A CLOSER UNION by M. E. K.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 9, 1897

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 23, No. 48.

A CLOSER UNION.

By M. E. K.

That Catholics and so-called Protestants are drawing closer together is a self-evident proposition, and the most interesting question that can be asked in relation to this changed state of feeling is, Are the Catholics and Protestants making equal concessions, or are the advances, with the necessary yielding of the ground of contention, all upon one side? Dr. J. H. Barrows, famous as the organizer and director of the Parliament of Religions held in connection with the World's Fair in Chicago, has lately visited Germany, and has written his impressions of religious matters in the land of the Reformation for the New York Independent. While still holding, or claiming to hold, that the Reformation was the most important revolution from the establishment of Christianity to the present hour, Dr. Barrows believes that the reasons for the use of the name “Protestant” do not exist at the present time; that the name is an unfortunate one, since it recalls old animosities, and emphasizes differences between two great bodies of professing Christians.

He further says:—

I know that the Evangelical Union in Berlin represents a movement of earnest resistance to the increasing power of the Roman Church; but, on the other hand, was there ever a time in the history of modern Christendom when so many things pointed unmistakably toward reunion? In America and France, in England and Germany, I have discovered that Christian hearts on both sides of the chasm are finding each other out in love. I have heard a Catholic archbishop, with a temper of friendliness and concession that would have startled our spiritual ancestors, say: “I do not pretend as a Catholic to have the whole truth, or to have solved all the problems of the human mind. I can appreciate, love, and esteem any element of truth found outside that great body of faith.” He expressed the hope that the day has “dawned when in every nation the idea of oppressing a man for his religion will be swept away.” This archbishop does not stand alone.

This way of trying to heal the breach by putting a bridge of brotherly love across the chasm, is unique in its way, but it can be accomplished only at the expense of truth—truth for which countless thousands of martyrs have perished at the stake, by the tortures of the Inquisition, by fire and sword, and by every conceivable way that the devotees of the Catholic Church, goaded on by papal decrees, could invent. Could Dr. Barrows have visited the old Inquisition in Nuremberg while in Germany, could he have gone through the “torture chamber” and have seen the hundreds of terrible implements of torture, which, by orders of the highest dignitaries of the Catholic Church, were once used there upon those who in that day were not ashamed of the appellation of “Protestants,”—could he have seen those things, and then, while sitting in that chamber so suggestive of unspeakable and horrible atrocities, have read the defense of the Inquisition, which only a few months ago appeared in the columns of the Catholic Mirror, he would have been slow in coming to the conclusion that the Catholic Church has changed in character since the days of the Reformation, or that Protestants can affiliate themselves with her without compromising the truth for which their spiritual fathers laid down their lives.

Dr. Barrows admits that the Catholic Church is “hampered by its past, and appears to be bound by a doctrine which makes it responsible for the papal and churchly teachings of other ages;” but he does not seem to realize that the present Church of Rome, far from feeling hampered by its past, glories in it, and holds up its past record and the Dark Ages as a history of which the church is proud. As an illustration of Catholic teaching upon this point, we will here give a quatrain verse which appeared upon the first page of the Catholic Mirror, of October 23, entitled, “The Middle Ages”:—

“She calls them dark, those ages when the light Of faith restored to earth primeval May; Vain Bigotry, that, like the bird of night, Is sightless in the dazzling glare of day.”

According to the sentiment of this poem, the ages when the Inquisition flourished, when no one could breathe anything different from what the church believed but on peril of his life—this time was one of dazzling light—the “primeval May” of the world, and those who protested were vain bigots, who, like night birds, can not see in the light. This is the sentiment of the Catholic Church of to-day in regard to her cruel and shameful past. And if that time was so lovely, why should she not wish to restore it? And who but vain bigots would stay her hand?

These considerations furnish sufficient evidence that there can never be any union between Catholicism and true Protestantism, and that any union that may be consummated will be the result of a shameful surrender of a so-called Protestantism to the never-relaxing and pretentious claims of Rome. That a union involving the surrender of so much can be discussed with equanimity evinces that a spirit of surrender is affecting the Protestant host. Then when Protestantism shall have apostatized so much that this union can be formed, what may we expect but the fulfilment of the prophecy, “And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ”? Rev. 12:17. M. E. K.