p. 357 | Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, November 19, 1867

“Eating her Flesh.”

ACCORDING to statistics given some months ago in the Boston Journal by C. C. Coffin, or “Carleton,” when Pius IX ascended the pontifical throne in 1846, the debt of the Papal States—which had then a population exceeding two millions—was sixteen million dollars, but it is now supposed to amount to one hundred and twenty millions while the population is but seven hundred thousand; and this “immense debt is increasing every year five or six millions, and threatening, even if there should be no uprising of the people, to swamp the pontifical ship of state.” There are, however, in the city of Rome alone, between three and four hundred churches, “containing gold, diamonds, emeralds, and other precious stones, with costly marble of every variety, wrought in all conceivable devices, worth, all told, more than the entire national debt of the United States;” and of course quite enough to replenish the Italian treasury. The following, cut from the Methodist, shows the recent decision of the Italian government respecting a portion, at least, of the wealth of the Papacy:

“After long quarrels on the disposition to be made of the ecclesiastical property, the Italian Government and the radicals of the Lower Chamber of the Italian Parliament have at length agreed on a bill which appropriates the immense wealth of the Church of Rome for improving the wretched condition of the Italian finances. Although the Church law threatens with excommunication every one who aids in the confiscation of Church property, only fifteen members among some four hundred voted against the bill. This shows how weak the ultramontane party is in the Italian Parliament and among the Italian people.”

The bearing of this and similar acts performed by the kingdoms of Europe, will be best understood by looking a moment at the ‘sure word of prophecy.’ In the 17th chapter of Revelation we have the combination of the various ecclesiastical hierarchies of the Papacy symbolized by a wanton woman seated on a ‘scarlet-colored beast which has seven heads and ten horns. The rulers symbolized by these horns for a while sustain her, but when her career is nearly ended, they turn against her, hate her, “make her naked, eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.” A distinguished writer on prophecy remarks:

“This has already in a degree taken place, in the disallowance and scorn of her imperious claims in

most of the European States, the confiscation of her property in France and slaughter of many of her priests, the robbery of the churches, monasteries and ecclesiastics, of their wealth, wherever the French armies penetrated during the wars of the revolution, the conquest of the Papal States, and dejection of the Pope from his throne by Bonaparte, the secularization of many of the ecclesiastical territories in Germany, the dissolution of the religious houses and confiscation of ecclesiastical property in Spain and Portugal during the revolutions in those countries, the resumption by the civil rulers of Austria and other kingdoms of the nomination to bishoprics and other rights which had been conceded to her on the erection of the image in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and in the abrogation in Great Britain of the monopoly of civil offices by the members of the establishment; and these retributive judgments, are doubtless to be continued and carried to a greater severity.”

Twenty years have passed away since this was written, and with these passing years the mystic woman has been losing flesh. This recent act of the Italian Parliament is but another act in the drama of her life. The Papal Hierarchy is not sustained by European kingdoms now as it was even then. Within that time the war-cloud has swept over the land, causing every throne in Europe to tremble, and driving the Pope into exile only to be restored by the French bayonet. The waiting ones may think events move slowly; but they move. God is in no hurry—he has boundless eternity before him, and “in his times he will show” that not one jot or tittle of his word will fail. Let us wait patiently, prayerfully and actively the return of the Master; for “they that are with him are called, and chosen and faithful.”