An Agency for Good by Editor

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 11, 1908

An Agency for Good

By Editor

WE find in the following extract from the Outlook an illustration of the gradual turning toward Catholicism which close observers of the present day can but recognize. Professed Protestants are glossing over the records of the past, and encouraging one another to believe that the Roman Church is to-day a great power in the world for good. One of the writers for the Outlook, having visited the Vatican, knelt before the pope, and kissed his hand, speaks thus:—

The pope himself, mere man as he is to our Protestant consciousness, stands for a mighty agency for good, and is in very truth to millions of people the vicegerent of God. The stately room in the Vatican was a place of profound religious significance, and the ceremony one of the experiences to live always in memory, not because the Spectator had knelt before the chosen head of a great church, in compliance with ancient custom, but because he thus caught a fleeting but actual glimpse of the mighty influence on human history and individual lives which has been, and is being, exerted by the tremendous organization which we in America know as the Roman Catholic Church.

There is no question about the greatness of the organization; but the history of that organization, the self-asserted vicegerency of its head, its own authoritative declaration that it never changes, its unalterable opposition to freedom of conscience and liberty in worship, its antagonism to everything good that the Reformation has given to the world, ought to make it impossible for any one to be deceived as to Rome’s power for good, and the one purpose for which alone she will use the power of her “tremendous organization.”