A Truly Remarkable Thing
By F. M. W.
The gains to Catholicism in so-called Protestant countries are regarded with concern and amazement by many students of the times. Says the Western Recorder (Baptist) of February 2:— It is a remarkable thing that the Catholic Church is losing so greatly in all the Catholic nations, and gaining in Protestant Germany, England, and the United States.
The Catholic nations of the Old World have learned by sad experience of the burdens and thraldom which Catholicism imposes upon them. One by one these nations have been seeking to throw off the galling yoke. Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, have all been engaged in a death-struggle with a system which, while it has promised them liberty, has only served to place upon their limbs manacles of slavery and despotism. Protestant nations have forgotten the lessons of their past history. They are reaching out to, and joining in an alliance with, a power to gain freedom from which, in the past, cost them the blood of martyrs. With the lessons of the European conflict fresh in their minds, our forefathers repudiated the principles upon which the Roman Catholic hierarchy rests; but we, their children, are prone to forget these dearly purchased lessons. The United States, the Benjamin of the nations, is affording generous support to the papal system to-day, and according to the Scriptures of truth, this nation will lead, in the last days, a large following back to the fold of the Roman Catholic Church. Remarkable indeed is it that the lessons of history should be so soon forgotten, and that men should now press to their bosom principles which will inevitably prove their undoing, as they have proved the undoing of the nations of the Old World.