paradise. Serve and honor Mary, and you will certainly find life eternal." "Mary having been made the mother of all the redeemed, by the merit of her sufferings, and the offering of her Son, it is just to believe that only by her hand may be given them the milk of those divine graces which are the fruits of the merits of Jesus Christ and the means to obtain eternal life." "Whoever wishes to find Jesus, will not find him except through Mary." The book abounds in prayers to the Virgin Mary. I will give you portions of a few: — "O Mother of my God and my Lady Mary, as a poor wounded and loathsome wretch presents himself to a great queen, I present myself to thee, who art the queen of heaven and earth. From the lofty throne on which thou art seated, do not dis- dain, I pray thee, to cast thy eye upon me, a poor sinner. Look upon me, and do not leave me until thou has changed me from a sinner to a saint. Thine I am, save me! Accept me, O Mary, for thy own and attend to my salvation, as I am thine What Protestants Believe 57 own." What more could one say in praying to God himself. And yet they say they do not wor- ship Mary; they only adore her and invoke her. If that is not worship, such as belongs to God alone, then I am too ignorant to know what wor- ship is. Can you endure some more of this blas- phemy?" "Behold, O mother of my God, Mary, my only hope, behold at thy feet a miserable sin- ner, who implores thy mercy. Thou art pro- claimed and called by the whole Church, and by all the faithful, the refuge of sinners; thou art my refuge ; it is thine to save me. I place myself in thy hands. I take refuge beneath thy mantle/* One more: "O holy mother, thou hast already left the earth; do not forget us, miserable pil- grims, who remain in this valley of tears strug- gling against so many enemies, who desire to see us lost in hell. By the merits of thy precious death, obtain for us detachment from earthly things, pardon of our sins, love to God, and holy perseverance; and, when the hour of death shall arrive, assist us from heaven with thy prayers, and obtain for us to come and kiss thy feet in paradise." 58 What Protestants Believe To cap the climax of absurdity and blasphemy, I will make one more quotation from the book of Ligouri, which is the Pope's own book: "If there were two ladders reaching from earth to heaven, one a red ladder, with Jesus standing at the top, and the other a white ladder, with Mary stand- ing at the top; and the poor sinner should try to climb up Jesus' ladder, he would fall back into hell, but if he should climb up Mary's ladder, he would be saved/' How can our Roman Catholic neighbors clear themselves from the charge of idolatry ? I grant you that they are sincere. So, doubtless, are the millions who worship other gods than the true God in India and Africa and the isles of the sea. They have been misled; they are in grevious er- ror. We must show them the true way of salva- tion. I know their priests say that they do not in- voke Mary in place of Christ, but that she may in- tercede with her Son for our salvation. Right there is the core and heart of their error and sin. They represent God the Father and God the Son as being hard-hearted beings who are disposed to refuse our prayers and hurl us all into hell. Therefore we need the intercession of the angels What Protestants Believe 59 and saints to move them to save us. Especially we need the intervention of Mary to tease her iron-hearted Son to pity us and grant us the benefits of his sufferings and death. That is a gross and wicked slander. The Bible does not give us any such view of Christ as that. We need no intercessor between him and us. St. John says: "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." St. Paul says : "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Rome gives the lie to John and Paul and God, squarely and positively, by declaring that Mary is our Intercessor and Advocate. Every sinner can, and must, go directly to Christ, without the intervention of any angel, or saint, or priest, or minister. Christ's love and pity are infinitely greater than his mother's or those of any saint or all the saints. Mariolatry is blasphemous, unscriptural and absurd. It is blasphemous. It puts a mere woman in the place of God. It gives her the titles and attributes which it is an awful sin to give to any being but the Creator of the universe. Mary was a holy woman. Her memory is to be honored. 60 What Protestants Believe And yet she was a sinner, saved by grace. Rome, without any warrant from Scripture or reason, says that she was born without a sinful nature. The doctrine of "The Immaculate Conception," as they call it, is a human invention. Mariolatry is unscriptural. There is not one solitary word in the Bible to back it up. But little mention is made of the Mother of Jesus in the gospels. Her son reproved her at Cana for interfering with his affairs. When she and his brothers (the Ro- manists say that Mary had no child but Jesus) stood at the door of a crowded house where Jesus was teaching, desiring to speak with him, he did not stop his preaching to go to her, but merely said: "Who is my mother? and who are my brothers? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in Heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." That shows how much influence Mary would have as an intercessor with Christ. If we needed any such advocate, any other holy woman or man would answer just as well as Mary. Jesus did not appear to his mother after the resurrection, so far as the record shows. Very likely she was one of the "above five hun- dred" who saw him at the same time ; but he did What Protestants Believe 61 not appear to her especially. It is an interesting fact that Mary drops out of the record entirely. She is never mentioned after the first chapter of Acts. If, as Ligouri and the pope declare, "God made Mary a bridge of salvation, by which we are enabled to pass over the waves of this world and reach the blessed port of paradise/' do you not think Peter and Paul and James and the others would have said something about her in their ser- mons and letters? Mariolatry was utterly un- known to the primitive church. It came into Christianity from paganism, long after the death of the apostles. It was mingled with Christian- ity to make it more palatable to the heathen. It came in little by little. It has grown during the centuries. It is growing now. More and more Mary is crowding out Christ and the Holy Spirit and God the Father himself. To a very large part of the membership of the Roman Church there is no God but Mary. Mariolatry is utterly absurd. Millions are praying to her, night and day, all over the world. She is invoked to be at the bedside of every dying Romanist. If she hears and answers all these prayers, she must be omniscient and omnipresent; she must be God. 62 What Protestants Believe Practically that is what the adoration of Mary amounts to. It is turning Jehovah out of Heaven, and putting a deified woman in his place ; or it is adding a second God to the monotheism of the universe; or it is adding a fourth person to the Holy Trinity. Let us hold fast to the pure and simple faith of the New Testament and the primitive church. "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." When we go one step beyond that, we are in danger. There are scores of prayers in the Bible, from the lips of holy men and women. There is not one addressed to any person but God. When we pray to anyone but God, we are idolaters. GOD ALONE CAN FORGIVE SIN. "Why doth this man speak blasphemies ? Who can forgive sins but God only?" Mark \\:j. To the second question the only possible an- swer is "no one." No one would ever think of giving any other answer, unless he were a fool or a willful liar or a slave to some false and hell- born creed. It is well-nigh a self-evident truth that no one but God can forgive sin. The power to forgive sin belongs to God as exclusively as the power to create a world. What is sin? It is a crime committed against the Government of Heaven ? It is a wrong done against the person of God. Who but the Governor of Heaven can pardon a crime committed against the Govern- ment of Heaven ? Who but God himself can for- give a wrong done against the person of God? An anarchist tried to shoot the King of Spain a short time ago. Who but King Alphonso can par- don him and save him from death ? If a man is convicted of a crime against the State of New York, who can pardon the criminal and set him free? No one but the governor of the state. If 63 64 What Protestants Believe a man has been found guilty of violating the laws of the nation, and has been sentenced to prison or to death, who can restore to him his liberty and his citizenship? No one but the chief execu- tive, the President of the United States. I am only repeating what everybody knows. The power and right to forgive sin is a prerogative which belongs to the Almighty, and which He has never surrendered and never will. About that there would seem to be no chance for argument. But the Church of Rome declares that God has resigned that power. So far as that one preroga- tive of deity is concerned, the Sovereign of the Universe has come down from his throne and stripped himself and lodged His sovereignty ex- clusively in the hands of the ministers of that religious denomination. According to Romish doctrine, every ordained priest, no matter what his character and life may be, has the power to forgive sins; and no sinner can obtain forgive- ness except through and from a priest. But no priest can forgive sins outside the parish, or pas- toral charge, to which he has been appointed. There is one exception to this law. If a person is in imminent danger of death, and cannot pro- What Protestants Believe 65 cure the help of his parish priest, he can ask any priest to forgive his sins. To you and me, there is no being in the universe who can forgive our sins but the rector of the nearest Roman Cath- olic Church, or his regularly-appointed assistant priest, if he has one. If you should go to God and humbly say : "O, God, my Heavenly Father, I have sinned against Thee. I am sorry for my sins ; forgive me for Jesus' sake/' he would refer you to Father -, or his assistant. You must go to him, or go to — Hell. That is good, sound Roman Catholic doctrine. I am not slandering anybody. I am telling you exactly what they all believe, from the pope down to the humblest lay- man. There are two possible exceptions. I have stated one. If you are dying you can call in an- other priest. The other exception I will state by and by. What do you think of that doctrine ? Is it rea- sonable ? Does it agree with your sense of what is proper and right? Do you find any such teach- ing in the Bible? Are you willing to risk your eternal salvation on such a proposition? Where do our Roman Catholic friends get their doctrine of forgiveness by the priest ? There are two pas- 66 What Protestants Believe sages of Scripture which squint in the direction of priestly absolution. One is in John xx.22 and 23, where we read: "And He/' Jesus, "breathed on them/' the apostles, "and said, Re- ceive ye the Holy Ghost ; whosesoever sins ye re- mit, they are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins you retain, they are retained." In regard to that text I have this to say, if it is to be taken in its most literal sense, it cannot mean any more than that Jesus gave his Twelve Apostles the power to forgive sins. It does not mean that every priest and every minister of the gospel, no matter how vile and devilish he may be, has the power to for- give sins. It is either limited to the Twelve, or it is given to all Christians down to the end of time. To suppose that all Christians have the power to forgive sins would be absurd and dan- gerous. The most reasonable interpretation is that Christ gave his ministers authority to preach the gospel of forgiveness; to declare, with the power of the Holy Ghost, the terms and condi- tions on which a sinner may find the pardon of his sins. If Jesus intended to give his disciples power to forgive sins, why did he not make it plain ins his final instructions. Just before he What Protestants Believe 67 ascended to Heaven he said: "Go ye and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." Why did he not plainly tell them also to forgive the sins of all who should repent and confess to them ? If they had the authority and power to forgive sins, that was, by far, their greatest and most important work, and the fact ought to have been made known to them, and to all mankind, in the plain- est and most unmistakable words. That is a truth, if it is a truth, of such infinite importance that it ought not to be left in the slightest ob- scurity; it ought to be made as clear as the sun in an unclouded sky. There is a passage in the first chapter of the Book of Jeremiah which sheds a flood of light on the subject which we are now examining. God said to Jeremiah : "See, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down and to plant/ 5 Now Jeremiah never did any one of those things liter- ally. He was nothing but a poor, despised and persecuted preacher. He spent much of his time 68 What Protestants Believe in prison, and died in captivity. He had no more power to root out and pull down nations and king- doms than I have. What did God mean? He could not have meant anything more than that Jeremiah should declare God's purposes and threatenings to root out and pull down certain nations. God did root out and pull down Jerusa- lem and Babylon and Egypt and Tyre and many other kingdoms and he planted Jerusalem again ; and he commanded Jeremiah to foretell these events in His name. In poetic and figurative lan- guage the prophet is represented as doing what he only foretold God would do. Christ did not give His apostles power to forgive sins them- selves; but the authority to declare, in God's name, the terms and conditions on which He would forgive. If the Romanists are correct in their interpretation of this Scripture, it is pass- ing strange that we find no traces of priestly ab- solution in the Book of Acts and in the epistles of Paul, Peter, James, John and Jude. Such a doctrine is too important to be passed over in silence. Another Scripture with which the Ro- manists try to bolster up their absurd doctrine of priestly absolution I presented in the first chapter. What Protestants Believe 69 It is Christ's words to Peter and to the whole Church: "I have given unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind in earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven. And if any two of you agree on earth as touching anything ye shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in Heaven." To a rational mind that means noth- ing more than that God has given the power to his Church to discipline and expel unworthy members and to obtain blessings from Heaven, in answer to united prayer. There is one other passage of Scripture which I must mention. It is in James v:i6. "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed." The Roman Catholics have changed that verse and make it read : "Confess your sins to the priests of the Church." All I have to say is that a creed which needs such medicine as that must be very sick and just ready to die. Now let us look at the other side. How does God's word say we are to obtain the forgiveness of our sins? On the very occasion when the words of our text were spoken, Jesus said to the 70 What Protestants Believe Jews: "The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins." As everybody knows, he meant himself when He said "the Son of Man." Jesus Christ is God. As God, he has power to forgive sins. No one but God has that power. In the thirty-third verse of the eighth chapter of Ro- mans Paul says : "It is God that justifieth." To justify is to forgive. That is exactly what the Word means. Again Paul uses such words as these: "God is just and the justifier of him who believeth in Jesus." "It is one God who shall justify the circumcision by faith and the uncir- cumcision through faith." "Blessed is the man to whom God will not impute sin." Did not Paul know as much about the forgiveness of sins as the priests of Rome? Nowhere in his writings, or in any part of the Bible is it hinted that anyone but God has the power to forgive sins. Sins can- not be forgiven unless the sinner is truly penitent for his sins. Who but God, the all-wise, can read the sinner's heart and know that he is hon- estly and sincerely sorry, and determined to for- sake all his evil ways and thoughts? God invites us to go directly to Him. He says, in the Book of Isaiah, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all What Protestants Believe 71 the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else/' What does the faithful Romanist do when he wants his sins forgiven? Instead of looking to God, he looks unto the priest. He goes to the confessional, that he may receive the sacrament of penance. All this business of forgiving sins they call by that name, the "Sacrament of Pen- ance." He finds the priest in the Church, sitting in a box, or wardrobe, called "The Confessional/' behind a grated window. The priest must have on a surplice and a violet colored stole. The peni- tent kneels down in front of the grate, makes the sign of the cross and says to the priest : "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Pray, father, give me thy blessing, for I have sinned. I confess to Al- mighty God, to the blessed Virgin Mary, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy apostles, Peter and Paul, to all the saints, and to you, Father, that I have sinned exceedingly, in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." Then the penitent tells the priest all he can think of that he has done, said and thought, that 72 What Protestants Believe was wrong, since he made his last confession. That nothing may be left out, it is the duty of the priest to probe the penitent's memory and conscience with pointed questions, "Have you done this? Have you had this thought? Have you felt this desire ?" When the sins are all emptied out, the priest afKxes some penance or penalty, such as a fine of money, or going around the Church on the knees and praying before each of the stations of the cross, or fasting, or letting some very pleasant kind of food alone, or doing something very unpleasant and painful. Finally, the priest says : "I absolve thee from thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost/' and the poor sinner goes away, think- ing that all is right between him and God. Every- body must go through with that performance, or go to hell. There is just one possible exception. If you can't possibly get to the confessional, and sincerely want to, and would if you could, and are sincerely sorry for your sins, God will for- give you without the priest and without the "Sac- rament of Penance." Now, what are our objections to the doctrine of auricular confession, or priestly absolution? What Protestants Believe 73 We have six very serious objections. First, it is horribly blasphemous for any man to pretend that he can forgive sins. This has been stated al- ready. When Jesus, at Capernaum, said to the man who had the paralysis: "Son, thy sins be forgiven thee/' the scribes and Pharisees, sitting by, were horrified and exclaimed: "Why doth this man speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?" Jesus made no reply. He knew they were right. The only reason why he was not guilty of blasphemy was that he was not a man, but the very, eternal God, clothed in human flesh. When we charge the priests of Rome with blasphemy in pretending to forgive sins and drive them into the corner, they get out, or try to, by saying: "We do not claim that we forgive sins. God does it. But he does it through us. We only declare the fact." O, I thought you said that Christ actually and literally gave Peter and the other apostles and all their succes- sors the power to remit and retain sins. But, after all, you only mean that he gave them the power to declare what God himself did. You take his words figuratively and not literally. We, Protestants, do the same. You say Jesus gave 74 What Protestants Believe his ministers the power to declare his forgiveness to truly penitent sinners. We say that he gave them authority to proclaim the terms and condi- tions on which God will forgive the penitent sin- ner who goes to him in Jesus' name. The Ro- man theory, when stripped to the skin, is simply this: The business of forgiving sins belongs to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But their sole agents are the priests of Rome. If you wanted to buy a Steinway piano, and should write to the central office of the company to ship you one, they would refer you to their agent in this city, and inform you that you must purchase through him. If you go to God and ask Him to forgive your sins, He will refer you to His agent, Father So-and-So, the priest of the parish within which you reside. You must get your sins forgiven through him, or carry them with you, through time and eternity. That is what I call blasphemy. It is damnable blasphemy for a sinful man to pretend that he is the sole agent through whom God will grant pardon and salva- tion to hundreds and thousands of souls. The second objection to auricular confession is that it is the invention of a corrupt and super- What Protestants Believe 75 stitious age. As I have proved, it was unknown to the apostles and the men who were inspired to write the New Testament. The Bible doctrine is that we are to confess our sins to God. If we have wronged any man, we are to confess the wrong to him and make restitution, if possible. We are to confess, in a general way, to the Church and to the world that we have sinned against God and that we now forsake our sins and take Jesus Christ as our Saviour and King. Christians are commanded by James to confess their faults to each other and to pray for each other. But that we must pour all our sinful acts and words and thoughts and desires into the ear of a priest is nowhere taught, or hinted at in the Word of God. The psalmist says: "I will confess my trans- gressions unto the Lord/' Jesus taught us to pray: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, for- give us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us." This is the origin of the confessional: In the fifth century it became the custom to require persons who had been expelled from the Church for gross sins to make a con- fession of the same before the public congrega- tion, as a condition of being restored to the fel- 76 What Protestants Believe lowship of God's people. This practice became unprofitable and disgusting to everybody. So a rule was made that the guilty one should confess privately to the minister, and he should make a very general report of the same to the Church. Out of that very simple and proper practice grad- ually grew the custom for everybody to go to the minister and confess before going to the Lord's table. But there was no law that Chris- tians must confess to the priest till the year 121 5 ; and the confessional, in its present shape, was not established till 1545. The confessional was not an institution of the primitive church. It was invented by men, at first in a harmless form and with a good intent. It has grown into a mighty engine of superstition, impiety and corruption. My third objection to the confessional is that it encourages and promotes wrongdoing and makes sin seem to the sinner to be a trifling af- fair. You Protestants have been taught that sin is an awful thing; that no one but God can for- give you ; that you can be forgiven only because Christ has died to atone for your sins ; and that God will not forgive you unless you are heartily sorry and intend never to sin again. But sup- What Protestants Believe 77 pose there were a man close at hand, no better than yourself, to whom you could go, once a month or once a quarter or once a year, and confess your sins and hear him say, "I forgive thee in the name of God," without knowing whether you were really sorry for your sins, and could come away thinking you were forgiven because a man had said so, and having no other intention than to go again for the same purpose next month or next quarter or next year. Would not that re- duce repentance to a mere form, make sin easy and encourage you to continue in the path of evil ? I am sure it would. Perhaps some very intelli- gent and conscientious Romanists get some good out of the confessional. But I am persuaded that to the great mass of them it is a cheap license to continue in sin. A Protestant lady, who had a Roman Catholic servant girl who was an invet- erate and consummate liar, told me that she said to her one day : "Maggie, how dare you lie so ?" "O," she said, "the priest will forgive me for fifty cents." Her idea of religion was to sin all she wanted and get forgiven at stated intervals for a stated price. You get in debt to your gro- cer every day and pay once a month. The Ro- 78 What Protestants Believe manist sins every day and settles with the priest whenever it is convenient, intending to run up another account, as soon as the old score is wiped out. The doctrine of the confessional encourages, if it does not directly teach, that idea. In prac- tice, if not in theory, the system of the confes- sional is a license to sin. My fourth objection to the confessional is that it is a vast engine of political despotism. The Roman hierarchy, with the pope at the head, has always undertaken to control the politics of the nations. The pope intends to rule this nation. He is putting forth all his power to that end. He is having splendid success. Through the priest wringing answers to all his questions from the penitent, in the confessional, the pope can know everything that takes place in every Roman Cath- olic home, in a majority of all Protestant homes, in every church, in ever lodge, in every business house, in every counting room, in the private councils of every political party and even in the most secret meetings of those societies which have been organized to defeat his schemes. Through the confessional there runs a private telegraphic wire, from every square acre of the surface of What Protestants Believe 79 Christendom to the Vatican Palace at Rome. That is the chief purpose for which the confes- sional was invented. My fifth objection to the confessional is that it destroys domestic peace and happiness by put- ting the priest between the husband and the wife, the parent and the child, the child and the child. I do not say that every Roman Catholic home is thus divided and destroyed. But I do say that there is a man who can thus divide and destroy, if he will ; and he often does. Out of every peni- tent who comes to the confessional, the father confessor can worm everything that the penitent knows. The wife in the confessional will tell the priest things about herself which she would not tell her husband. He can make her reveal her most secret thoughts to him. She will tell him things about her husband and her children which she would not reveal to any other soul on earth. There is no intimacy of conversation and thought in all the world that compares with that which exists between the priest and the penitent in the secrecy of the confessional. To say the least, that intimacy is very dangerous. What husband wants any man to come in between himself and his wife ? 80 What Protestants Believe What wife wants any man to come in between herself and her husband? What parent wants any man to come in between him and his child? The priest, through the confessional, is doing that all the time. I declare to you that it ought not so to be. The last count in my indictment of the confes- sional is the severest of all. I approach it with great reluctance. I cannot tell half the truth without being in danger of using language too in- delicate to be printed in a book. At the same time I may seem to some to be uncharitable and se- vere. I may be accused of railing, abuse and slander. My charge is that the confessional strongly tends to corrupt both the penitent and the priest. The theory of the confessional is that no sins are forgiven except those which are spe- cifically confessed. If you go to the confessional and keep back any sin, through willfulness, or ig- norance, or forgetfulness, that sin stands against you unforgiven and may sink you into hell. You may have done or said something sinful which you thought to be innocent. You may have cher- ished some impure thought, not realizing that it was unclean. You may have covered some What Protestants Believe 81 iniquity which you have honestly overlooked. Therefore, it is the solemn duty of the father con- fessor, which he neglects at the peril of his own damnation, to probe your mind with questions. He must ask you if you have done this or that or had this or that thought. He must go to the very bottom of your soul, and uncover every- thing, with his questions. In doing this he may suggest to your pure mind something so utterly vile that you had never thought of anything a thousandth part as black and filthy. A stain is thus left on your mind which time can never wholly wipe away. Other such suggestions are added, from time to time, till the chambers of your imagination are haunted with demons com- pared with which the imps of hell seem snow- white angels of mercy. While the confessor pol- lutes your mind, he, at the same time, pollutes his own ; and, as he hears many more confessions than you make, his mind becomes a hundred times blacker than yours. Both priest and peni- tent are now in just the right condition for the Devil to lure them into gross and abominable sin. It is not safe for the purest man and the most virtuous woman to face each other and hold such 82 What Protestants Believe conversations as must take place in the confes- sional I have, hidden away where no one can come upon it, a book, published in Latin by the Roman Church for the use of her priests in the confessional. It contains nothing but the ques- tions which the priest must put to his penitents. I have not looked into it for years. It is too ut- terly vile to be described. It could not pass through the mails, if it were printed in English. There are questions there, intended for the whit- est maidens and the most upright youths, which I should not dare to whisper into the ear of the vilest wretch in the world, at midnight, in the darkest corner of the deepest cellar. God, who reads my heart, knows that I am telling you the truth, or as much of the truth as I dare to tell. The horrors of the confessional are too black and putrid to be told ; they can only be imagined. Mul- titudes of priests, pure and noble men, have fled from the confessional, in utter horror, into the Protestant Church. If the Devil wanted to cor- rupt the whitest angel in Heaven, the best thing he could do would be to put him into the confes- sional, as confessor or penitent. I had an inti- mate friend, whom I received into the Methodist What Protestants Believe 83 Episcopal Church from the priesthood of the Romish Church. I knew him for years — a simple and pure-minded man. He told me many things about Rome which I never saw in books. I am sure he told me the truth. He never manifested any bitterness toward the religious body in which he was born. I asked him why he left Rome. "On account of the confessional/' he answered. "I could not endure its vileness." I had a lady in one of my congregations in Buffalo, who was born and reared in the Roman Catholic Church. She told a lady, through whom her words reached me, that when she went to confessional for the first time, such vile questions were put to her that she never went again, and had not been inside a Roman Church for many years. She had not become a member of any Protestant Church. But she could not be a Romanist any longer, at the price of going to the confessional. I do not wish to wound the feelings of any honest Roman- ist. But I must tell the truth about the confes- sional. It is the blackest spot in that whole sys- tem of error. I will not say that the Devil in- vented it. But it is just what I should expect from him. 84 What Protestants Believe The confessional is a fountain of corruption. In all the nations and in all the centuries it has been the source of seduction, adultery and for- nication. It holds out the temptation. It affords the opportunity. If the confessor is already vile, he has the most convenient chance to ensnare and destroy the female penitent. She trusts him be- cause of his office. He presents plausible ex- cuses. He justifies lust. He promises conceal- ment. He commands compliance. If he is pure, the atmosphere and conversation of the place tend powerfully to corrupt him and turn him into a fornicator and seducer. That this is fact and not theory is proved by the testimonies and confes- sions of multitudes who have abandoned the Church of Rome, by the writings of Roman au- thors and by the regulations which Rome herself has made to prevent and cure this evil. Let us look at the three sources of information. Many of the best and ablest men in the Roman priesthood have written about the confessional. There was Father Chiniquy, who left Rome, suf- fering the loss of all things but life and almost that. Read his "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome/' He tells all about the confessional. Read What Protestants Believe 85 Father Crowley, who left Rome but a short time ago. He was one of the ablest and most honored priests in the diocese of Chicago. He tells about the confessional in his book, "Romanism a Men- ace to the Nation." He calls the confessional a "diabolical system." There are scores of such books. As you read them, you cannot help be- lieving that they tell the truth. Their authors were not expelled from Rome. They left for conscience sake. They lost all by leaving. Then we have the testimony of men still in Rome. Count de Lasteyrie, a French Catholic, wrote a book entitled, "History of Auricular Con- fession." He quotes from Tertullian, Chrysos- tom, Augustine, Basil, Ambrose and other church fathers to show that among the early Christians confession of sins was made to God alone. He represents Augustine as saying "man cannot re- mit sins." He says that auricular confession was the invention of popes and councils. He gives scores of pages about the rottenness of the con- fessional, much wore than anything which I have given you. I will quote one of his paragraphs: "What effect can be expected from these unchaste conversations of the confessional, which, by ex- 86 What Protestants Believe citing the imagination, inspire wishes which may be satisfied the more easily as the satisfaction may reman unknown to the public? Confessors are inclined to give full scope to their passions in the confessional, inasmuch as they find, in every other circumstance of their calling, ob- stacles which their vow of continency imposes upon them. Indeed, what is easier than to seduce a young person who is known to be susceptible, or one who, already corrupted, ever seizes the opportunity of satisfying her inclinations? — an opportunity which invites still more to crime, as both parties are certain that nothing will tran- spire between two guilty persons equally inter- ested in keeping the secret." A Roman Catholic priest of Seville, Spain, wrote a book about the confessional, from which I will make a brief quotation. He says : "Filthy communication is inseparable from the confes- sional. The priest in the discharge of the duty imposed on him by the Church is bound to listen to the most abominable description of all manner of sins. He must inquire into every circumstance of the most profligate life. Men and women, the young and the old, the married and the single, What Protestants Believe 87 are bound to describe to the confessor the most secret actions and thoughts, which are either sin- ful in themselves, or may be so from accidental circumstances. Consider the danger to which the priests themselves are exposed — a danger so im- minent that popes have, on two occasions, been obliged to issue the most severe laws against con- fessors who openly attempt the seduction of their female penitents." The late Archbishop Kenrick was one of the ablest and learned Roman Catholics in America. While he was Bishop of Philadelphia, he pub- lished a Latin book on Moral Philosophy in three volumes. He devotes seven pages to the "crime of solicitation," in which he gives the papal leg- islation concerning seduction by the confessional — legislation which, of course, was demanded by the existence of the crimes therein prohibited. I will give you one paragraph, translated out of the bishop's book. "We scarcely dare to speak of that atrocious crime in which the office of hear- ing confession is perverted to the ruin of souls by impious men under the influence of their lusts. Would that we could regard it solely a conception of the mind and as something invented by the 88 What Protestants Believe enemies of the faith for the purposes of slander ! But it is not fit that we should be ignorant of the decrees which the pontiffs have issued to defend the sacredness of this sacrament." In the City of Seville, Spain, in the year 1563 so many complaints against seducing confessors were made by females that it took one hundred and twenty days to register them all, and the prosecution of them was abandoned because of their prodigious number. But I must drop this bad-smelling subject. I have lifted just a little the cover of this loath- some cesspool. I must let it fall back. I will end the discussion of the subject of confession and forgiveness where we started. God alone can forgive sins. We are to go directly to Him, with- out any father confessor, and ask Him to for- give us for the sake of Christ, our great High Priest. That is the doctrine of the Protestant Church. That is the doctrine of the Apostolic Church. That is the doctrine of the Holy Bible. THE BREAD AND WINE ON THE LORD'S TABLE REMAIN BREAD AND WINE "As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till he come." I Corinthians xi 126. These words from the inspired pen of the apostle Paul declare the meaning and purpose of the Lord's Supper. That Sacrament was insti- tuted by our blessed Lord on the last night of his life. It has been observed, with slight excep- tions, by all Christian denominations ever since. It is called by different names, such as the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, the Holy Communion and the Mass. The text tells why we celebrate the Lord's Supper. "Ye do show forth the Lord's death." The Greek word "show" means to an- nounce or proclaim, as a herald makes proclama- tion. The Lord's Supper is a proclamation to the eyes of men, as preaching is to their ears, of the glorious truth that Christ died for our sins. Every time the Lord's Supper is observed a pic- ture of Christ's death on the cross is held up be- 89 90 What Protestants Believe fore the eyes of every person who takes part and to every person who witnesses the ceremony. This passage also declares that this rite is to be ob- served by the Church till the second coming of Christ and the end of the age. The purpose of the Lord's Supper is to keep alive the doctrines of Christ's vicarious suffering and of his prom- ised return to earth ; and it is inconsistent and im- proper for anyone to take part in the celebration of the Lord's Supper who does not believe both of those doctrines. Does the Lord's Supper mean anything more than this ? Jesus himself said, when he instituted his Supper : "This cup is the New Testament in my blood which is shed for you." The word "testament" means covenant or contract. The Lord's Supper takes the place of the Jewish Pass- over. The blood of the paschal lamb, sprinkled on the door posts of the houses of the Jews, was the sign of the contract which God had made with them that the destroying angel should pass over and not harm anyone in their dwellings. The sacramental wine, symbolizing the blood of Calvary's Lamb, is the seal of God's contract with us to save us from eternal death. Every What Protestants Believe 91 time we partake of the Lord's Supper worthily (that is with true faith in Him) God renews his pledge to save us, and we become more fully the objects of his saving power. Thus the Lord's Supper is a means of grace. Paul calls the Lord's Supper the "communion of the body and blood of Christ." That may mean that the bread and wine are a sign of our participation in the benefits of Christ's sacrificial death ; or, if you please, it means that, when we worthily partake of the Lord's Supper, we do actually receive these benefits. Again, although the Bible does not exactly say so, I think we may affirm that the Lord's Supper is a sign of fellowship among God's people and a bond of union. We eat and drink together because we are brethren and that we may grow in brotherly love. Once more, we call the Lord's Supper a Sac- rament. That is not, however, a Bible word. The Sacramentum was the oath of allegiance which the Roman soldier took to his Emperor. The Lord's Supper is our oath of allegiance to our Emperor, the Lord Jesus Christ. Every time we 92 What Protestants Believe go to the Lord's table we solemnly renew our pledge to be his and his alone and forever. How can we make anything more of the Lord's Supper without running into fanaticism and folly? The truths which I wish to impress upon your minds are that the bread and grape juice on the Lord's table are nothing but bread and grape juice, after the minister has pronounced the prayer of. consecration. They have been con- secrated, or set apart, to a sacred use. But, physi- cally and actually, they are bread and grape juice just as they were before they were brought into the Lord's house. And, further, there is no mys- tic virtue in the bread and wine themselves. They can do you no good unless you receive them by faith. They may help your faith. They can- not take the place of faith. Here we and our Roman Catholic friends part company. They say that the sacrament has vir- tue in itself ; that it acts by its own inherent power. One of the popes says : "The sacraments contain grace and confer it on those who worthily re- ceive them." The Council of Trent says : "Who- soever shall affirm that grace is not conferred by the sacraments by their own power (ex opere What Protestants Believe 93 operato), but that faith in the divine promise is all that is necessary to obtain grace, let him be accursed." They make the sacraments saving or- dinances in themselves. They declare that when the officiating priest, at the Lord's table, says over the bread and wine "Hoc est meum corpus" and "Hoc est meus sanguis" — "this is my body" and "this is my blood" — the bread and wine be- come the actual, literal, physical flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. They call that change "transub- stantiation." They affirm that in transubstantia- tion the elements, and every particle thereof, con- tain Christ whole and entire — divinity, human- ity, soul, body and blood, with all their component parts. The whole God and man Christ Jesus is contained in the bread and wine, and in every particle of the bread, and every drop of the wine. If you were in front of the altar of a Roman Cath- olic church, and a priest stood there and, after speaking those mystic words, "Hoc est meum corpus," should take up the wafer and break off a crumb so small that you could not see it and should hold it up before your eyes, it would con- tain, and be, the whole of Christ — body, bones, blood, soul, humanity and deity — and it would 94 What Protestants Believe be your duty to fall down before it and worship it as your God. If you should come and kneel at the alter, the priest would place a wafer, or a por- tion of one in your mouth, and you would eat it, and in doing so you would masticate and swallow the literal flesh of your Savior, and his body, soul and divinity would pass into your stomach and, undergoing digestion, become a part of your- self. At the last supper in Jerusalem the apostles ate the flesh and drank the blood of their Master, just as literally and actually as though they had taken a knife and cut pieces of flesh from the limbs of Jesus and chewed and swallowed it warm and dripping with blood. If our Romanist friends do not use the words of that last sentence, they do say what means just that; for they insist that the bread and wine on their altars are changed into Christ's flesh and blood in the most literal meaning of those words. They also say that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper (or the Mass, as they call it) is a real sacrifice; that every time the mass is celebrated Christ is actually offered up as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. Let us examine this latter statement first. The Mass is a real "unbloody sacrifice/' Well, if it is What Protestants Believe 95 unbloody, it has no value; for the word of God declares that "without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins." In the second place the Bible declares, in Hebrews X:i4, that "by one offering Christ hath forever perfected them that are sanctified," and Peter says in his first letter, "Christ hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God," and Christ himself exclaimed on the cross, "It is fin- ished/' and yet Rome declares that Calvary is repeated every time the Mass is celebrated, and Christ has been offered up millions on millions of times since her hierarchy invented her doc- trine of the change of the bread and wine into flesh and blood. On what does Rome base the doctrine of tran- substantiation ? So far as the Bible is concerned, she bases it on the words of Jesus, at the last supper, "This is my body" and "This is my blood," and the words he spoke to the Jews, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." Romanists take those words literally and physically. We Prot- estants take them figuratively and spiritually. The Bible abounds in figurative language: 96 What Protestants Believe and everybody who talks uses figurative language. Why could not Christ use figurative language? We know he did constantly. He was the great- est user of parables among all the teachers who ever lived. Why may we not believe that he was using figurative language when he said: "This bread is my body?" In telling the meaning of Pharaoh's dream, Joseph said: "The seven fat cows are seven years of plenty; the seven lean cows are seven years of famine." Did Joseph mean that the cows were actually years? Any little child in the Primary Department of our Sunday School would understand that Joseph meant : "The seven lean cows represent, or stand for, seven years of plenty." Jesus said to his dis- ciples : "Ye are the salt of the earth." Did he mean that they were literally chloride of sodium? He might have meant that, if he had been talk- ing to Lot's wife. But talking to human beings like us, Christians, he cannot mean anything more than that we are like salt ; salt, in certain respects, represents those who have the saving grace of God in their hearts. Jesus appeared to John on the Isle of Patmos and said: "I am alpha and omega. I am the root and offspring of David What Protestants Believe 97 and the bright and morning star." Could he have meant that he was literally the first and last let- ters of the Greek alphabet; that he was a root; that he was a star? If he was divine, he could not literally be all these things at the same time. It seems to me that the biggest ignoramus in the world would understand that he meant that he was represented by the first letter of the alphabet and the last ; that he was like a root ; that he was like a morning star. Jesus said : "I am the way. " Did he mean that he was literally a road ? He said : "I am the door." Could he have meant that he was literally a material door, swinging on its hinges? "I am the good shepherd." Did he literally tend sheep? No, he was a carpenter. "I am the vine; ye are the branches." Did he mean that he was literally a grape vine and his disciples were literal branches, growing out of him and bearing literal grapes? Every- body understands what this figurative language means. He meant: "Look at that grape vine. It represents me ; and the branches represent my disciples. That door represents me. Just as you have to go through a door to get into a house, so you must enter Heaven through me." "See 98 What Protestants Believe that shepherd. In his constant care for his sheep he represents me in my care for the souls that trust in me." In all these quotations the words am and is and are mean "resemble," "represent," "stand for" and similar ideas. So when Jesus said : "This is my body," "This is my blood," he meant, "This bread represents my body," "This wine represents my blood." We must not throw away our reason and common sense, when we read the Bible, and make fools of ourselves and turn the word of God into nonsense and fool- ishness. Everybody talks in figurative language, and nobody misunderstands. Figurative language is just as plain and definite as language which is to be taken literally; and it is much more forcible and is longer remembered. A man undertakes to describe a worthless and impracticable fellow, of which no good use can be made. He condenses a whole paragraph into a pithy figure of speech. He says: "He is a crooked stick." Is anybody so brainless as to suppose that he means that the fellow is literally a stick of wood twisted out of shape? Why should anyone be so foolish as to suppose that when Jesus said, "This bread is my What Protestants Believe 99 body/' he meant that the piece of baked dough had actually been turned into animal tissue, filled with nerves and minute blood vessels ? Jesus could not have meant that the piece of bread, which he held in his hand, was his own flesh, and that his whole humanity and divinity were in the bread; for there he was right before them. Jesus was not the bread. The bread was not Jesus. He was one thing and the bread was quite another. It is altogether probable that Jesus ate with his disciples and drank with them. He ate some of the bread of which he had said : 'This is my body/' and drank some of the wine, of which he said: "This is my blood." That is, Christ ate his own flesh and drank his own blood. That is an absurd, a horrible and a disgusting thought ! Jesus did tell the Jews that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they would have eter- nal life. In their grossness and spiritual stupid- ity, they may have understood him literally. But he made himself plain. He said: "He that be- lieveth on me hath everlasting life." "Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath ever- lasting life." Put those two sentences together. 100 What Protestants Believe They were spoken to the same crowd. Do you not get the meaning? To eat Christ's flesh and to drink his blood is to believe on him. I suppose he put the idea of believing on him into that strik- ing form, that he might impress the minds of those people and make them remember his words. And then you must remember that he had fed them miraculously, a few hours before, and they had come to him to get another good meal. So he told them that he himself was the bread they most needed and that they were to feed on him by faith. The whole lesson is spoiled, if you take the Saviour's words literally. If the bread and wine on the Lord's table be- come flesh and blood, the change is a miracle. Does a miracle take place every time the Mass is celebrated in a Roman Catholic Church ? Certain facts characterize all the miracles of the Bible. First, they are rare — few and far between. There were a great many miracles wrought in Bible times. But you should remember that they cov- ered a period of more than four thousand years. If they were distributed evenly, they would stand very far apart in time, and much farther in space. They were very exceptional. But the miracle of What Protestants Believe 101 transubstantiation takes place hundreds of thou- sands of times, in hundreds of thousands of places, every week. Since Christ instituted the Lord's Supper the miracle of changing bread and wine to flesh and blood has been performed millions of millions of times. Do you believe that the Al- mighty, who usually works according to fixed laws, has stepped outside of his ordinary track so many times and made so great a miracle so exceedingly cheap? Do you believe that he has given every Roman Catholic priest, no matter how careless and ignorant and vile (there have been vile and ignorant priests as there have been vile and ignorant Protestant ministers), the power to turn bread and wine into the literal flesh and blood of his only-begotten Son, whenever he will, by simply mumbling two short Latin sentences over the plate and cup? Believe it if you can. It is too much for me. Again, the miracles of the Bible were almost always wrought to confirm some divine message or to prove the truth of some doctrine. But what doctrine does transubstantiation prove ? Nobody knows that the bread has been turned into flesh. It was bread before the priest said: "Hoc est 102 What Protestants Believe meum corpus/' It seems to be bread now. If the priest, standing at the altar, could hold up a piece of bread and say: "Beloved, I am a mes- senger sent from God to preach the everlasting gospel. That you may know that I come from God, I will turn this bread into flesh," and then could perform the miracle and let the crowd come up and feel of the morsel in his hand and taste it and see for themselves that the bread had really become flesh, there would be some value in such a miracle as that. As it is, the priest professes to turn the bread into flesh and the wine into blood. But, so far as taste and smell and touch and sight and chemical analysis can determine, the bread and wine are bread and wine still. The only evidence we have that the priest has turned the bread into flesh is his own word. If his word is sufficient evidence for the miracle, why do we need the miracle to prove that he is a messenger sent to us from God. There is no evidential value to a miracle which does not seem to be a miracle. Once more, miracles always speak for them- selves. When Jesus turned water into wine at Cana, everybody who tasted the beverage said it was wine, and the governor of the feast said it What Protestants Believe 103 was the best they had had since the seven days' feast began. When God turned Aaron's rod into a serpent, in the presence of Pharaoh, it looked like a serpent and it proved that it was by swal- lowing the serpent-rods of the king's magicians. When Moses, by the hand of God, turned the River of Egypt into blood, it looked like blood and smelt and tasted so bad that the Egyptians could not drink it. Suppose Moses had said to them : "I will turn your waters into blood," and, after he had said : "Hocus pocus," the water had looked and smelt and tasted just as it always had. Would they not have laughed him to scorn and called him a fool and a fraud. What if Jesus, at the grave of his friend, had said: "Lazarus, come forth," and the dead man had not stirred, and his cold, closed eyes had not opened, and, turning to the sisters, the Master had said : "Dry your tears, your brother is alive." What a mock- ery of sorrow that would have been. But when the Lord of life spoke, the dead arose and walked forth, and everybody knew he was alive. What sort of a miracle is it that does not reveal itself to any of the senses, which nobody can discover, which has to be accepted on the credit of the per- 104 What Protestants Believe son who pretends to perform it ? Suppose that I claim to have power to turn lead to gold. You bring me a piece of lead pipe. I hold it up before you and say: "Hocus pocus." Then I tell you that it is gold. You come up and examine it. It looks like lead. You take your pocket knives, and it cuts like lead. You hold it in the gas flame, and it melts like lead. You take it to a chemist, and he smiles at your ignorance and tells you that it is lead. What would you think of me? What would you call me? If the priests of Rome did actually change bread to flesh and wine to blood, and had been doing it for hundreds of years in thousands of places, and had never once failed when they tried (that is what they claim), every- body would know it, there would be no chance for debate, and the doctrine of transubstantiation would be as firmly established as the astronomical truth that the earth revolves around the sun. But when they have changed the bread to flesh and the wine to blood, the elements look and feel and taste and smell just as they did before and pos- sess all the chemical properties they had before, and no others. How can we help saying that the whole thing is a delusion and a fraud? Is there What Protestants Believe 105 a Roman Catholic priest in all the world who hon- estly believes that he has the power to change bread to flesh and wine to blood ? The doctrine of transubstantiation contradicts an axiom of natural science. The same body can be in but one place at the same time. The body of our Saviour cannot be in Heaven and on earth, and on ten thousand altars, whole and entire, at the same time. That is what the priests of Rome assert. I suppose that, every Sabbath morning, there are millions of pieces of consecrated wafer in the world. Every one of them is Christ's body whole and entire. Christ's body is in a million places at the same time. It is his body, observe. If they only said that Christ's spiritual presence is everywhere we would not object. That we be- lieve. But that his body, in which he rose from the tomb and ascended into heaven, is in a mil- lion places at one and the same time, we cannot believe. Again, the doctrine of transubstantiation con- tradicts a mathematical axiom. One is one, and not two, nor any other number. A single thing is not a thousand or a million things. According to Rome, the single body of our Lord is in innu- 106 What Protestants Believe merable places at once, or else his single body is ten thousand bodies. There are some things which the Almighty cannot do. He cannot make twice two three. He cannot make one a thou- sand. He cannot put the same body into a thou- sand places at the same time. Jie cannot put the whole body, soul and blood of his only-begot- ten son into a million crumbs of bread at the same instant. And yet, Rome declares, we must believe this or be eternally damned. I object to the doctrine of transubstantiation because it is a human invention. It was unknown to the apostolic Church. You can find no trace of it in the New Testament, unless it be in the Scripture passages which I have expounded. His- tory shows clearly when and how it came to be put into the creed of the Church of Rome. A monk named Eutyches seems to have been the first person who suggested that the bread on the communion table was the literal flesh of Christ. That was in the year 400, or thereabouts. It was a long time before the new creed gained any considerable number of converts. It was con- demned by Pope Gelasius. Hear what that in- fallible Head of the Church said: "The sacra- What Protestants Believe 107 ment of the body and blood of Christ, which we receive, is a divine thing. Nevertheless, the substance or nature of the bread and wine ceases not to exist ; and, assuredly, the image and simili- tude of the body and blood of Christ are cele- brated/' That is what we Protestants believe. Many other popes and several councils of the Church condemned the new and strange doctrine. All the early church fathers teach the Protestant doctrine of the Lord's Supper. There are a few of them who, in some of their writings, use lan- guage which seems to agree with the present Ro- man Catholic theory. But, in other parts of their books, they make it clear that they were using only figurative forms of speech. There was a fierce war of words over the matter, which lasted for centuries. At last, in the dark ages, when science and learning were almost dead, and all sorts of superstitions were freely accepted, a pope arose who made up his mind that the bread and wine do become the literal body and blood of Christ. His name was Nicholas. He called a council of bishops and, under threats of death by fire, in- duced them to vote that: "The bread and wine on the altar are the Lord's real body and blood, 108 What Protestants Believe which, not only in a sacramental but also in a sensible manner, are broken by the hands of the priest and ground by the teeth of the faithful." That was about the year 1045. And yet the new doctrine did not fully get into the creed of the Roman Catholic Church till 12 15. Down to that date a man could get to Heaven without believ- ing that the bread becomes flesh and the wine blood. But now you must believe that or be ever- lastingly damned in the flames of hell. Whether that curse, pronounced by the Council of Trent, reacts upon those who lived and died before the year 121 5, I do not know. But I should suppose that what is true now must have always been true. Another objection to the doctrine of transub- stantiation is that it exalts the priest too far above the people and tends to fill him with pride and unholy lust for power. It makes him a miracle- worker. It endows him with divine power. It puts the lives of the people in his hands. They cannot sustain spiritual life without eating the flesh of Christ, and they cannot get the flesh of Christ except from the hands of the priest. It is not safe for fallen human beings to have such What Protestants Believe 109 power. The ministers of the meek and lowly Jesus ought not to have the temptation to such self-exaltation placed in their way. Because they can turn a wafer into God, the people almost wor- ship them, and they become — many of them — spiritual despots. Notice the broad line which the doctrine of the Mass draws between the ministry and the laity. Although Paul, writing to the Church at Corinth, says in our text, "As oft as ye drink this cup, ye do show forth the Lord's death till his coming again," the priests of Rome do not let the lay members of the Church have a drop of the communion wine. Where do they get their authority for that ? They have helped them- selves to it, contrary to the command of Jesus himself. Another objection to the doctrine of transub- stantiation is that it is a kind of idolatry. The priest turns a bit of bread into God, and the people fall down and worship it. In some countries the people call the consecrated wafer "the good God." In some countries the "host," as they call the consecrated bread, is carried through the streets in a splendid procession, and the people, all along the line of march, fall down on their knees and 110 What Protestants Believe faces and worship a piece of dough. Those words might shock a devout Romanist. But do they not express the truth? If they do not worship the bread, what are they doing. The doctrine of transubstantiation turns the spiritual religion of Christ into a lifeless form. The Bible teaches us that it is faith in an unseen Christ that saves the soul. This doctrine teaches that we receive the life and saving grace of Christ by eating his literal flesh and taking into our stomachs the physical Christ. Paul declared that he did not know Christ after the flesh. The priests of Rome cannot say that. This doctrine which I am opposing degrades the atonement of Christ. The Bible declares that he made a perfect atonement for the sins of the whole world on the cross. As he was expiring he exclaimed: "It is finished." But Rome de- clares that Christ must be offered for our sins every Sabbath day, and oftener, and puts the blessed Christ into the hands of a man (he might be the vilest of the vile) to be offered up for us. The last count in my indictment against the doctrine of transubstantiation is that it makes infidels. Almost all the educated and intelligent What Protestants Believe 111 men in Roman Catholic countries are infidels. They know nothing about any kind of Christian* ity but Romanism. Romanism demands that they shall believe that the priests — some of them very ignorant and vicious — can turn bread and wine to flesh and blood. They know that that is a fraud and a lie, and so they conclude that the whole Christian scheme is a delusion or an invention of selfish and scheming men. It is a well-known fact that France and Italy are nations of infidels. The Roman Church with its pretended miracles is the chief cause. I have heard this story, which I believe to be true. A very bright and well-educated Ameri- can lady married into a wealthy family of Ro- manists. She was wealthy before her marriage and belonged to a family of great influence and respectability. She remained a Protestant, as she had been born and educated. Her husband and his friends were very anxious to convert her to their faith. Every effort was put forth. The most cultured and skillful and winning priests and bishops visited her and tried to remove her objections to the doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome. One after another of the forts 112 What Protestants Believe built around her mind and soul were captured till only one remained. She told her teachers that she could not believe the doctrine of transubstaru- tiation. They could not convince her that every priest could make God out of dough. Finally she proposed a test. She said to the bishop : "If you will consent to have an altar erected in my home and turn my parlor into a chapel, and you will come and celebrate the Mass here, and officiate yourself, and let me prepare the wafer (accord- ing to your direction), I will join your Church." The bishop consented, although it was against the rules. But the game was so big, he thought he could afford to depart from the usual practice. So everything was made ready, and the celebra- tion of the Mass began, with the bishop for cele- brant and many friends to communicate. Just as the bishop came to the place where he had to eat the wafer, which was now nothing but the flesh of Jesus Christ, the lady called to him sharply: "Don't eat that ; I have put strychnine in it." The ceremony stopped right there; and the lady re- mained a Protestant. Now, if the Right Reverend Bishop had really believed what he professed to believe, that the wafer was no longer bread, but What Protestants Believe 113 the real, literal body, soul, blood and divinity of Jesus Christ, he would not have hesitated an in- stant to take it into his mouth and stomach. There could be no strychnine in Christ's body, in Christ's soul, in Christ's blood, in Christ's divinity. As soon as the Romanist begins to say: "But" and "and" and "well" and "you don't understand" and "we don't mean that the bread becomes Christ's body in that sense," he admits all that we Prot- estants claim, namely, that the bread on the Lord's table is Christ's body in a symbolic sense, that it represents his body, and the wine represents his blood. That is the eternal truth of God, and if Rome were wise, she would abandon that relic of a superstitious and barbarous age and say with Paul: "As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show — proclaim — the Lord's death till he come." 114 What Protestants Believe I was well grounded in the faith of the old his- toric Church, but through the reading of the Gos- pels and the writings of the Apostles, my mind was awakened and quickened into a new life. / began to think. Then I found that the mutterings of a man in a dead tongue brought no sense of forgiveness of sin ; prayers to dead saints, or the Virgin Mary, left no assurance of answers there- to; and a wafer blessed by a priest was a poor substitute for Him who says, "I am the Bread of Life" Samuel McGerald, D. D. THE ROAD TO HEAVEN DOES NOT RUN THROUGH HELL. "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgression from us." Psalm ciii:i2. This is a wonderful passage. The writer must have had great scientific knowledge. Why did he not say: "As far as the north is from the south, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us ?" That would have been a fearful blunder, which, perhaps, no one would have noticed then, but which would excite the ridicule and scorn of all infidels today. The Spirit of infinite wisdom kept the psalmist from saying north and south and made him say "east and west." The north and south are only twelve thousand miles apart, while the distance between the east and the west is in- finite. The meaning of the text is that when God forgives our sins, his forgiveness is perfect; he puts our sins so far away from us that they will never come back, and we need not fear that the penalty for them will ever be visited upon us. Is this consoling and joyous thought presented any- 115 116 What Protestants Believe where else in the Bible ? Yes, in very many places. In the beginning of this psalm we read: "Bless the Lord, O my soul and forget not all his bene- fits, who forgiveth all thine iniquities." When God forgives our iniquities, he forgives not a part of them, but every one. The prophet Isaiah, in praising God for what he had done for him, says : 'Thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back." In the forty-third chapter of Isaiah, God is rep- resented as saying: "I am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins." I do not know just what forgetfulness is with God. I do not suppose that he forgets in the absolute meaning of that word ; but he acts and feels toward the pardoned sinner as he would if he had actually forgotten his sins, as he would if those sins had never been com- mitted. The same thought is repeated in the tenth chapter of Hebrews : 'Their sins and inqui- ries will I remember no more." Then we have such passages as these : "If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleaneth us from all sin," and, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, What Protestants Believe 117 and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." It is the teaching of God's word, from beginning to end, that when God forgives sin he does it per- fectly and absolutely, so that the pardoned sinner is as innocent before high Heaven as though he had never sinned. When a sinner is forgiven, there is nothing left over for him to work out, either in this world or the world to come. The Bible also teaches that when God forgives a man his sins he, at the same time, begins a work of cleansing. He instantly gives him a new heart and "renews a right spirit within him." He takes away the love of sin and implants a desire to do the perfect will of Heaven. The man who plans to sin every day and to get forgiven at longer or shorter intervals is not a Christian at all; he has not learned the first letter in the alphabet of sal- vation. If the pardoned and regenerated sinner follows on to know the Lord, he continually grows in grace and holiness, till he reaches a point where the blood of Ctitiat cleanses him from all sin and he is fit for the inheritance of the saints in glory. If he dies before that time, if he dies walking in the light and striving after perfect holiness, God cuts short the work of purification, 118 What Protestants Believe makes him whiter than snow in the blood of the Lamb and puts him among all the blood-washed before the celestial throne. Nothing but the blood of Christ can cleanse the soul, and the cleansing work must all be finished before the soul leaves the shores of time. Nothing but the blood of Christ can cleanse from sin ; and all its cleansing power is at the command of faith, here and now. Is there any Scripture authority for saying that the dying Christian goes directly into that state and place of blessedness which we call Heaven? Let us see. When David's infant son died, he said to those about him : "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." Where had that in- nocent, sinless infant gone? Is there any doubt that it went to the home of the blessed? David said, in substance, 'There is where I shall go when I die." David, at this time, had repented of his foul crimes and had been forgiven. When the beggar Lazarus died he "was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom." That was the name which the Jews gave to Paradise, the home of the blessed and holy after death. There was no delay whatever in the case of Lazarus. He went straight from Dives' back door to the home What Protestants Believe 119 of the glorified saints and angels, as Dives went straight to a place of torment. Christ said to the dying thief on the cross: 'This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise/' If anybody ought to spend a period of cleansing and preparation, after death, before being admitted to the presence of God, it would seem to be a robber and murderer, who repented just before he drew his last breath. If he, after a life of crime, without baptism, with- out the Lord's Supper, without joining the Church, without confirmation, without any of the means of grace, repenting and praying and be- lieving in the agonies of death, was fit for Para- dise, certainly the godly men and women in our churches, who have walked with Christ for a score of years, ought to go straight to Paradise when they die. Paul spoke of death as depart- ing and being with Christ. The dying Stephen prayed: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit/' Do you think that prayer was answered? If it was the dying saint went directly to the place where Jesus is. John on Patmos "heard a voice from Heaven saying, Write, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors ; and 120 What Protestants Believe their works do follow them." Blessed means happy. The dead who die in the Lord are all true Christians. "Henceforth" means from the very moment when they die. So we know posi- tively that all who die in the Lord go, without any delay, to a state and place of rest and hap- piness. This is the doctrine of Protestantism, of primitive Christianity and of God's holy word. But Rome contradicts all these words. Rome says that when God, through the priest and the confessional, forgives sin, he does not forgive it perfectly. He forgives so far as the eternal con- sequences of sin are concerned; he forgives so far that the penitent may get to Heaven at last ; but he leaves a portion of the penalty of sin to be worked out and suffered for in this world and in the world to come. King David prayed : "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean ; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow." But if there had been a Roman Catholic priest at his elbow, he would have said: "No, David, you are asking for too much. God will not make you whiter than snow, or as white as snow. He will let you into Heaven some time. But he will leave you spotted with sin, and you will have to have the spots What Protestants Believe 121 rubbed off gradually by doing penance and suf- fering unknown agonies here and hereafter." Rome holds that a few souls — one in a million, perhaps — are so fine and white and holy that they pass, at death, directly into Paradise. But the great mass of her members, including popes, car- dinals, bishops, archbishops, abbots, monks, nuns, priests and laymen, go first to a place of torment, called Purgatory. Where Purgatory is no one of them positively knows. Some think it is down in the heart of the earth, from which such vol- canoes as Vesuvius, which is near the headquar- ters of Romanism, vomits out its fire and brim- stone. All agree that it is a place of punishment and that fire is the instrument of punishment which is employed. Some say that, while it lasts, it is as bad as hell itself. It is a temporary hell. And so we may say that Rome teaches that, for the vast majority of her people, the road to Heaven runs through hell. Purgatory is for Ro- man Catholics alone. It is the temporary abode of imperfect Christians. In Purgatory good Ro- manists suffer for their sins, which God did not remove as far from them as the east is from the west, and have the stains of sin and the remains 122 What Protestants Believe of the carnal mind and all their evil dispositions burned out. All who go to Purgatory will finally go through to Heaven. No Protestant ever goes to Purgatory. Every Protestant goes straight to hell, when he dies. There is no possible help for that. All Roman Catholic authorities are unanimous in that dec- laration. There is no possible salvation for any- one who does not belong to the Church of Rome, and who does not die in that faith. When we charge our Romanist friends with holding that uncharitable creed, they try to deny it; I doubt not that some of them think it is not so. But all of their theologians and all their books and all their councils and all their popes declare that there is no salvation but in union with Rome. I was talking with a very pleasant and intelligent lady a few weeks ago at her home. She said : 'T am a Catholic. But I am not one of the kind who believe that all Catholics will go to Heaven, and all Protestants will go to hell/' She, evidently, was not well instructed upon the creed of her church. All true, loyal, obedient and well in- formed Romanists do, and must, believe that all Protestants go to hell. Just look at the matter, for What Protestants Believe 123 a moment. There is no salvation without the for- giveness of sin ; and there is no forgiveness except through the priest and the confessional. We Prot- estants have never been absolved by a priest. There is no salvation without eating the literal flesh of Jesus Christ. We Protestants have never been to the Mass to get Christ's flesh from the hands of his priests. There is no salvation without the mediation of the Virgin Mary. We quoted in a previous chapter, over and over again, from Ligouri's "Glories of Mary/' that the Virgin is the only way to Christ. Ligouri says — and the infallible pope endorses Ligouri — "Whoever wishes to find Jesus, will not find him except through Mary." We Protestants honor the mem- ory of that good woman ; but we utterly repudiate her mediation. One more, there is no salvation except in union with the Pope of Rome. The Vatican Council, held at Rome in 1870, sent out this decree: "All the faithful must believe that the Roman Pontiff is the successor of the blessed Peter, and the true Vicar of Christ and the head of the whole Church. This is the doctrine of Catholic truth, from which no one can depart without loss of faith and salvation." But we 124 What Protestants Believe Protestants do most emphatically depart from that "truth" and pronounce it a lie. So we Prot- estants are all damned four times over. Protes- tantism has certainly produced some very beau- tiful, and Christlike characters, both men and women, who loved God and their fellow men and served Jesus Christ and bore his image and blessed the world and died in holy rapture, with the atmosphere of Heaven all about them, confi- dently expecting to go to Heaven. But they are all in hell, simply because they could not believe, what the Bible nowhere teaches, that the priest can forgive sin; the bread and wine on the Lord's table become flesh and blood; that the Vir- gin Mary is the mediator between God and man; and that the Pope of Rome is the head of the Church. If you were a good, true, loyal Ro- man Catholic, fully accepting all that your Church teaches, and had two daughters, and one of them should become a Protestant and the wife of a Protestant minister and should be as pure as an angel and as full of good works as Dorcas of old ; and the other should become a vile woman of the town, but should continue in union with the pope and his Church : you would mourn more over the What Protestants Believe 125 former than the latter. There would be abso- lutely no hope for the accursed heretic, who had left the bosom of Holy Mother Church ; while the other, by receiving the last sacraments of the Church in the dying hour, could, some time, get home to Heaven. The most damning of all sins is to be out of harmony with the Church of Rome and to refuse to accept her unreasonable and un- scriptural doctrines, invented by superstitious and ignorant men, in the darkness of the middle ages. We are more charitable than our Roman Catho- lic friends and neighbors. They are bound to be- lieve that we are all on the road to hell. We believe that very many of them, in spite of the dangerous errors which have been taught them from the cradle, are Christians and are on the road to Heaven. Purgatory is a temporary hell, fitted up for im- perfect Christians, for Roman Catholics alone. There they will be tortured with fire till they have suffered an equivalent for all their unfor- given sins and till all the stains of inbred and actual sin have been burned out of their souls. How long they will have to wallow in those awful flames, no one pretends to know. But some of the 126 What Protestants Believe theologians of Rome believe that it will, in some cases, be millions of years. The length of time will depend upon the degree of their sinfulness; but not so much upon that as upon the amount of money their friends on earth are able, or will- ing, to expend in hiring priests to offer prayers and say masses in their behalf, or in the purchase of indulgences for the dead. If a rich man and a poor man, equally good or equally bad, die and go to Purgatory at the same time, the poor man will have to stay there the longer time. The difference may amount to thousands of years. There are two ways to shorten the time of a soul in the torments of Purgatory. If you ask what they are, the answer is "Indulgences" and "Masses." The Roman Catholic theory is that there is an immense bank in Heaven, filled with the super-abundant merits of Christ and his saints. All the merits of Christ's sufferings and death are there on deposit and the merits of the saints who lived better lives than it was neces- sary for them to live. The pope and his priests hold the keys to that bank. The pope is the pres- ident of the bank ; the cardinals are directors ; the bishops and priests are cashiers and tellers and What Protestants Believe 127 .officers of different grades and ranks. They can transfer these deposits of merit and check them over to the credit of the living and the dead, so as to lessen the severity of their punishment and shorten their stay amid the flames of Purgatory. Some Protestants have a false idea of this mat- ter of Indulgences. They think that a man can buy a license to commit sin. Some of the Ro- manists themselves think so; and the priests let them think so, in order to make the business of selling Indulgences more thriving and profitable. The bandits of Italy, just before starting out to commit robbery and murder, will go to a priest and buy an Indulgence, thinking that that will save them from guilt for all the innocent blood they shed. In the days of Luther, Tetzel sold Indulgences to raise money for Pope Leo X to finish St. Peter's Church at Rome. He told the ignorant multitude that he could sell them a full license to commit any sin and crime they might desire — so much for murder, so much for adul- tery, so much for theft. But that is not the idea. I want to be perfectly just with Rome. She teaches that no one will get to Heaven, unless his sins have been forgiven in this world by a priest. 128 What Protestants Believe But an Indulgence will remove, or diminish, the suffering which he must endure, here or in Pur- gatory, after his sins have been forgiven. One of the strongest objections against the doctrine of Indulgences is that it is sure to be misunderstood by the multitude, and the priests are under great temptation to let, or make, them misunderstand. The people think money will buy the right to commit sin with impunity; and their spiritual guides — some of them — encourage them to think so. Well, then, the Pope and his priests can grant Indulgences to shorten Purgatory and to cool its flames. How are Indulgences obtained? By at- tending the Pope's Jubilee, by making a pilgrim- age to some sacred place, by attending worship in some designated church, by giving money to build or repair a church, or for some other such purpose. If I were a Roman Catholic priest and were raising money to build a new church, or to pay a debt on an old one, I should get authority from the Pope or bishop, if I could, to offer so much of Indulgence, so many days off of Purga- torial pains, to everyone who would give so much money for my cause. It could be applied for the benefit of the living or the dead. That is a very What Protestants Believe 129 common way to raise money in the Roman Cath- olic Church. The other way to draw on the Bank of Heaven for the shortening and lessening of Purgatorial pains, is prayers and masses. If the priest cele- brates the Mass — that is the Lord's Supper — for you, or some friend of yours who is dead, that will take off so much from your suffering after you get to Purgatory, or from his, now that he is there. Just how much one mass will amount to, nobody knows. That is a secret which has not been revealed even to the Pope himself. But here is the interesting part : you can't get a mass for yourself or your friend, unless you pay for it. You would suppose that such holy and benevo- lent men as the priests of Rome profess to be, if they really believed that their prayers and masses would relieve souls who are wallowing in awful agony amid the flames of Purgatory and lift them into the joys of Paradise, would spend their days and nights, all the time they could possibly spare, and wear their flesh down to the bone, praying for the unhappy dead, and not charge one cent. Wouldn't you, if you were a priest, and believed as they profess to believe ? You would be a heart- 130 What Protestants Believe less wretch, if you would not. But no money, no masses. No cash, no prayers for the dead in Purgatory. Some masses cost much more than others. They have many different kinds of masses. I do not know the names of all of them, and I do not understand how they differ. But some pour more water on the flames of Purgatory than others, and cost more money. As was said a little time ago, the length of time a soul must stay in Purgatory and the amount of anguish he must suffer there, depend much more upon his earthly bank account than upon the kind of a life he has lived. There would have been small chance for the beggar Lazarus, if he had gone to Purga- tory. It was fortunate for him that Purgatory had not been invented in his day. There is much more that could be said about Purgatory. I know that I have described it fairly and honestly, as it exists in the creed of the Church of Rome. Protestants reject the whole scheme of Purga- tory. There is an intermediate state between death and the resurrection and, possibly, an inter- mediate place between earth and Heaven. It is probably a state of growth. But we do not be- lieve that it is a state of punishment. "Blessed What Protestants Believe 131 are the dead who die in the Lord, from hence- forth." There are six reasons, which I will name, why we do not believe in the Roman Catholic Purga- tory. First, the whole thing is absurd and ridicu- lous. The idea that the payment of money and the saying of masses and the pretended turning of bread and wine to flesh and blood could re- lease souls from the punishment which they de- serve! What kind of a God would he be who would release a soul from merited punishment because his friends on earth had money to pay for masses, and make another soul, just as good, stay there for ages because his relatives on earth were poor ? If the Pope holds the keys of Purga- tory, as his followers believe, why does he not swing open the gates and let all the prisoners escape to Paradise, without money and without price ? He would, if he had a spark of humanity in his breast and believed what he professes to believe. Secondly, the doctrine of Purgatory is contrary to the Bible. You remember the reference which I quoted at the beginning of this sermon. "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he 132 What Protestants Believe removed our transgressions from us." Where is there any place for Purgatory ? "Blessed are the dead, who died in the Lord." "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise," Jesus said to the robber, dying at his side. Nobody, reading noth- ing but the Bible, would ever dream of such a thing as Purgatory. There is not one clear state- ment of such a doctrine between the lids of this book. Why did not Paul and John and Peter say something about it in their epistles? Why did they not exhort the churches to raise funds to be spent in praying their deceased relatives out of torment? There are a few obscure verses in the Bible which the Roman theologians try to twist into proof texts for Purgatory. Jesus said that a certain sin could not be forgiven either in this world or in the world to come. They say that Jesus implied that some sins could be for- given in the other world. But that text is too small to hold Purgatory and all that goes with it. What Jesus said was only another way of say- ing that that sin could never be forgiven. Paul to the Corinthians tells about certain persons who build poor buildings on a good foundation and yet save their souls "so as by fire." Therefore, What Protestants Believe 133 say the Romanists, some souls will escape eternal fire through the temporary flames of Purgatory. But all these passages can be rationally explained without Purgatory, and there is not one that can- not. There is one tremendous verse in the Bible which knocks Purgatory out of existence. "If we walk in the light as He (God) is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth us from all sin." According to Rome, it is the fires of Purgatory that cleanse us from all sin. The blood cleanses from all sin ; and when the blood has ex- erted its cleansing power, there is nothing for purgatorial fires to do. Thirdly, Purgatory is a human invention. It was unknown to the early Church. The Church fathers, for many centuries after the death of the apostles, knew nothing about Purgatory. Origin, in 212, said: "We, after the labors and striv- ings of this life, hope to be in the highest heav- ens/ 5 Macarius, in 315, said: "When the faith- ful go out of their bodies the choirs of angels receive their souls into the proper places, to the pure world, and so lead them to the Lord." St. Athanasius, one of the greatest of the great schol- 134 What Protestants Believe ars of the early Church, in the fourth century, said : "To the righteous it is not death, but only a change, for they are changed from this world to an eternal rest. And as a man comes out of prison, so do the saints go from this troublesome life to the good things prepared for them." They do not attack Purgatory by name; for they had never heard of a Purgatory for Christians. Pur- gatory was a heathen notion. After the Church became corrupt she borrowed Purgatory from the old Greeks and Romans. But it did not get into the creed till the tenth century. Mosheim, one of the very highest authorities in church history, says: "The clergy, finding these superstitious fears admirably adapted to increase their author- ity and promote their interest, used every method to augment them; and by the most pathetic dis- courses, accompanied by monstrous fables and fictitious miracles, they labored to establish the doctrine of Purgatory, and also to make it appear that they had a mighty influence in that formid- able region." Dollinger, a modern Roman Cath- olic scholar of great distinction, in 1875, at Bonn, at a convention of Old Catholics, said : "Purga- tory was an idea unknown in the East as well as What Protestants Believe 135 the West till Gregory the Great introduced it." Gregory was Pope from 590 to 604. Purgatory is purely an invention of corrupt and ambitious and avaricious priests. Fourthly, Purgatory is a gloomy doctrine. That would not be enough to condemn it, if it were clearly taught in the word of God. But, in the absence of Scripture proof, it helps to confirm us in our conviction that Purgatory exists only in the imagination of the priests and the victims of their cunning. When our loved ones, who have lived good Christian lives, have departed in the faith of Jesus Christ, we comfort ourselves with the firm persuasion that they are beyond the reach of all trouble and pain and are in a state and place of unspeakable joy. But, in the same cir- cumstances, our Roman Catholic friends are com- pelled to believe that father or mother or husband or wife or child is in hellish torments, compared with which their worst sufferings here were posi- tive pleasure. And then there is the awful un- certainty, which not even his Holiness the Pope can ever remove, as to how long the anguish of the dear one must last. I thank God that I do not belong to a church which compels me to be- 136 What Protestants Believe lieve that my dear departed ones, the loved and lost, are in the flames of Purgatory. Fifthly, the doctrine of Purgatory promotes priestly despotism. Not every priest is a tyrant and not every Romanist is a slave. But the temp- tation and the tendency are strong in that direc- tion. Look at the priest and his flock. He alone can forgive their sins. They must eat the flesh of Christ or die of spiritual starvation. He alone can change the bread into flesh. And then, by his prayers and masses, he can lift the souls of their departed loved ones out of hellish torments or leave them there. There is no emperor or king or sultan or dictator who begins to have the power over his subjects that the doctrine of Pur- gatory gives the priest of Rome over those com- mitted to his care. If you had been taught from the cradle to believe, and did believe, that your minister carries the keys to the underworld, into which you must go at death and abide for an un- known period of time, in unspeakable agony, could he not make you do anything he might wish? Would you not be his slave? How many men do you know whom you would trust with such power? Is not the best man in danger of What Protestants Believe 137 becoming a proud, selfish and cruel tyrant, if he be made a Roman priest? Who could resist such temptations as beset the priest? No man ought to have such power. No man ought to be exposed to such temptation. We have all heard stories of priestly oppression, resulting from the doctrine of Purgatory. Father Chiniquy, in his "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome," relates that his father died when he was twelve years old, leaving the widow poor, with three small children. A few days after the funeral the priest, who was be- lieved to be wealthy, called upon the stricken fam- ily. He said to the widow : "There is something due for the prayers which have been sung and the services which you requested to be offered for the repose of your husband's soul. I wish you would pay me that little debt." She told him that she had no money; that her husband left her very poor. "But the masses offered for the rest of your husband's soul must be paid. Your husband died suddenly and without any prepara- tion. He is, therefore, in the flames of Purga- tory. If you want him to be delivered, you must unite your personal sacrifices with the masses which we offer." The widow still insisted that 138 What Protestants Believe she had no money. But there was a cow, on whose milk the family largely depended for their support. The heartless priest actually took that cow and drove her away, while the children screamed with despair. The boy never forgot that scene. It helped to make him a Protestant, long after. I do not charge that the Church of Rome teaches or justifies such cruelty. But I do charge that her doctrine of Purgatory naturally and inevitably makes such things possible and frequent. That doctrine is a club, a scourge, an instrument of torture in the hand of every priest who loves money and power. The doctrine of Purgatory is a bloody hand on the throat of every faithful, loyal and sincere Romanist. If you stood on the margin of a river or lake in which a man was drowning, whom you could save, would you demand money of his wife and children before plunging in for the rescue ? The priest of Rome tells us that he stands on the margin of a lake of fire and brimstone, in which immortal souls are wallowing, whom he can lift out by his pray- ers and masses. But he will make no effort, un- less he is paid, cash in advance. Is not hell too cooJ and comfortable for such a heartless wretch ? What Protestants Believe 139 Finally, the doctrine of Purgatory is the means of the most wicked extortion. Fkther Crowley, in a book which he published while he was a priest in good and regular standing, says: "Many priests deliberately preach, during the week im- mediately preceding All-Souls' Day, in such a way as unduly to work upon the feelings of their hearers. They picture the deceased relatives of their hearers as suffering most horrible torments in Purgatory and crying out in anguish, 'Have pity on me ! Have pity on me, my friends V Large offerings are thereupon made by the sympathetic relatives, amounting often to thousands of dol- lars, and in good conscience calling for masses, but the masses actually said are few and far be- tween." He calls this "Purgatorial Graft." He goes on to say : "A few years ago, in an eastern diocese, a pastor denounced from his pulpit the graft practiced upon the Catholic people in the name of religion by mercinary priests, and he called particular attention to the awful swindle perpetrated upon them in connection with All- Souls 5 Day offerings. A brother priest, who was a prominent pastor, struck him between the eyes with his fist at a public meeting of the priests of 140 What Protestants Believe the diocese, held in the Cathedral Church, for having enlightened the people. Seeing that the exposure of the brave priest would interfere with their grafting, the priests entered into a plot to ruin him, and he was soon after suspended and deprived of his parish. He is now raising and selling chickens for a living." The priests extort enormous sums of money from the faithful by means of the doctrine of Purgatory. Purgatory is chiefly a financial institution. It is the biggest money-making concern ever devised by man. I really believe that that is the chief reason why it was invented. If you had a dear friend whom you believed to be in Purgatory, or you were on your death bed and expected to go to Purgatory in a few minutes, would you not give millions, if you had them, to the Father bending above your pillow, who should promise, if you would, to pray the sufferers out of the flames? Certainly you would. That is the way in which Rome gets her thousands of millions for her churches and other buildings and to enrich her cardinals and bishops and priest. Purgatory is an inexhaustible mine of gold. Many years ago, when there were not more than half as many people living on this side What Protestants Believe 141 of the Atlantic as now, a noted Roman Catholic priest estimated that the money paid for masses for the dead, each year, in North America, amounted to ten million dollars ; and he believed that a large proportion of the masses paid for were never offered. We could write for hours upon this subject of Purgatorial Graft. Why ! they have Purgatorial Insurance Societies. You pay such and such pre- miums, and when you are dead, the Society will pay for the saying of a certain number of masses for the repose of your soul and its escape from the flames. The number of masses will depend upon how your policy reads and how much you pay a year. Who believes that the road to Heaven runs through Hell ? Protestantism stands for the glo- rious truth that the soul who trusts alone in Christ has perfect forgiveness. "As far as the east is from the west, so far" does Almighty God re- move "our transgression from us," if we renounce every evil way and believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ. "If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with an- other, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." 142 What Protestants Believe I therefore instinctively sought Him of whom the Apostle Peter declared: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God/' I received with joy the welcome response : "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved." There and then I found a sure resting place. The promise of Jesus was verified unto me : "Come unto Me, and I will give you rest ;" and "He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life." This belief or faith that saves, and which I sought and found, is not faith in a man, or creed, or church, but in the divine Person, the son of God. Samuel McGerald, D. D. MINISTERS HAVE THE RIGHT, AND OUGHT, TO MARRY " * * * Ordain elders in every city * * * if any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children. * * * " — Titus i:5 and 6. These are the words of the Apostle Paul to his spiritual son Titus. The entire paragraph reads : "For this cause I left thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee, if any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly." Paul had traveled through the island of Crete, preaching the gospel, win- ning souls to Christ and organizing them into churches. Titus had been with him, helping him in his work. Being obliged to go to some other part of his immense diocese, he left Titus behind to complete the work of organization. One thing especially he commanded him to do, to ordain elders over the churches. The word translated 143 144 What Protestants Believe "elder" is, in the Greek, presbyter, from which our Roman Catholic friends make their word priest. They call their ministers priests. We call ours ministers and pastors and preachers. Paul mentions several qualifications which the minister of the gospel must have. The one to which I call your special attention tonight is that he must have a wife. Paul forbade Titus to or- dain any man to the ministry, no matter how well qualified he might be, unless he was married. The Roman Catholic Church has turned Paul's command squarely around and will not ordain anyone to the ministry who is married. Before any man can become a priest in the church of Rome, he must take a solemn vow that he will never marry. A married man may become a priest by casting off the woman whom he has promised to "love, comfort, honor and keep." The purpose of this chapter will be to show that Paul was right and that Rome is wrong; that what they call "celibacy" is an evil thing; that ministers have the right to marry, and that they ought to marry. I oppose celibacy for eight reasons. First it calls God a liar and curses what he blesses and What Protestants Believe 145 blesses what he curses. When Adam was alone in the garden of Eden, God said: "It is not good that man should be alone ; I will make a helpmeet for him ;" and he created Eve and gave her to him to be his wife. In performing that first wedding ceremony, God said: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." Jesus Christ repeated those words and added : "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." God said: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The minister, the priest, is a man. He was a man before he was a min- ister. If, as the All-wise declares, it is not good for a man to be alone, it is not good for a minister to be alone. There may be special cases in which it is necessary for a man, a minister or a layman, to be alone. But such cases are the exceptions which prove the rule. God's law for ministers, who are but men, is marriage. Rome hurls the lie into God's face and says : "It is good for the man to be alone; my priests shall not marry." The author of the book of Hebrews — probably Paul, certainly some one who was authorized to speak for God — says : "Marriage is honorable 146 What Protestants Believe in all." Rome says : "Marriage is not honorable in all ; it is not honorable in ministers." Rome dis- honors marriage. She pretends to matke it a sac- rament and boasts that she makes it more sacred than Protestants do. At the same time she pro- nounces it an unholy and unclean thing by declar- ing that men and women can be more holy by remaining single than they possibly could be if they should marry. If you ask a well-informed Romanist why his church does not permit her priests to marry, he will give, as one reason, that a man can be more holy out of matrimony than in. That cannot mean anything else than that there is something unelean and dishonorable in mar- riage. Rome teaches that those who would attain the highest summit in religion and piety and holi- ness must remain single and become monks, or nuns or priests. If a man or woman, who is mar- ried, has reached a certain height in holiness, by prayer and church-going and deeds of charity and by using all the means of grace, he or she could have risen higher by remaining single. Accord- ing to Rome, marriage is a sort of necessary evil, a burden and drag which the Creator has imposed on the majority of mankind, which priests and What Protestants Believe 147 monks and nuns are graciously permitted to shake off, that they may live in the heavenlies and hold constant communion with the Infinite. That is a vile slander on the Almighty. He says that "it is not good for man to be alone." He says that "marriage is honorable in all." It is not true that there is something unclean in mar- riage. It is not true that a man or woman can live a sanctified life out of matrimony better than in. It is not true that marriage is a necessary evil. The reverse of all this is true. Marriage is an unspeakable blessing. The true union of one man with one woman, and the family life which is based on that union, are more like Heaven than anything else on this earth. Mar- riage is not a hindrance to living a holy life ; it is a very great help. The unholy are not the married. More often the unholy are those who have rashly sworn that they will not marry. I want to cast the lie back into the teeth of Rome and say to her : "Begone with your enforced celibacy. This is not the first way, or the last, in which you make the word of God of none effect through your tradition." 148 What Protestants Believe The second objection to the Roman Catholic law of celibacy is that it is contrary to nature. The allwise Creator has divided the human family into two sexes, almost equal in number. Each sex is incomplete without the other. There is a mighty instinctive tendency in the two to come to- gether and become one. Each sex seeks the so- ciety of the other with a mutual attraction which it is almost impossible to resist. No fence was ever built high enough, no ditch was ever dug deep enough, to keep the sexes apart. They will come together, either in honorable, heaven-blessed wedlock, or as the wild cattle do in the fields. It is nature's plan that every man shall have one wife, and every woman shall have one husband. Man is but half a; man without woman, and woman is but half a woman without man. To both man and woman a single life is forever an incomplete life. There is something lacking which can never be made up. Man is a hemi- sphere. Woman is a hemisphere. The life of each is but half a life. When fittingly joined to- gether, they make one well-rounded sphere — one perfect life. Longfellow says : What Protestants Believe 149 "As unto the bow the cord is, So unto the man is woman. Though she bends him, she obeys him, Though she draws him, yet she follows, Useless each without the other \" Martin Luther said: "It is almost as impossible to dispense with female society as it is to live with- out eating or drinking. The image of marriage is found in all creatures, not only in the animals of the earth, the air and the water, but also in trees and stones. Everyone knows there are trees, such as the apple and the pear, which are like hus- band and wife, and which prosper better when planted together. Among stones the same thing may be remarked, especially in precious stones — the coral, the emerald and others. The Heaven is husband to the earth ; he vivifies her by the heat of the sun, by the rain and the wind, and causes her to bear all sorts of plants and fruits/' But what becomes of all these beautiful words and these solid truths, in the face of Rome's decree that her priests shall never marry? There are unfortunate circumstances which sometimes com- pel men and women to go through life unmarried. When this is so, the affliction is to be endured like 150 What Protestants Believe other calamities. But to compel a hundred thou- sand lusty young men, and millions before and millions after, to swear that they will never marry is a crime against nature and nature's God; and the results cannot be anything but evil. The third objection against the Roman law of priestly celibacy is that a minister needs a wife more than almost any other man. Every man needs a wife. No man, in any calling or profes- sion or occupation, can do his best, unless he has a true woman by his side, or in the sacred shelter of his home, to praise and criticize and counsel and inspire. That is the plan on which humanity was made. The greatest and most successful men owe much of their greatness and success to their other, and better, self. The great Napoleon be- gan to fall the moment he put away his Josephine, the wife of his youth. Her love had been his in- spiration. Her counsel had been his safest guide. What is true of men in general is doubly and trebly true of the minister, the pastor of a Chris- tian church. The statesman, the general, the lawyer, the physician, the artizan, the farmer needs a wife far less than the pastor. How sense- less for the Church of Rome to forbid her pastors What Protestants Believe 151 to marry ! There are several reasons why a pas- tor is in special need of a wife. If he be a sincere and conscientious man, he has burdens to bear which might crush an angel. How greatly he needs the refuge and rest of home in the intervals of his most strenuous toil. But there is no real home where there is no wife, or where there has been none. She may have taken her flight to the Heavenly world. But the fragrance of her life remains, and the children linger, and the home still stands. A pastor can endure almost any- thing if he has a home, to which he can flee and a wife, in whose love and sympathy and counsel he can confide. God pity the pastor who is alone ! Every wifeless man is alone, no matter how many hundreds of true friends he may have. A pastor needs a wife to act as critic for him. There is hardly anything a minister needs more than just and loving criticism. He has two kinds of critics — those who admire him and can see nothing in his preaching or himself to blame, and those who do not like him and can see nothing to praise. Between the two, he gets no real criticism at all, and so becomes confirmed in faults which seri- ously mar his work. But a good and sensible wife 152 What Protestants Believe may be a most excellent critic. She dares to tell him his faults and her criticism is inspired by love. Left to himself, he gathers a hundred lit- tle ridiculous blemishes, which hinder his useful- ness as the barnacles on a ship hinder its prog- ress. But a good wife may scrape them all off before they are fixed. A pastor's work is largely among the women of his flock. He therefore needs a wife through whom he may the better approach the sisters, who will often be his spokes- man and who will always be a shield to his repu- tation and his character. A minister, with a wife, can go to many places and put himself into many situations where a single man ought never to be found. A pastor needs advice which no one on earth can give him but a wife. Some pastors have made grievous and incurable blunders which they would not have made had there been a wife at hand, armed with sanctified common sense. A pastor can be a better shepherd to the families of his church, if he is a family man himself, with wife and children. How can an old bachelor come into a home and give advice? There is a vast amount of good work which a minister's wife can do, in the church and in the community, What Protestants Believe 153 which no one else can do as well. I believe there is no place of usefulness for a woman as great as that of a pastor's wife. A woman of the right sort, wedded to a minister, may double, may mul- tiply his power for good many times. I have known many instances where that was the fact. The church which is blessed with a good pastor who has a good wife has the equivalent of two pastors. A pastor who has a good wife is twice a man, where an old bachelor of the same ability and devotion would be only half a man. All ex- perienced ministers would tell you that. And all churches want married men for pastors, and will not willingly accept old bachelors. Old maids are respectable. Usually they are not to blame for being single. Old bachelors are usually abomin- able. They might get married, if they would. In no place is an old bachelor so much out of place as in the pastorate of a church. If Rome is seek- ing the good of her people and the glory of God, she has made an awful blunder in decreeing that her ministers must all be unmarried. The fourth objection to ministerial celibacy is that it is contradicted by Old Testament example. All the Old Testament worthies and saints were 154 What Protestants Believe married, so far as we are informed. Of the heroes of faith, whose names are inscribed on God's honor roll in the Eleventh chapter of Hebrews, we know that every one was married, except Abel and Barak. Abel was murdered in his youth and we do not know about the other. There is not a man among all God's prophets and priests whom we know to have been an old bachelor. There was Noah, who built the ark and preached right- eousness for one hundred and twenty years. Why did not God command him not to marry ? There was Abraham, whose name is honored today by more millions than that of any other man who ever lived, by Christians and Jews and Moham- medans. He was a married man. There was Joseph. He is, perhaps, the purest character in all the Bible, next to Jesus Christ. He had a wife. If, as Rome says, an unmarried life is purer than a married life, I wonder that such a clean man as Joseph was did not remain single. There was Moses. Everybody considers him one of the greatest and best men that ever lived. He was married. Who believes that he would have been a greater and better man, if he had been an old bachelor? According to Rome, he would have What Protestants Believe 155 been. Human nature has not changed. If a man can be a better minister of the Lord Jesus by re- maining single, Moses could have served God and Israel and mankind better by staying in the state of single blessedness. Samuel, one of the very greatest of the prophets, was a married man. So were Isaiah and Ezekiel and Hosea. God had an ancient priesthood. He established it among the children of Israel. The Roman Catholic Church has copied many of its features in her priesthood. ■ The Jewish priests were married men. God gave them directions as to whom they should marry. If it is better that a priest should be single, why did not God know, and command his priests to be bachelors? Old Testament abounds in commands to be holy and rules about being holy. If celibacy is a cleaner state than matrimony, how strange that a holy and all wise God did not command his holy prophets and priests to remain unmarried! He instituted a class of very holy men called Nazarites. They were forbidden to touch any intoxicating drink. If Rome is right, I wonder that they were not forbidden to marry. Can you explain God's mistake ? 156 What Protestants Believe The fifth objection to ministerial celibacy is that the apostles were married men. St. Ambrosius, of the Church of Rome, says that all of the apos- tles were married except Paul and John. Many scholars think Paul had a wife. We know that he said he had a right to have a wife and to take her around with him on his preaching trips. We know that Peter, who, according to Rome, was the first Pope, was a married man. That fact is a cruel blow, aimed right at the head of Rome. Nothing can be said against the Roman Catholic Church and religion half so un- kind as this fact, which they all admit, that their first Pope had a wife. How do they get along with Mrs. Peter ? They say that when her hus- band became a priest he put her away. The Roman Church professes great respect for the sacrament of matrimony and will not permit di- vorce for any cause. And yet she declares that her first infallible pope abandoned his innocent wife to the cold charities of an unfriendly world. I think Peter would have shown himself to be a better Christian, if he had stuck to his wife and his fishing and left the business of being pope to some old bachelor. But old bachelors were very What Protestants Believe 157 scarce in those days before holy men found out that they could be more holy out of matrimony than in. But how does Rome know that Peter put away his wife. She does not know it. There is absolutely no proof for that assertion. He had not put her away when Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians ; for he says in that letter that Peter's wife was traveling about with her hus- band. The sixth objection to Roman Catholic celibacy is that it is opposed to the direct and positive com- mand of God. Listen again please: "Ordain elders in every city, if any be blameless, the hus- band of one wife, having faithful children." This text not only permits ministers to marry; but it commands them to. In his first letter to Timothy Paul says : "A bishop must be blameless, the hus- band of one wife." He also says : "Let the dea- cons" (Rome like us considers the deaconate one of the orders of the Christian ministry) "be the husbands of one wife." How can the doctrine of priestly celibacy stand one moment in the face of these positive commands of God? It could not, if Rome cared anything for the Holy Scriptures. She hates the Bible. She withholds it from her 158 What Protestants Believe people. She has murdered hundreds of thousands who would read it for themselves. She fears the truth. She shuns the light. The seventh objection to priestly celibacy is that it Is a human invention. At the beginning of the Christian church, and for centuries after, ministers had wives like other men. It is so today in the Greek Church, which is older than the Roman Church. The Greek Church, with its ninety million members, not only permits, but re- quires, all its priests to marry before they are ordained. It makes an exception only of its bish- ops. For some reason, they must be single men. Roman Catholic celibacy had its origin in super- stition and papal ambition. Quite early the silly notion sprung up that a single life is more holy than a married life. During the dark ages this spread. At length a pope adopted the theory and undertook to force it upon the priesthood. A fierce battle began, which raged for many cen- turies. The popes saw, if the priests had no wives and no family ties, they would be bound more firmly to the church and would be the blind and pliant tools of papal despotism. The war against nature and reason and divine law lasted What Protestants Believe 159 six hundred years. Little by little the popes forced the bitter drug down the throat of the unwilling priesthood. At last Pope Hildebrand, Gregory VII, a man of iron will and great ability, succeeded, in 1073, in getting a decree proclaimed that none but unmarried men should officiate at the altars of the Roman Church. That is the law to- day. But many of the best and ablest men in the Roman priesthood hate it and cry out against it as much as they dare. I have in my possession a recent book written by an American priest, in good and regular standing, who uses these words : "In no other matter has Rome shown a more bru- tal despotism and a more wicked superstition than in regard to clerical celibacy. Efforts have been made by both priesthood and laity, from the days of Hildebrand to our own, to mitigate the present discipline of celibacy; but, as in all other move- ments towards a more spiritual religion and a more rational rule, Rome has uttered its anath- ema, and loaded the reformer with foul insinu- ation and public disgrace." The last, and strongest objection to priestly celibacy is that it strongly tends toward vice and licentiousness. This is the truth which I desire 160 What Protestants Believe to fix in your thought: the unmarried minister is much less likely to be pure than the minister who has a wife. This is an extremely delicate subject, and I must tread very cautiously. There is a piti of slime and most disgusting filth right before us, which I must not uncover; I can only lift the lid a very little. Permit me, in the cleanest language I can use, present for your reflection a few facts and sug- gestions. Suppose marriage were universally abolished. Suppose there were a law, enacted and enforced in every state and nation, that no man, minister or layman, shall have a wife. Would that promote virtue or vice? Everybody would say: "It would promote universal corruption. A few would be virtuous. But the great mass would cohabit like the cattle and the swine. You cannot keep the sexes wholly apart. Marriage — one man with one woman — with its occasional infe- licities^ is infinitely better than indiscriminate as- sociation." Well, here are a hundred thousand priests. They are but men. They are, for the most part, strong, vigorous, virile, well-fed men, never worn down to the bone by severe physical toil. In which state will they be most likely to be What Protestants Believe 161 pure and holy, bound by legal, public marriage, each to the woman of his love, or exposed to all the allurements of the flesh, without wife or home? There can be but one answer. If mar- riage means purity for the mass of men, it means purity for the ministers of religion. St. Paul says : "To avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife and let every woman have her own husband/' Bernard, a famous Roman Catholic saint, said: "Take away honorable wedlock and you will fill the church with fornication, incest, sodomy and all pollution/' D. Marco Petrono, an Italian priest, says: "The boasted chastity of the priesthood has filled the church with demons in place of angels, who lead their flocks to ruin by their acts and example/' There is a special reason why the ministers of the Roman Church should be married. They are brought into much more intimate relations with women than Protestant ministers are. In the con- fessional they are required to converse with women of all ages upon the most delicate matters and in the closest secrecy. In conversation and thought the priest and the woman come nearer to each other than human beings ever do, in any- 162 What Protestants Believe where else. How much safer for both parties that the father confessor be bound to a wife whom he loves with a pure affection ! As a matter of fact celibacy does not produce purity, and it was not intended to, by the men by whom it was invented. The best and most loyal Roman Catholic historians record that many popes and cardinals and bishops along the cen- turies, have had children, if they have not had wives. In the estimation of Rome, for a priest to be a father is a much smaller sin than to be a husband. It is a notorious fact that Cardinal An- tonelli, the prime minister and bosom friend of Pope Pius IX., was sued by his daughter, the Countess Lambertini, for her share of the pa- ternal estate. It caused a great scandal at the time. But the Holy Father, who considered it a sin for a priest to marry, retained his licentious counselor. Father J. J. Crowley says : 'Tope Leo XIII. was the father of several children, one of them being the eminent Cardinal Satolli, a man of conspicuous immorality." St. Ligouri, the au- thor of the book entitled : 'The Glories of Mary," from which I quoted in a former chapter, says: "We must not rebuke the penitent priest, who falls What Protestants Believe 163 into the sin of unchastity once a month." The popes, who condemn marriage among ministers, expect that they will violate the Seventh Com- mandment; for they have legislated on the sub- ject, not to forbid the sin, but to provide for the results. Pope Pius V. made a law that no clergy- man should leave anything by will to his illegiti- mate children. Doctor Butler, who has been Superintendent of the missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Mexico for very many years, told the Method- ist ministers of Buffalo, in my hearing, that it is the common and usual thing in that country for the parish priests to live openly with concubines and families of children. Is that better than law- ful marriage? Rome says, "Yes." Father Jeremiah J. Crowley, of Chicago, in a recent book, published while he was a Roman Catholic priest in good and regular standing, and had no thought of becoming a Protestant, tells the most dreadful stories of the licentiousness of very many of the priests of the diocese of Chi- cago. When the facts were laid before the bishop with all the evidence, he gave them no attention, unless to reward and promote the guilty ones. 164 What Protestants Believe There is abundant evidence, from nuns who have escaped from what they call "hell" and from converted priests, that the nunneries generally, to all of which the priests have free access, are places of awful sin and loathsome debauchery. It is not a pleasure to say this ; but it ought to be known. Particulars can not be given here. But they have been given by the hundred with cir- cumstances and proofs which would convince every unprejudiced investigator. They certainly have convinced the writer. All things go to show that priestly celibacy tends to vice and corruption, and not to virtue and holiness. Father Crowley says: "Priestly celibacy and auricular confession ever have been, and are now, prolific sources of crime and licen- tiousness." Let us close this malodorous discus- sion with the words of St. Paul. Writing to Tim- othy concerning the "latter times," he says that "some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils." Then he names one of those "doctrines of devils." It is this "Forbidding to marry." If the law of the Roman Catholic Church that ministers shall bind themselves with a horrid oath that they will never What Protestants Believe 165 marry is not a "doctrine of devils/ 5 what can it be ? Is not this exactly what the Holy Ghost had in mind when he inspired Paul to write those words? 166 What Protestants Believe The priests in the confessional stretches forth his right hand towards the penitent and says, "Our Lord Jesus Christ absolve thee, and I, by His authority, absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen/' "May the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the merits of the Blessed Vir- gin Mary, and of the saints, and whatsoever good thou shalt do, or whatsoever evil thou shalt suffer, be to thee unto the remission of thy sins, the increase of grace, and the recompense of everlast- ing life. Amen." Notwithstanding all this the sincere Roman worshipper has no assurance of pardon nor a personal consciousness of sins forgiven. Samuel McGerald, D. D. JESUITISM— THE SOUL OF ROMANISM "They speak not peace: but devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land." Psalm xxxv : 20. The Great Reformation, from which our mod- ern civilization has sprung, began, in England, with Wycliffe, in 1375; in France, with Lefevre, in 1 5 12; and in Germany with Luther, in 15 17. Three great universities, Oxford, Paris and Wit- temburg, saw the first faint glimmer of day, after a thousand years of midnight darkness. By the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation had advanced so far, and was moving so rapidly, that all appearances indicated that the Church of Rome would wholly pass away. She had lost England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wur- temburg, the Palitinate, the Northern Nether- lands and several cantons of Switzerland ; and all other countries on the northern side of the Alps and Pyrenees were slipping out of her palsied hands. In France, Belgium, Southern Germany, 167 168 What Protestants Believe Hungary and Poland the contest was undecided ; but the Protestants were numerous, powerful, bold and active, while the governments were giv- ing no aid to the frightened Papacy. In Poland while the king was still a Papist, the Protestants had the upper hand in the Diet and had taken pos- session of the parish churches. The Papal nuncio wrote to his master : "In this kingdom it looks as though Protestantism would completely supersede Catholicism/ 5 In Bavaria the Protestants had a majority in the Assembly of the States. In Tran- sylvania the house of Austria was powerless to prevent the Diet from confiscating, at one stroke, all the estates of the Church. In Austria proper it was commonly said that only one thirteenth of the population could be called good Catholics. In Belgium the Protestants were reckoned by hun- dreds of thousands. Even in Spain and Italy the reformed doctrines were gaining adherents by the thousands among the most influential classes. The Prophecy of the book of Revelation seemed to be having its fulfillment. "The kings of the earth shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire." What Protestants Believe 169 While Rome was bleeding to death from the wounds inflicted upon her from without, she was dying from a cancer within her very vitals. She was rotten to the core. Her monks were the laughing-stock of the world. It was commonly believed that her priests and abbots and bishops were almost universally licentious and vile; and they were regarded with loathing and contempt. "Viler than a priest" was a very common proverb. The Papacy had lost the respect of all classes, while its annals were black with debauchery, in- cest and murder. The whole system of Romanism was on the point of falling to pieces from sheer putrifaction. But there came a change. When the billows of the Reformation seemed about to roll over all Europe, there was a sudden recoil. To return to our figure — the blood flowing from the wounds of the Papacy was stopped. Her running sores were partially healed. Her cancerous growths were checked. Life came back to her emaciated frame. She put on fresh garments. She re- sumed her activities. And today she survives, in great strength, after a new and wonderful career of nearly four hundred years. The story of this 170 What Protestants Believe reaction and recuperation is one of the most mar- velous chapters in the history of our race. It is all traceable to one man. When Rome seemed almost at her last gasp, an obscure Spanish soldier, lying in bed from wounds received in a battle with the French, discovered a remedy which saved her life. Whether it was man's wit, or Satan's cunning, that devised the cure, no mortal can tell. The wonder-worker's name was Ignatius Loyola. We have his life, written by Rabandenira, one of his followers and his intimate friend, and by many other admirers. He was the youngest son of a Spanish nobleman. He was born one year before the discovery of America. He grew to manhood with only the barest rudiments of book knowledge. He was wild and dissipated, though strictly trained in the Roman religion. For a little while he was a page in the court of King Ferdinand. Being very am- bitious, he entered the army, determined to win a great name for himself. At the age of thirty he was wounded by a cannon ball, in both legs, at the siege of Pampeluna. Falling into the hands of the French, they kindly sent him to his father's castle, where he lay a long time in extreme suffer- What Protestants Believe 171 ing of body and anguish of mind. Realizing that his crippled condition would forever spoil him for a soldier, and that his wounds had disfigured his person so that he could no longer shine in the gay- festivities of the royal court, he racked his brain to think of some other way to satisfy his ambition. "What can I do to make myself great and power- ful and famous ?" he asked himself. Power, fame were what he wanted. He thought only of self and self-exaltation. Having nothing else to read, he read "The Lives of the Saints." That made him think of religion, not of religion as that which would make him pure in heart and acceptable to a holy God, but as some thing by which he might attain worldly grandeur and glory. He could not fight again in the war between his country and France. But he could take part in the war be- tween Catholicism and Protestantism. He could enlist in the army of the Lord to kill heretics and destroy heresy. He knew that Protestantism was gaining everywhere, and that the "true Church" and "true religion" were everywhere growing weaker and weaker. He said to himself : "I will found a new order of monks for the purpose of destroying heresy. I will be the head of the 172 What Protestants Believe order. I will destroy Protestantism and make myself the most famous man in the world. Saint Peter founded the Church of Rome. Saint Igna- tius shall be famous, through all coming ages, as the restorer of the Church." A bolder and more daring scheme of worldly ambition was never born in a human mind. He believed it would suc- ceed. Probably he had a superstitious faith that the Almighty would make it succeed. But before he could found a monastic order he must become a saint, or make the world believe that he was a saint. A saint with the Romanists is not one who lives a holy life ; but one who starves and scourges and torments his body, and performs wonders, and wins glory for the Church and himself. He would be such a saint as that. That kind of sainthood seems much easier and more attractive to the de- praved heart of man than the real sainthood taught in the Word of God. When his strength was sufficiently restored Ignatius set himself to the task of working out his scheme. He began with a pilgrimage to the convent of Mont ser rat, a jagged mountain in Catalonia, believed to have been torn and shattered by the earthquake which took place at the moment What Protestants Believe 173 when the Saviour expired upon the cross. Thither came pilgrims, from all parts of the Catholic world to worship a miraculous picture of the Vir- gin Mary. There, during three successive days, Ignatius made a general confession of all the sins of his life and took the vow of perpetual chas- tity, giving up a sweetheart for whom he had an ardent affection. Hanging up his sword as a votive offering before the holy picture, he took the road, barefoot, to Manresa, a small town twelve miles from Montserrat, where the Domini- cans had a hospital for the relief of pilgrims. There he offered himself for the service of the poor and sick. Near by was a cave so horrible that no one had ever dared to enter. Into this vile den he crept, and there he remained till he was so nearly dead that, when he crawled out, he had to be carried to the hospital. His life in the cave gave him the name of saint, and, while there, he is said to have been favored with visions of the Saviour and the Holy Virgin. While in the hos- pital of Manresa, Ignatius made the first draft of his famous book, Exercitia Spiritualia, in which he claimed to have had divine assistance. This work has always been the chief text-book of 174 What Protestants Believe Jesuitism, and has contributed more than any other to the erection of the new papal theocracy and to the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility. A single quotation will show the general character of the work. "We ought ever to hold it as a fixed principle that what I see white, I believe to be black, if the Hierarchical Church so define it" From Manresa Ignatius went to Rome. Having received the papal benediction from Adrian VL, he set out as a beggar to Venice, and thence em- barked for Cyprus and the Holy Land. This pil- grimage lasted about half a year. He returned to Spain with the conviction that he must have a literary education before he could carry out his grand scheme of conquering the world for him- self and the pope. Although he was thirty-three years old, he entered a grammar school at Barce- lona. After two years of hard study there, he went, with three disciples whom he had gained at Barcelona, to the university of Alcala. Thence he went to the university of Salamanca. At the age of thirty-seven he entered the university of Paris, where he studied seven years and received the de- gree of doctor of philosophy. In Paris Ignatius What Protestants Believe 175 gathered around him the first members of the new order which he intended to found. The charter members beside Ignatius, were Lefevre from Savoy, Francis Xavier from Navarre, three Span- iards, Jacob Lainez, Nicolaus Boabdilla and Al- fonso Salmeron, and one Portuguese, Simon Roderiguez. On the summit of Monmarte, on a starlit night, August 15, 1534, after receiving the communion in the abbey church on the heights, these seven young men took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and became 'The Society of Jesus." They do not seem to have had much of a constitution at the first; but they took for a motto, "Ad majorem Dei gloriam," 'Tor the greater glory of God." That, with* "Semper Idem," "Always the Same," has ever since been the slogan of the most wonderful merely human organization the world has ever seen. The next thing which had to be done was to secure the sanction of the pope. The Society of Jesus could not be a monastic order till the Head of the Church should speak the word. Accord- ingly the seven young men repaired to Rome. They anticipated much opposition and were not disappointed. There seemed to be monkish orders 176 What Protestants Believe enough already and the existing orders tried to make the pope believe that no new one was needed. Ignatius obtained an audience with his holiness. He showed him the Constitution which he had drawn up and perfected. He told the pope that he would "reform the monastic orders and reanimate the priesthood with holy fervor." He said: "The society which I would found is absolutely necessary for the eradication of those abuses with which the Church is afflicted." He described the dreadful condition of the Church in many lands, and declared that it was due to the shortcomings of the priesthood abandoned to the gratification of their own passions. "For ex- ample," he said, "there is a city in Germany, Worms, where there is only one priest worthy of respect." The substance of his argument was: "Nothing can save the Church from utter de- struction but my society." The pope took the constitution and submitted it to a committee of cardinals for examination. They objected to the clause which pledged all the members to "im- plicit and unquestioning obedience to the General of the order." Ignatius consented to an amend- ment, whereby every member should also take a What Protestants Believe 177 vow "of obedience to the Holy See and to the pope pro tempore, with the express obligation of going, without remuneration, to whatsoever part of the world the pope should please to send them." Af- ter deliberating about two years, Pope Paul III., on September 2J, 1546, issued the bull "Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae," establishing the Society of Jesus as a legitimate order in the Holy Catholic Church. Ignatius, with seeming reluctance, accepted the office of General of the order. The society grew with marvelous rapidity. The zealous, devout and enegetic of all ranks in the Roman Church offered themselves as members. They spread into all lands. They became the confessors of kings, the teachers of youth, the most popular preachers and the most successful missionaries. In ten years Loyola's society had gained the confidence and affection of all Catholic Europe, in spite of the jealousy of other orders, the fears of kings and the opposition of universities. Loyola was the most powerful man in the world. He swayed the councils of the Vatican; he moved the minds of monarchs ; his followers filled the most important chairs in all the universities ; his eighty thousand 178 What Protestants Believe eyes were fastened upon every court and camp and family; his eighty thousand hands were in the affairs of every state; his influence was the prop of every absolute throne and the only hope of the spiritual despotism of Rome. The sudden growth and enormous power of the Society of Jesus impress us with wonder and awe; and we are almost, if not quite, ready to attribute them to the cunning and might of the Prince of the empire of Hell. Is there not a superhuman element in Jesuitism ? After serving as General of his order for fifteen years, Ignatius Loyola died, worn out by exces- sive labor, in the year 1556, in the city of Rome, and was buried in the Church of Jesus, one of the richest and most gorgeous in that city of splendid churches. It is located about midway between the Capitol and the Pantheon. Annexed to the church is an immense building, erected to be the headquarters of the Jesuits and the home of the General. Here the body of Ignatius is preserved in a splendid urn of gilt bronze, incrusted with gold and precious stones. He was solemnly can- onized as a saint by Gregory XV., in 1623. He was certainly a most remarkable man. It cannot What Protestants Believe 179 be doubted that he was possessed of great intel- lectual gifts. His followers assert that he was divinely inspired and was endowed with miracle- working power, even to the extent of raising the dead. The Constitution of the Jesuits was locked up in the secret archives of the Society for more than two hundred years. Its contents were un- known to most of the members of the organiza- tion. In 1760, a suit against the order for the re- covery of a sum of money being prosecuted in Paris, the court demanded and obtained a copy of the Constitution, and it was published to the world. The Jesuits form a secret, oath-bound society. It consists of four degrees. The members of the first degree are called the Novices. They are under very severe training for two years. If then they are found capable of giving up all indi- viduality and all independence of intellect, and are in all respects acceptable to their superiors, they are advanced to the degree of Scholastics. The Scholastics undergo a long and severe training in theology, philosophy, philology and science, and, if found worthy, are advanced to the degree of Coadjutors. Six years at least are required to 180 What Protestants Believe pass through the second degree, and the candidate must be thirty-two years old. Most of the Coad- jutors are ordained as priests on entering that degree; but a few remain laymen for menial services. After remaining in the third degree for ten or more years, the worthy members take their final vows and are enrolled among the Professed. Only the Professed possess the full rights of mem- bers. They alone have the right to vote in the Provincial Congregation. The Jesuits have divided the world into provinces. The Professed of a province meet in a congregation and elect two deputies. The deputies of all the provinces meet in general congregation and elect a General of the Order, who serves until death. The Gen- eral Congregation may depose a General; but it never has. The General is a monarch of the most abso- lute kind. His word is law to every member of the Society. Every Jesuit is under the most solemn and awful oath to obey the General in all things, without any hesitation or questioning. Nicolini, an Italian Roman Catholic, in "History of the Jesuits," says : "The member of the Society must regard the General as Christ the Lord, and must What Protestants Believe 181 strive to acquire perfect resignation and denial of his own will and judgment to that which the Gen- eral wills and judges, just as if he were a corpse, which allows itself to be moved and led in any direction/' The Jesuit Bartoldi says, in his his- tory; 'The meaning of the Constitution is entire abnegation of our own will and judgment." Again he says, "What can be more complete than our submission to the orders of our superiors in every- thing? This submission to the will and judg- ment of the superior, or General, is called 're- nouncing our own judgment/ 'the annihilation of self/ " Bartoldi repeats one of the oaths of the society in which the candidate for advancement swears: "I will regard myself as a dead body, without will or intelligence, as a little crucifix which is turned about unresistingly at the will of him who holds it, as a staff in the hands of an old man, who uses it as he requires and as it suits him best/' Bartoldi says: "To believe that a thing ought to be because the General orders it, is the last and most perfect degree. We cannot arrive at this degree without recognizing in the person of our General, be he wise or imprudent, holy or imperfect, the authority of Jesus Christ 182 What Protestants Believe himself, whom he represents." Once more he says: "If it seems to me that the superior has ordered me to do something against my con- science, or in which there appears to be something sinful, if he is of the contrary opinion, I should rely upon him. I must no longer belong to myself, but to my Creator, and to those who govern in his name, and in whose hands I should be as soft as wax, whatsoever he chooses to require of me." Jesuitism makes the members of the order slaves in the most absolute meaning of the word — slaves to the General. They are a secret police, drilled to obey the General absolutely. If the General commands anything which a member be- lieves to be sinful, he is bound by his oath to obey, notwithstanding. This has been denied by Jesuits in recent times and by some weak-kneed Protest- ant apologists. But, according to Nicolini, the Constitution reads: "No constitution, declara- tion, or any order of living can involve an obliga- tion to commit sin, mortal or venial, unless the Gen- eral commands it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, or in virtue of holy obedience, which shall be done in those cases or persons wherein it shall be judged that it will greatly conduce to the par- What Protestants Believe 183 ticular good of each, that the greater glory and praise of Christ, our Creator and Lord, may fol- low." Listen to the quotation from the Constitu- tion, whose, authenticity no one can deny : "Visum est nobis nullas constitutions, declarationes vel ordinem ullam vivendi posse obligationem ad pec- catum inducere, nisi Superior et juberet." This can be translated only one way : "It is evident to us that no constitutions, declarations or any order of living can impose any obligation to sin, unless the Superior should command it." The Jesuits are convicted out of their own mouth, of putting obedience to their General above obedience to God, or even to the Pope. Nor is this all. As Nicolini says : "After having thus transferred the allegiance of the Jesuit from his God to his General, the Constitution proceeds to secure the allegiance from all conflict with the natural affections or wordly interests." Jesuitism does not allow its slave any affections of the heart or earthly interests whatever. He cannot own a cent of property. He cannot have a country ; all nations must be alike to him. He cannot attach himself to any spot on this round globe. He can- not set his affections on any human being outside 184 What Protestants Believe of his order, or even within. He must live and move and have his being only for his order and as his General commands. As Nicolini says, "No one but the General can exercise the right of ut- tering a single original thought or opinion/' Then he adds : "It is almost impossible to conceive the power, especially in former times, of a General having at his absolute disposal such an amount of intelligence, wills and energies." The most serious charge against the Jesuits is that they hold and practice the doctrine that "the end justifies the means." This they stoutly deny. But Blaise Pascal, that brilliant French author, himself an ardent Catholic, fastened it upon them, two hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous "Provincial Letters," so tightly that it has stuck till now, and will stick forever. Pascal convinced the world that the followers of Loyola were gov- erned by that mischievous and Satanic principle, whether the very words were in their books or not. The Jesuits made a feeble attempt to defend themselves. But their reputation follows them, as a black shadow, wherever they go. Their his- tory shows that they regard any sins and crimes as justifiable and praiseworthy which will pro- What Protestants Believe 185 mote "the greater glory of God" by building up their society and strengthening the papal church. The greatest of all sins is heresy, forsaking Rome and becoming a Protestant. But a Jesuit can pre- tend to do that and become an ardent member of a society of heretics, in order to learn its secrets and defeat its efforts. A Jesuit can lie and perjure himself and practice all manner of deceit and kill a heretical ruler, at the command of his General, and verily believe that he is doing service to God and earning more stars for his celestial crown. He has been taught an intricate system of cas- uistry and mental reservation, by which he makes himself believe that, while his tongue and eyes and hands and conscious will are doing all sorts of deviltry, his sub-conscious soul is innocent and pure. On account of its diabolical principles, this society has produced more disturbances in the world than any other society that ever existed. Its methods are deceit, fraud, treachery, craft, fox- like cunning, combined with the cold-blooded cruelty of Hell itself. It works in the dark, and the Prince of Darkness is its founder and master. The word "Jesuitism" has become synonomous with everything that is dark and treacherous. 186 What Protestants Believe One of the great dictionaries gives this definition of the word Jesuitism : 'The principles and prac- tices of the Jesuits; cunning, deceit, hypocrisy." That is their name and that is their character. There has been a book in circulation for three hundred years called "Monita Secreta." It pur- ports to be Secret Instructions by which the mem- bers of the Society of Jesus are to be directed and aided in assaulting the patriotism and morals and purses of the victims of their flattery and cunning. If it is genuine, it brands the Society with eternal infamy. They say that it is a forgery of their enemies. So much can be said in favor of its au- thenticity : It appeared at about the same time in many different countries, in very nearly the same words; many prominent Jesuits have admitted that it came from the General of their order; it was attributed when it first appeared in Acqua- viva to the Jesuit General, and he never disowned it. After the suppression of the order and the confiscation of its property, copies of the book were found in the houses and colleges of the Jesuits, and Louis Prosper Gachard, the renouned archaeologist and literary critic of Belgium, on What Protestants Believe 187 whom Prescott and Motley relied in writing their histories, pronounced it genuine. One quotation from this pernicious document will suffice to show its general character : "That ecclesiastical persons gain a great footing in the favor of princes and noblemen by winking at their vices and putting a favorable construction on whatever they do amiss, experience convinces, and this we may observe in their contracting mar- riages with thier near relations and kindred or the like. It must be our business to encourage such whose inclination lies this way by leading them up in hopes that through our assistance they may easily obtain dispensation from the Pope/' Napoleon Bonaparte, who certainly knew men and institutions, says : "The Jesuits are a military organization, not a religious order. Their chief is the general of an army, not the father of a mon- astery. And the aim of this order is power, in the most despotic exercise, absolute 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 most enormous of abuses. The General of the Jesuits insists on being master and sovereign over the sovereign. 188 What Protestants Believe Wherever the Jesuits are admitted, they will be masters, cost what it may. Their society is by nature dictatorial, and therefore it is the irrecon- cilable enemy of all constituted authority. Every act, every crime, however atrocious, is a meritor- ious work, if committed in the interest of the Society of the Jesuits or by the order of the General." Thomas Carlyle said: "For two centures the genius of mankind has been dominated by the gospel of Ignatius Loyola, the poison-fountain from which these rivers of bitterness that now submerge the world have flowed. Long now have the English people understood that Jesuits proper are servants of the Prince of Darkness. Men had served the devil, and men had very imperfectly served God, but to think that God could be served more perfectly by taking the devil into partner- ship — this was the novelty of St. Ignatius." Let us briefly trace the history of Jesuitism in the different nations of the world. Of course it flourished in Italy, right under the shadow of the papal throne. But it was hated and opposed by many Italian princes, because it tried to make them mere vassals of the Roman See. It exists What Protestants Believe 189 today in the kingdom of Italy only by evading the law and operating in the dark. Jesuitism got into Spain by stealth and fraud, against the opposition of the Cardinal- Archbishop of Burgos. At length Charles V. interfered and gave the Jesuits all they wanted. In return, they helped him to extinguish the last spark of civil liberty. They became very numerous and power- ful. They established their missions in all the Spanish colonies of the three Americas and con- verted millions of natives to Catholicism with fagot and sword. In the later history of the Pen- insula they caused much trouble and defeated the people again and again in their efforts to establish liberal government. Five separate times they have been expelled from Spanish territory. The Jesuits got into France under Charles IX., against the bitter opposition of all the bishops, the University of Paris and the people, by deceit, promising to stand by the liberty of the Gallican Church. This promise, of course, they did not keep. They encouraged and abetted the massacre of St. Bartholomew. It would be more correct to say that they were the authors of that carnival of horrors. Catherine de Medicis and her imbecile 190 What Protestants Believe son were but their tools. They were the bitter enemies of Henry IV., and procured his assassin- ation. They brought about the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, whereby they inflicted on France the worst wound she ever suffered. They were expelled in 1594, and have received their walking papers six times since. They have no legal rights there now. In Germany the Protestants and Romanists were living in peace and harmony till the coming of the Jesuits. There were nine of the former to one of the latter. The Pope did not like this har- mony and used the Jesuits to stir up strife and persecution. The Collegium Germanicum was established at Rome to train young Germans to plot treason against their fatherland. The de- struction of Protestantism in Germany was the constant thought and aim of the followers of Loyola. They established schools all over the land. They persuaded the princes that Protes- tantism would destroy monarchy. They turned back the land of Luther toward Rome. Germany will not tolerate the Society of Jesus now. The Jesuits entered England in disguise, under fictitious names, as stealthily as nocturnal robbers. What Protestants Believe 191 They tried to excite the people to rebel against their Protestant rulers. They had an English College at Rome to train men for rebels. They sent back swarms of conspirators. They con- spired to murder Queen Elizabeth and to put Mary of Scotland on the throne. They had Eliz- abeth cited to Rome for trial for heresy and got the pope to depose her. Then they made Philip II. of Spain send the Armada to execute their decree and the pope's. Later they swarmed around Charles II., who was a Papist while pretending to be a Protestant. They hatched the "gunpowder plot" to blow up King James I. and both houses of Parliament. There are thousands of them in England today, striving, with much success, to turn the Church of England back to Rome. In Portugal the Jesuits became very rich and powerful. In Paraguay, a colony of Portugal, they established a kingdom of their own, which rebelled against the home government. An at- tempt was made to assassinate the king, of which they were believed to be the authors. This brought about their expulsion. The Society of Jesus sent an army of mission- aries to India, China and Japan. In those lands 192 What Protestants Believe their motto was "All things to all men." They have received much praise for their missionary- labors and achievements. They did display a fa- natical zeal, which was wonderful, though not ad- mirable. Francis Xavier has been glorified even by Protestants and placed by the side of the Apos- tle Paul. But these facts are to be noted con- cerning Xavier : he was a wild fanatic ; he fooled the natives by performing mock miracles, going so far as to pretend to raise the dead; he employed Portuguese troops to pull down pagan temples and to compel heathen tribes to accept baptism at his hands; his converts were nothing but baptized heathen, who could say "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" without any intelligent conception of the difference between the One Omnipotent God of the Christians and the many gods which they had been accustomed to worship. The missionary work of the Jesuits in the far East was wretched in the extreme. It does not deserve one word of praise. They baptized vast multitudes of natives who knew nothing of Christianity. They became Brahmins in India; and brought the cause of Christianity into degradation by practicing the idolatrous rites and ceremonies of that country. What Protestants Believe 193 In China they joined with the natives in worship- ing Confucius instead of Christ. They did far more harm than good. They created a prejudice against real Christianity which the Protestant missionaries have to resist today. By interfering with the governments of India, China and Japan, they got themselves expelled from those countries and caused Christ to be barred out for genera- tions. In North America they discovered some rivers and named some lakes and baptized many savages. But they made the natives worse than they were before by adding hatred of Protestants to the devilish spirit by which they were already possessed. The fiendish massacres and burnings which the Indians of Canada inflicted on our fore- fathers at Deerfield and Schenectady and scores of other frontier settlements were incited by the Jesuits "for the greater glory of God." That was their method of evangelizing and Christian- izing the continent. The Jesuits have been praised for their educa- tional work. They have founded a multitude of schools and have instructed millions of students. But they teach a false philosophy, tainted ethics, lying history and fictitious biography. Their sys- 194 What Protestants Believe tern of education is calculated to narrow the mind, and to put a straight- jacket upon its noblest pow- ers. Their students are closely watched ; all books are taken from them which have a liberal ten- dency; truths of the highest importance are con- cealed ; exploded errors are revived ; and most of what is taught is useless, if not altogether false. The Jesuit instructors make their pupils puppets in a mechanical system of philosophy, slaves to an ecclesiastical tyrant and traitors to their country. It would be better to turn a boy loose to be his own teacher, than put him into a Jesuit College. In the middle of the eighteenth century the order of the Jesuits was at the zenith of its power. Their corporate wealth was very great, they swarmed everywhere in great numbers ; they were the confessors of the high and noble; they were educators of the youth ; they were the controlling power in almost every Catholic country. But they had a sudden fall. The nations awoke to the fact that the Jesuits were absorbing their wealth, corrupting their morals and making them slaves of the pope. They rose up almost simultaneously and demanded that the Roman Pontiff should sup- press the order. Most of them banished the black- What Protestants Believe 195 coated traitors from their territories, without waiting for the word of the pope, beginning with Portugal. Clement III. was an ardent friend of the Jesuits. But he could not long resist the uni- versal storm which was sweeping over Catholic Europe. He gave his word to the Catholic sover- eigns that he would sign the death warrant of the Society of Jesus on a certain day. During the night preceding the appointed day the pope was seized with convulsions and died. The whole world exclaimed: "The Jesuits have poisoned him!" So the world believes today. The next pope was Clement XIV. He was one of the ablest and best men who have ever worn the triple crown. After four years of careful investigation, he gave great joy to the great body of Christians throughout the world, on the 21st of July, 1773, by issuing his celebrated bull, "Dominis Redemp- tor" whereby he decreed "that the name of the company of Jesus shall be, and is forever extin- guished and suppressed," and that the said bull of suppression and abolition shall "forever and to all eternity be valid, permanent and efficacious." At the same time the pope confiscated all the property of the Jesuits, gave their schools to other orders 196 What Protestants Believe and imprisoned their General, Ricci. Everybody believed that the Jesuits would murder the pope, if they could. Hence all avenues of approach to his presence were carefully guarded. These ef- forts were successful for eight months, when a peasant woman procured admission to the palace and presented his holiness with a fig in which poison was concealed. He ate it without fear. Soon the poison began to work. He exclaimed: "Alas, I knew they would poison me !" He died in great agony. This is not a Protestant inven- tion, but the testimony of Roman Catholic historians. The Jesuits refused to disband. They sought shelter in Russia and Prussia and other non-Ro- manist countries. In 1814, Paul VII, reestab- lished the Society of Jesus, revoking what his in- fallible predecessor had said should stand "forever and to all eternity/' The Jesuits came out of their holes more numerous, richer and more cunning and powerful than before. How numerous are the Jesuits? That is a hard question to answer, because all their works are done in darkness. Forty years ago their numbers were estimated at twelve thousand. They must be What Protestants Believe 197 much more numerous now. They, and their schools and convents and churches and other es- tablishments, are very numerous in this country and in England. They are giving their special attention to us and to our English brethren, be- cause they have been outlawed in most other countries and because they know that war between Romanism and Protestantism is to be fought chiefly under the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. What have the Jesuits done and attempted? That question has been answered, in part, already. They have turned back the tide of the Reform- ation. They have made the Papacy more decent by keeping common murderers and acknowledged whore-masters out of the papal chair. They de- luged Holland with Protestant and patriotic blood. They tried to make North America French and Romanist. They have kept Mexico down in the mud of ignorance and superstition. They have made Spain the basest of European nations. They tried to divide and destroy the American Re- public. Over the last statement we must linger a moment. William Dean Howells, the brilliant journalist and author, tells us that, when he was 198 What Protestants Believe U. S. consul at Venice, Garibaldi said to him: "We Italians know the only cause of the civil war in your country. In this world there is but one cause of mischief — the Jesuits/' Abraham Lin- coln said to Father Chiniquy: 'This war would never have been possible without the sinister in- fluence of the Jesuits." Pope Pius IX., who was a mere tool in the hands of the Society of Jesus, blessed Jefferson Davis and acknowledged him as the legitimate ruler of the Confederate States. The Jesuits influenced Napoleon III. to intervene in the affairs of Mexico, while the North and and South were at war. They assassinated Lin- coln. They did all they could to prevent the unifi- cation and liberation of Italy. Using the Empress Eugenia as a tool, they fomented the war between France and Prussia, expecting that the Protestant side would go down in defeat. They have greatly increased the abomniable idolatry of the Virgin Mary in all the Roman Catholic world. They have controlled all the councils of the Roman church for the past three hundred years. They brought about the enactment of the decree of the "Immaculate Conception/' in 1854, and of "Papal Infallibility/' in 1870. What Protestants Believe 199 What are the Jesuits doing, and what are they trying to do ? They control the Roman Catholic Church. They elect and boss the popes. Pius IX. was their tool absolutely. Fear of assassination made him subservient to their will. Leo XIII. , was trained in a Jesuit college. Pope Pius X. was under Jesuit control. His prime-minister, Car- dinal Merry Del Val, was a Jesuit. The General of the Society of Jesus, whom the Italians call 'The Black Pope," is the real ruler of the Roman Catholic church. The Jesuits swarm through this country. They are plotting against our public schools. They are supporting a multitude of their own colleges. They manipulate all the societies and associations of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Knights of Columbus. They are ac- cumulating vast wealth. They maintain a power- ful lobby at Washington. They have the ear of our President. They have throttled the press of the nation, so that not a word can be printed that is not favorable to Rome. They have their spies in our secret societies and all our private counsels. At what do the Jesuits aim ? Reaction ? Reac- tion ! REACTION ! They are the embodiment of reaction. "Back to the middle ages !" is their 200 What Protestants Believe cry. They aim at the restoration of the temporal power of the pope ; the absolute supremacy of the pope over every civil ruler everywhere; the over- throw of constitutional government; the putting of all education into their hands; and the utter extermination of Protestantism. You say "they can never carry out such a program as that ; the spirit of the ages is utterly against them." So it would seem. But they will cause us much trouble unless we wake up and circumvent them. Seven- ty-five separate acts of expulsion have been passed against them by foreign nations. But we, in our blindness, give them perfect liberty, and encour- age them, to plot our ruin. Shall we nurse in our bosom an oathbound, se- cret fraternity of thousands of the most cunning, unscrupulous and thoroughly trained experts in diplomacy, flattery and fraud, under the absolute direction of a foreign General, himself the life- long slave of a hideous superstition, the sole aim and end of whose existence is to exterminate Protestant Christianity, religious liberty and every form of liberal government? That is ex- actly what we are doing, in tolerating the Jesuits. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, said that popery What Protestants Believe 201 was the invention of the Devil. He was correct; and Jesuitism is the heart and soul and life of Popery. 202 What Protestants Believe "For there is one God and one mediator be- tween God and men, the man Christ Jesus." I Tim. 2:5. "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and / will give you rest." Mat. 1 1 :2& A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE << * * * R en( i er un t Caesar the things which are Caesar's ; unto God the things which are God's/ 5 — Matthew, xxii:2i. We Protestants believe that we ought to render respect and obedience to the civil government un- der which we live and to obey the laws and ordi- nances of the nation, state and city. We also believe that we ought to render loyal service to the church of which we may be members, to obey its rules and regulations and to show proper re- spect to its officers and ministers. If the law of the land required us to do something which the law of God forbids, we would obey God and suffer the consequences. In 1850 the Congress of the United States passed a law making it the duty of every citizen when called upon, to assist in the capture and re-enslavement of any bondman es- caping from Southern slavery. Many good men believed that that law conflicted with the law of God, as written in the Bible, and refused to obey. If our Church should make a rule, or our minister 203 204 What Protestants Believe should ask us to do some thing which we believed to be contrary to the law of God, we Protestants would disobey the Church and the minister. We put the law of God first. To find out what the law of God is, we go to the Bible and the Bible only. The Church and the minister may help us to find out what the Bible says; but the Bible alone re- veals to us the will of Heaven. Next to the law of God we put the laws of the state and nation, which do not conflict with the law of God. In the third, and last, place we put the rules and regulations of the Church and the admonitions and suggestions of the minister. We strive to obey all the laws of God. We obey all the civil laws which do not violate the laws of God. We seek to obey all the rules of the Church, which do not conflict with the laws of God and the laws of the land. That is Protestantism. Our Roman Catholic friends take an entirely different view of this matter. We have three terms, the law of God, the civil law and the law of the Church. They have but two terms, the law of the Church and the law of the land. To them the law of the Church is always the law of God; they cannot by any possibility be two. Another What Protestants Believe 205 very important fact, which must never be for- gotten, is that to the true, loyal Romanist the Church is always the Pope. To the Romanist there are just two laws, or two sets of laws, the law of the Pope and the civil law ; and the law of the Pope is always supreme. If the law of the Pope and the law of the nation, state or city con- flict, the true Romanist always obeys the law of the Pope. There is another difference between us Prot- estants and our Roman Catholic fellow citizens. We hold that State and Church should forever be separate. We hold that the state should allow to all its citizens the right to worship God just as they please, and protect them in the same, and treat all denominations and sects and creeds ex- actly alike. On the other side, the Church, in its various branches, should not interfere with the state or seek in any way to control its action. If the church desires better laws and better civil administration, she should seek to secure them by making out of the raw material of humanity, bet- ter men who will make better laws. We believe in a free Church in a free State. The State should not control the Church and the Church should not 206 What Protestants Believe control the State. Each should be free and su- preme in its own sphere. But the Romanists be- lieve that State and Church should be united. The state should protect and support one church, the Roman Catholic, and should outlaw and prohibit and utterly destroy all other churches and all other religions. The state should be the servant of the one, only, true, holy, papal, Roman Cath- olic Church, executing her laws, obeying her com- mands and wielding all the power of the sword to exterpate her enemies and to conquer the world for her. No civil law has any binding force, un- less it is sanctioned by the Church, and no civil officer has any authority unless the Church con- sents; and the Church, you must remember, is always the Pope of Rome. The Romanists believe in a free church in, or standing upon, an enslaved state. The state should not control the church. But the church should, in all things, control the state. If you contradict what I have said, you show that you are very ignorant of history and utterly unacquainted with the claims which Rome has alwas put forth. Let us consider still further the attitude of Rome. First, the Roman Catholic Church is stub- What Protestants Believe 207 bornly opposed to every shape and shadow of re- ligious liberty. We Protestants hold that every man has a right to believe and worship as he pleases, provided he does not interfere with the rights and privileges of other men. For his re- ligious opinions and practices he is responsible to no being in the universe but God. Rome says: "There is only one religion and one Church. Ev- erybody is bound to think and believe and worship as the Pope directs. It is the duty of the State to exterminate all other religions and all other churches and compel everybody to believe and worship according to this one rule." Rome says : "Believe as I tell you, or lose your civil privileges, your property, your liberty and our life." I do not say that all Roman Catholics have knowingly subscribed to that creed of absolute intolerance. Many of them think that they believe in religious liberty. But that is what the Roman Church has always believed and taught ; and every Romanist is bound to believe it, or be everlastingly damned. Pope after Pope (and they are all infallible) has declared it to be an article of belief, necessary for salvation, that no other religion should be tolerated anywhere but the Roman Catholic. In a circular 208 What Protestants Believe letter in 1808, Pope Pius VII. said: "It has been proposed that all religious persuasions should be free and their worship publicly exercised. But we have rejected this article as contrary to the canons and councils of the Catholic Church." In 185 1 Pius IX. said: "The Catholic religion ought to be exclusively dominant in such sort that every other worship shall be banished and interdicted/ 5 In 1878 the same Pope condemned certain "Princi- pal Errors of our Times." Among them was this : "That in the present time it is no longer necessary that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other modes of worship." Pope Leo XIII. sent out a circular letter, dated January 10, 1902, in which he said: "The supreme teacher of the Church is the Roman Pontiff. Union of minds, therefore, requires, together with perfect accord in one faith, complete submission and obedience of will to the Church and to the Roman Pontiff as to God him- self." The Popes and councils have declared again and again that all heretics (and all Protestants are heretics) ought to be put to death, and that it is a meritorious act for any Catholic to kill any heretic, at any time and in any place. To kill a What Protestants Believe 209 heretic will shorten the duration of a Catholic's stay in Purgatory, after his death. In all coun- tries where the Church of Rome has complete control all other religions are forbidden by law. In most of the old Catholic countries complete or partial religious liberty has been granted by the government, at the demand of the spirit of the times; but always against the protest and oppo- sition of Rome. Down to the establishment of the Kingdom of United Italy, in 1870, the city of Rome and the surrounding country was governed by the Pope. He was the absolute civil, as well as religious, ruler. He had his way and Romanism bore its perfected fruit What was the result? Protestant worship was absolutely forbidden by law except in the houses of ambassadors sent to the Pope by Protestant governments. Not a Bible could be sold, not a voice could be heard preach- ing Christ, on any part of the Italian soil; the punishment for such a crime was imprisonment or death. It would be the same today, if the Pope could have his way. What do American Roman Catholics think and say? They sometimes prate about religious liberty. But all they mean is liberty for themselves till they can grow strong 210 What Protestants Believe enough to rule the land. Then religious liberty will be extinguished in the blood of all who re- sist their will. Listen to some of the sweet and lovely sentiments of these only representatives of the meek and lowly Jesus : "The Catholic World," one of their leading papers, wholly controlled by the priests, said, in April 1870, "The Church is instituted, as every Catholic who understands his religion believes, to guard and defend the rights of God on earth against any and every enemy, at all times and in all places. She, therefore, does not and cannot accept, or in any degree favor, liberty in the Protestant sense of liberty." The "Free- man's Journal" of New York (What a name for a paper which can utter such sentiments) says: "Religious liberty, in the sense of a liberty pos- sessed by every man to choose his own religion, is one of the most wicked delusions ever foisted upon this age by the father of all deceit. No man has a right to* choose his religion. Catholicism is the most intolerant of creeds. It is intolerance itself, for it is truth itself. We might as ration- ally maintain that a sane man has a right to be- lieve that 2 and 2 do not make 4, as this theory of religious liberty. Its impiety is only equalled by What Protestants Believe 211 its absurdity." The "Shepherd of the Valley/' a Roman Catholic paper published in St. Louis, says : "The Church is of necessity intolerant. Heresy she endures when and where she must; but she hates it, and directs all her energies to its de- struction. If Catholics ever gain an immense numerical majority, religious freedom in this country is at an end. So our enemies say. So we believe." "The Catholic Review" of 1865 says: "Protestantism has not, and never can have, any right where Catholicity has triumphed. Therefore, we lose the breath we expend in declaiming against bigotry and intolerance and in favor of re- ligious liberty, or the right of man to be of any religion as best pleases him." The Right Rev. O'Connor, Bishop of Pittsburgh, says : "Religious liberty is merely endured until the opposite can be carried into effect without peril to the Catholic Church." "The Catholic Church numbers one-third of the American population; and if its membership shall increase, for the next thirty years, as it has the thirty years past, in 1900, Rome will have a majority, and be bound to take this country and keep it. There is, ere long, to be a state religion 212 What Protestants Believe in this country, and that state religion is to be the Roman Catholic." This last is from Father Hecker, in the Catholic World, of July, 1870. His prophecy has not come true ; but that is the aim and expectation of the whole hierarchy of bloody old Rome. The editor of the " Western Watch- man" uses these soft and honeyed words : "We would draw and quarter Protestantism. We would impale it and hang it up for crows' nests. We would tear it with pincers, and bore it with hot iron. We would fill it with molten lead and sink it into hell fire a hundred fathoms deep." Some of the priests of Rome, like Archbishop Ire- land, pretend to deny some of these statements. But not one of them would dare to publish, over his own signature, a clear declaration that he be- lieves that every man has a perfect right to his own religious belief and that all religious bodies ought to be forever equal before the law. The Pope would silence and excommunicate him, if he did. Nothing is more certain than that if the Roman Catholic hierarchy had full control in this country they would make Romanism the state religion, shut all other places of worship and com- pel us to choose between death and bowing to the What Protestants Believe 213 Pope and the Virgin Mary. The Church of Rome has always claimed the right to punish heretics with death. Her track through the centuries has been a track of fire and blood. She has shed the blood of uncounted millions. Her right to murder Protestants is in her creed, put there by succes- sive Popes so deep that it cannot be taken out. Protestants have no right which Romanists are bound to respect. We have kind-hearted Roman Catholic neighbors who would not want to do us any harm. But if the pinch came, their priests would command them to draw the sword against us, or go to hell. Sometimes very kind Romanists get angry and spit out what is in their hearts. A wealthy Romanist in the city of Rochester told a Protestant lady, with whom he had a little argu- ment, that he hoped to see the time when he could wade through Protestant blood to his an- kles. That is the spirit of Rome, though it is not the spirit of every person who belongs to that organization. The second fact which I wish to impress upon your minds is that Rome is as bitterly opposed to civil, as to religious, liberty. I have not the time to give to this subject that it deserves. Rome 214 What Protestants Believe hates democracy. She pretends to accept it in this country, because it is policy to do so; and very many of her priests and laymen believe in our Constitution and the Declaration of Inde- pendence. But the real Rome, the Pope, would, if it were possible, destroy every liberal govern- ment on the globe and make absolutism and despotism universal. Every historian traces the liberty of the English-speaking communities of the world back to Magna Charta granted to Eng- land, by King John, in 1215. But the Pope who reigned at that time cursed the Charta and re- leased the king from the obligation to keep its provisions as he had solemnly sworn that he would. All along the ages Rome, herself a spirit- ual despotism, has been on the side of political despotism. Pope Leo XIII. in a circular letter sent out in 1885, said: 'The sovereignty of the people is a doctrine which lacks all reasonable proof and all power of insuring public safety." During our Civil war, Pope Pius IX. sent a let- ter of congratulation and blessing to Jeff Davis and acknowledged him to be the lawful President of the Southern Confederacy. As a result of the publication of that letter a large proportion of the What Protestants Believe 215 Romanists in the Union army deserted the flag. It is doubtful if the South would have ventured to embark on the bloody waves of secession, if the leaders had not had assurance from the Pope that the Jesuits, the bishops, the priests and the whole population of the Church of Rome would help them. To my mind it has been proved that the assassination of President Lincoln was the result of a Jesuit plot. Hear what three great men think of Rome and democracy. LaFayette, a Romanist himself who had seen how Romanism had cursed and blighted the fair realm of France, said : "If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the Catholic clergy." Gladstone wrote: "No more cunning plot was ever devised against the intelli- gence, the freedom, the happiness and virtue of mankind than Romanism." Richard W. Thomp- son, Secretary of the Navy, said, in his book, the "Papacy and the Civil Power": "Nothing is plainer than that, if the principles of the Church of Rome prevail, our Constitution would neces- sarily fall. The two cannot exist together. They are in open and direct antagonism with the fun- damental theory of our government everywhere." 216 What Protestants Believe A third glaring and frightful fact is that the Pope claims the supreme allegiance of every hu- man soul. He is above every emperor, king, prince, president, governor, legislator, judge, magistrate and officer, of every sort, anywhere in the world. He has the right, though fortunately, not the power, to depose the President of these United States and to set aside any law that can be framed and any decree or judgment of any court or tribunal. Every loyal child of the Church will obey the Pope first, and the law of the land after- ward. If the will of the Pope and the law of the land are in conflict he will choose to obey the Pope. No man can be a loyal American and a loyal Romanist at the same time. The loyal Romanist owes supreme allegiance to a foreign despot. There are thousands of Roman Catholics in this country who intend to be loyal citizens of the Republic. But if any conflict should arise be- tween love of country and love of Church, they would have to choose the Church or incur the danger of eternal damnation in hell. If you say "No" to this you reveal your extreme ignorance of history and of current events. All along the ages the Popes have claimed, and exercised, the What Protestants Believe 217 right to depose kings and queens. Pope Innocent III. deposed King John of England; and Pope Sixtus declared Queen Elizabeth deposed and sent over the Spanish Armada to execute his decree. But England's naval prowess and the wrath of Almighty God sent most of the Spanish soldiers and sailors to the bottom of the sea. If you should ask any intelligent and loyal Romanist what he would do if the commands of the Church and the law of the land should conflict, he would instantly answer: "I would obey the Church/' The last Pope but two, Pius IX., said, in one of his circular letters : "It is an error to hold that, in case of conflicting laws between the two powers the civil law ought to prevail." Let the Rev. D. S. Phelan speak for his Church. From his pulpit in St. Louis June 30, 19 12, as reported in a Romanist paper, 'The Western Watchman/' he said: 'The Catholics of the world love the Church more than anything else, more than they do their own nation, more than they do their own government. We of the Cath- olic Church are ready to go to the death for the Church. Under God, she is the supreme object of our worship. Tell us that we think more of 218 What Protestants Believe the Church than we do of the United States ; of course we do. Tell us we are Catholics first and Americans or Englishmen afterward; of course we are* Tell us, in the conflict between the Church and the civil government we take the side of the Church; of course we do. Why, if the government of the United States were at war with the Church, we would say tomorrow, to hell with the government of the United States; and if the Church and all the governments of the world were at war, we would say, to hell with all the governments of the world. They say we are Catholics first and Americans decidedly after- ward. There is no doubt about it. We are Cath- olics first and we love the Church more than we love any and all the governments of the world. Let the governments of the world steer clear of the Catholic Church. Let the emperors, let the kings, and the presidents not come into conflict with the head of the Catholic Church. Because the Catholic Church is everything to all the Cath- olics of the world ; they renounce all nationalities where there is question of loyalty to her. And why is the Pope so strong? Why, the Pope is the ruler of the world. All the emperors, all the What Protestants Believe 219 kings, all the princes, all the presidents of the world today are as these altar boys of mine. The Pope is the ruler of the world. The Catholics of the world are Catholics first and always. They are Americans, they are Germans, they are French, they are English afterward." Those words have not been contradicted by any one authorized to speak for Rome. That is sound Roman Catholic doctrine. What if we should say: "We are Methodists first and Americans afterward?" Would they not call us "traitors" ? And would we not be ? The fourth fact which I present for your re- flection is that the Roman Catholic church dis- honors and defies the laws of the land whenever it suits her pleasure. At the fairs, which they hold to raise money for their priests and their in- stitutions, they almost always operate gambling devices and sell intoxicating drinks contrary to state and national law. The priests of Rome con- sider themselves above the law. In many cases I know that they disregard the law concerning the recording of marriages, A city clerk once told me that the priest in the city where he was did not comply with the law and, when he asked him 220 What Protestants Believe about it, he defiantly made reply: "I record all my marriages in the records of my parish, and that is enough." When reminded of the law of the State of New York, he said: "I want you to understand that the Church is above the law." And the clerk, who owed his election to the Ro- man Catholic vote, held his peace. A Methodist minister, using such language, would have been prosecuted for violating the law. According to the statutes of the State we, men and women, are lawfully married. But Rome laughs at the law and says that, because we were not married by a Roman priest, we are living in gross and damn- able adultery. If a Romanist is married to a Protestant woman by a Protestant minister, a Romanist priest would tell him that he could lawfully forsake his wife and marry again, a woman of his own faith. That is what Rome would tell him. But the State of New York would tell him, that if he did what his priest told him, he would commit a state's prison crime. Thus Rome sets our laws at naught, A fifth appalling fact is that Rome, to a very large extent, rules this nation today. Rome can get almost anything she wants from our State and What Protestants Believe 221 National governments. The United States Gov- ernment supports three Roman Catholic churches and four priests in Panama. Nearly all the chap- lains in the army and navy are Romanists. The street railways and many of the steam railroads and steamship lines permit priests and nuns to ride for nothing, while Protestant ministers must pay. Roman Catholics are given the privilege to heg money in the different departments at Wash- ington^ while the privilege is denied to Protes- tants. A Jesuit censor controls the columns of every large daily paper in this nation, so that the truth about Rome cannot get into print, while everything that is derogatory to Protestantism is given the largest display. There is hardly a paper between the oceans that dares to utter a word of criticism of anything which Rome says or does, or that will give any Protestant church or institution a fair show. Nearly all the teachers in the public schools in Chicago are Romanists, and many other cities, notwithstanding the fact that Rome is curs- ing the public schools and doing all she can to destroy them. The friends and relatives of sol- diers buried in the National Cemetery of Arling- ton, Virginia, are forbidden to put Masonic em- 222 What Protestants Believe blems on their headstones, though Romanist em* blems are allowed. On the recommendation of President Taf t $7,500,000 were given to Rome for the friar lands in the Philippines which were not worth one million. The Roman Catholic catechism is taught in every public school in the Philippines, The city of New York gave the Roman Catholic Church the ground on which St. Patrick's Ca- thedral stands, worth a million dollars at the time, and several millions now. In many cities the Roman Catholic Churches pay nothing for the street improvements made in front of their build- ings. No Protestant Church ever had such ex^ emption. Nearly all the great cities of our Re- public are governed by Roman Catholic mayors and common councils of which a majority are Romanists ; and they rule the cities in the interest of Rome. In nearly all the great manufacturing plants, and on many of the great railroad systems, some mysterious influence is at work, with great success, to drive out every employe who is not a Romanist. Rome is getting her cruel grip on almost everything in this nation. Do you know that Rome is doing her best, or worst, to destroy our public schools ? Such is the What Protestants Believe 223 truth. Why do not our great and small news- papers sound the alarm and try to save our schools before it is too late ? Because the miserable cow- ards dare not whisper a word against Rome. If she should propose to cut our throats, it is doubt- ful whether a paper in New York or Washington or Buffalo would object, Rome can do what she will for all they care. Word has gone out from the headquarters of the "scarlet colored beast" that the American system of free public schools must come to an end. Cardinal Capel, speaking for the Pope, recently said : "The time is not far away when the Roman Catholic Church of the Republic of the United States, at the order of the Pope, will refuse to pay their school tax, and will send bullets to the breasts of the government agents rather than pay it. It will come as quick as the click of a trig- ger, and will be obeyed, of course, as coming from God himself ." The highest authorities in the American Roman Catholic Church have con- demned the public schools. And yet the greatest of American patriots and statesmen, all along the years since the Republic was founded, have de- clared the public schools to be absolutely necessary 224 What Protestants Believe to our existence as a free and self-governing people. Why does Rome hate our schools? The answer is very easy. She knows that if her chil- dren are educated with Protestant children in the public schools, they will get their eyes open and will turn their backs on her silly superstitions and forsake her confessional, her bones of saints, her dough god and her deified Pope. Rome has never been able to endure the light of reason, science, history and the word of God. Where she has her way, she never does anything for popular educa- tion. When the city of Rome and the States of the Church became a part of United Italy, ninety- two per cent of the people, who had been ruled by the popes for hundreds of years, could neither read nor write. Ignorance and degradation and vice and crime always and everywhere accompany Roman Catholic domination. In this country she cannot keep her children in perfect ignorance. So she has set up her parochial schools, where very little is taught that is of any value, and com- mands her people to patronize them. The Roman Catholic masses would prefer the public schools, because they know that they are better than the schools which are taught by the ignorant nuns. What Protestants Believe 225 But the priests hold their noses down to the grind- stone by threatening to exclude them from the privileges of the church. Now the priests are demanding that the public money be divided be- tween their schools and the public schools. At a recent convention of the Knights of Columbus, the largest gathering of Roman Catholic priests and laymen ever held on this continent, that was declared to be the policy and purpose of the Ro- man Church. The war has begun. "Death to the public school" is the battle-cry of Rome. This is the Roman Catholic program: i. Vilify and lie about the public schools. Call them godless. Charge them with being corrupt and seminaries of vice. Fill such magazines as "The Ladies' Home Journal" with bitter attacks on this great bulwark of liberty. 2. Buy, or frighten, the politicians and newspapers to keep silent on the subject of the public schools. 3. Secure a division of the public school funds between all the religious denominations. 4. The church of Rome being larger than any one Protestant denomination, and many of the Protestant bodies being very small, her schools would be the largest and might be made to be appear to be the most thoroughly 226 What Protestants Believe equipped and the best. 5. Thus she would keep her own children under her influence and, ultimately, get most of the children of Protestant families. 6. In a few generations, the whole country will be Roman Catholic. That is the plan. What do you think about it? The politicians and the public press ignore the subject entirely. If you and I open our lips, they call us bigoted and charge us with inciting religious strife. For the sake of peace, we must keep still and let Rome accomplish her purpose. Shall we keep still? No, with the help of God, we will make all the noise we can. We will do our best to wake up the descendants of the men of Lexing- ton and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg and save our country from the machinations of the "scarlet colored beast." Not one cent of the public money shall go to the support of sectarian schools ! Let them have their parochial schools, if they will, though I believe the State has a right to compel all children to attend the public school. But the free public school system must be preserved ; and all property must be taxed for its support! At this point we will not yield a single inch. What Protestants Believe 227 The seventh fact at which I ask you to look till it is printed on your eye and your very soul is that Rome is determined to capture and rule this nation. She is dying everywhere but here. The so-called Catholic countries are getting their eyes open and are shaking off the shackles which have bound them for centuries. The Pope is deter- mined to compensate himself here for what he knows he is losing there. To a large degree he is succeeding. Rome has more power over the gov- ernment of the United State than she has over any European government. For many years she has had her hand on the throat of the administra- tion at Washington. Today the Private Secre- tary of the President, the officer who has more influence with him than any other, is a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit. Hear what the Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco recently said to the Knights of Columbus : "This country is ours by inheritance. This glorious country is ours by right, by right of fighting and by right of con- quest. This country was found by a great Cath- olic. The Catholics have made this country as great as it is. This is our inheritance and it is your duty as Knights of Columbus to hold and 228 What Protestants Believe keep that inheritance which we found, won and are making our own." What would the politicians and the newspapers say if a Methodist bishop should tell a company of Methodists that this country belongs to the Methodists and that they must make it exclusively a Methodist country? What a howl would go up ! They would call us bigots and fanatics and everything bad and vile. But Rome can propose to make this country ex- clusively Roman Catholic and it is all right. We must not whisper a word of objection. The "Catholic World," a New York journal, recently said: "The Roman Catholic is to wield his vote for the purpose of securing Catholic ascendancy in this country. All legislation must be governed by the will of God unerringly indicated by the Pope. Education must be controlled by the Cath- olic authorities, and under education the opinions of the individual and the utterances of the press are included. Many opinions are to be forbidden by the secular arm, under the authority of the Church, even to war and bloodshed." That is a beautiful program! What do you think of it? Is the Protestant pastor guilty of stirring up re- ligious strife who cries out from his pulpit against What Protestants Believe 229 this open threat of stifling liberty of thought and speech in the blood of a free people ? What are the weapons which Rome intends to use ? First, a consolidated Roman Catholic vote. Every Ro- manist must vote as a Romanist, not as an Amer- ican. The only issue must be Roman Catholic supremacy. The ballot is being thus used. Not all Romanists are controlled by the priests; but most of them are. They mean well, and intend to be patriotic. But their eternal salvation depends upon obeying the Pope without a word or thought beyond passive obedience. Their next weapon is the boycott. Nobody dares say a word against Rome, who wants an office or is engaged in any business or profession. There are few ministers who dare to speak the truth about Rome from their pulpits. Influential laymen, who want the business patronage of Romanists, will tell them that they would better keep still. A prominent Methodist pastor was driven from his charge be- cause he preached a series of sermons on Roman- ism. The proprietor of a large grocery, and other business men of the congregation were threatened with boycott, if they did not silence that meddle- some preacher. He kept on. But when confer- 230 What Protestants Believe ence came, he moved. The third weapon of Rome is to get all Protestants crowded out of all the gainful and desirable positions in the shops and offices and on the railroads. The fourth weapon is to fill the highest places in the army and navy with Romanists. This they are doing through a pliant administration at Washington. Their final weapon, which they are getting ready to use, if necessary, is the best breech-loading rifle in the hands of thoroughly drilled men. That the Knights of Columbus and other Roman Catholic orders are arming and drilling for war, I am con- vinced, though I cannot now give you my evidence. Unless the sons of America awake, there is awful danger ahead. If there be war, it will be provoked and begun by Rome. But we ought to be on our guard. If only our careless, optimistic American people can be aroused ! They have the kindest feelings toward their Romanists neigh- bors. They cannot believe that Rome has any evil designs against us. Not so with the great seers of the nation. . President Lincoln said: "I do not pretend to be a prophet. But though not a prophet, I see a dark cloud and it is Rome. It What Protestants Believe 231 will rise and increase until its flanks will be torn by a flash of lightning followed by a peal of thun- der. Then a cyclone such as the world has never seen will pass over this country, spreading ruin and desolation from north to south. After it is over there will be long days of peace and prosper- ity; for popery will have been swept away for- ever from our country/' General Grant feared a bloody struggle between America and Rome. He so declared in a speech at a reunion of the army of the Tennessee, at Des Moines, Iowa, September 20, 1876. I had a cousin, a talented, refined and well- educated lady. Her husband was the proprietor of the largest hotel in the world, in the city of St. Louis. Shortly after the Civil war General Sherman and his family came to live in the hotel, while he was commander of that Department. The two families became very intimate. The General begged the privilege of naming my cousin's first child. He was called Skerman Win- chester Felt. The wife of General Sherman was a Romanist. One of his sons became a Jesuit priest. The General was an intense Protestant. He often 232 What Protestants Believe expressed his convictions and his fears to my cousin. Again and again he told her, basing his opinion on what he had found out concerning the spirit and intentions of Rome, that the time was coming when there would be bloody war between America and Rome. If war comes, it will be solely the fault of Rome. We want peace. We would not deprive our Ro- man Catholic neighbors of one shadow of their rights. They may worship and believe as they will. But they must keep their sectarian hands off our Constitution and Laws. They must not destroy or harm our public schools. They must not take one cent from our public treasury for sectarian purposes. We desire the most perfect good will to exist between them and ourselves; but it must not be at the expense of free speech and a free press. We ask them to join with us in rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and we will join with them in rendering unto God the things which are God's. "A free Church in a free State" is our cry; and we will never consent to a "Slave State in any Church." "Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole. Neither is there salvation in any other ; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved," Acts 4:10, 12, 233 'This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." I Tim. 1:15- 234 I have never yet met a Roman Catholic who acknowledged that he had experienced a change of heart or had received any special gift or grace as the result of the interposition of either priest or prelate. — Samuel McGerald, D. D. 235 'Tor God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life/' John 3:16. 236 "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." I John 2:1. 237 There is not an iota of evidence between the lids of the Bible of any advocate coming between the soul and its redeemer. — Samuel McGerald, D. D. 238 "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Mark 16:16. 239 "Faith of our Fathers ! holy faith ! We will be true to thee till death !" Samuel McGerald, D. D. 240 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: Jan. 2006 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111