Roman Catholics | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 11, 1866

Roman Catholics.

We clip the following statistics from a secular paper. Such figures are very suggestive.

There are four million Roman Catholics in the United States. In 1808 there were only 1 province, 1 diocese, 2 bishops, 68 priests, 89 churches, and 2 ecclesiastical institutions. In 1830 there were 1 province, 11 dioceses, 10 bishops, 332 priests, 230 churches and 9 institutions. In 1840 there were 1 province, 16 dioceses, 19 bishops, 482 priests, 554 churches, 358 stations and chapels, and 13 institutions. In 1850 there were 3 provinces, 27 dioceses, 27 bishops, 1,081 priests, 1,073 churches, 505 stations and chapels, and 29 institutions. In 1861 there were 7 provinces, 48 dioceses, 3 vicariates, 45 bishops, 1,317 priests, 3,517 churches, 1,278 stations and chapels, and 49 institutions. Besides these the Catholics have 102 asylums, where they educate some 7,000 orphans, and have over 100 benevolent societies, and 28 hospitals.—They have also 97 literary institutions for young men, 212 female academies, and 303 free schools for 27,940 males, and 327 schools for 26,671 females.

How strikingly do these facts show that the rapid increase of a church in numbers and wealth is no real evidence of its purity. This country is making rapid progress in wealth, pride, extravagance, and wickedness. No church of the day is so well adapted to meet the tastes of a corrupt people as the Roman Catholic. It allows its votaries the fullest indulgence in fashionable pleasures, and, at the same time, gives them the strongest assurance of final salvation. Romanism in this country has been greatly strengthened

by being imitated by other denominations. It is impossible for Protestants to check its progress by endeavoring to build churches as fine, and furnishing them with music equally artistic, and by permitting their members as wide a latitude in worldly pleasures. Jerusalem never vied with Rome in works of art. It was not by the polished elegance of oratory and rhetoric that the fishermen of Galilee overcame the countrymen of Cicero. The apostle to the Gentiles did not win to the cross, members of the house of Caesar “by enticing words of man's wisdom.” If the churches of this land make headway against the Roman Catholics it will be by returning to primitive purity and zeal and simplicity, and not by Romanizing tendencies.

The “man of sin” will be destroyed only by the spirit of Christ's mouth and the brightness of his coming.—Earnest Christian.