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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · January 17, 1895

Papal Policy.

IN an interview in this city recently, Dr. F. Z. Rooker said:—

I left Rome on December 9, having my last audience with the pope on the evening of December 6. . . . The pope has just received the first copies of the oriental encyclical which had been prepared during the last days of my stay at Rome, and copies of which I bear to Monsignor Satolli. The encyclical concerns the steps that have been taken in the East to bring into the Roman Catholic Church many of the inhabitants of Armenia and the countries thereabout, who, though practically Catholics, still refuse to acknowledge the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. By establishing schools and permitting the natives of these countries to retain many of their old customs in the celebration of the mass, the pope hopes to gradually bring them into the church.

This has ever been the policy of Rome. Of the era of Constantine, Gibbon says:—

The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstition of paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.

This is the policy by which the “man of sin” causes craft to prosper in his hand, and by which he destroys many.