POLITICAL ASPIRATIONS OF ROMANISM.
Rome is not like the Bourbons in never learning anything, but she is like them in never forgetting anything. She learns everything, appropriates all cultures, all fashions, all the enginery of the most advanced civilization, the most delicate refinement of taste, everything that can be named; she makes it all her own, that she may advance the things which she “never forgets.” No matter how much the world outtravels her, no matter in what dusty and mouldy piles her dogmas lie, no matter how her spiritual prince on the Tiber may tremble and fly, or be propped up by foreign bayonet upon his throne, awaiting the doom of his temporal authority, she plots as keenly as ever, and does with might and main the thing within her reach, whatever it may be. Her great passion, however, is for the control of governments. Governments can tax the people and appropriate the public revenues. Governments control public-school systems, and sometimes undertake to endow or to support public charities. Governments that are free, and even republican, are sometimes overturned, and converted into despotisms; and despotisms, temporal and spiritual, are all akin, and naturally take to one another. Who among us has forgotten the efforts of Romanists, a few years ago, in this country to get possession of the school funds of the several States for their own sectarian use? For a time, they seemed to lay aside their slyness; they came out from their concealment and boldly announced their purposes. They put their chosen men into the legislatures, and bills in their interest took shape before the public eye, as though Popery were a thing to be supported by all republican commonwealths. Beaten here, they grew more quiet, but not less ambitious nor industrious. They now try to accomplish, through city governments, what they failed to do by the States. The States were found to have a preponderantly Protestant population. The foreign Romanists of this country do not cultivate the soil; they live mostly in the cities, and are supported mainly by common day labor. In New York, especially, where this class is so dangerously numerous, the Romish church is almost omnipotent, even controlling the legislation of the State, and absolutely owning that of the city. The vast sums appropriated to popish institutions by the Legislature of New York have become an old story, and but recently the Papal government of the city has given $25,000 to the Roman Catholic Asylum, known as the “House of the Good Shepherd,” an establishment which is entirely beyond the reach of public inspection. The whole hierarchy in the country is working in this spirit. Their government is at Rome, and ours, in all its shapes and powers, is meant to be used for its advancement. They cast the vote of the immense, degraded and ignorant population, solidly in any direction they please. They are presenting an unusually large number of candidates for office at present. Political names, of course, are given to their aims, but, after all, they are deeply ecclesiastical—more than anything else. The priests direct the vote, and they have no country, no opinions, no politics, but their hierarchy. Their adherents are never divided; their instinct is unerring; they go for themselves, and for none else.231 The immediate expulsion of the Jesuits by the revolutionary government of Spain is proof of the feeling of the Spanish people whenever it has the privilege of free expression. The Roman Catholics of Europe are, generally, content to remain members of the “Mother Church,” but they are, evidently, determined to put an end to its interference with civil and political affairs. They show an obvious purpose to confine it to its proper sphere. We shall, no doubt, be compelled in the end to deal in the same manner with Romanism in this country. Its attempts to build itself up through the control of State legislation, thus making itself a quasi State church, becomes every year more intolerable.—Methodist.