A Possible Danger

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 22, 1883

A Possible Danger.

The Boston correspondent of the Christian at Work, says:—

And now the Pilot, the principal Catholic paper, calmly gives notice that the course of things in the past must be now changed. Irish-American citizens, it says, have long enough been content with subordinate positions in political office. Hereafter they are to step to the front. Or, in other words, it serves notice that we are to have a Catholic mayor and Catholic rulers, which New York has so suffered from having. The day may be much nearer than optimists dream when the American people will wake to find that our country has been foreclosed and sold out to Rome while they slept. What curse is blighting any community or city of this country to-day that is not principally fostered and protected by adherents of the papacy? And is it not plain enough to most people that those who advertise themselves as atheists and unbelievers, and who ridicule the gospel and rail at the ministry of religion, rarely ever have any charges to bring against the Catholics? Rob't. G. Ingersoll does not hurl his anathemas against the confessional and its demoralizing influences, nor lash the Romish Church for obstructing progress. Why not? How comes it that none of his satire and invective and vituperation is directed against this one branch of the church which has ever been the authoress of corruptions that justify the title of "mother of harlots"? Look through the Index, or the Boston Investigator, two papers which verily gnash their teeth in hatred of other Christians, and you shall find no severe word against the Roman Catholics. From a moderate liberal to the most rampant atheist there is either omission or excuse of any outrageous conduct on the part of the Catholics. Their Archbishop Purcell may pocket millions from the earnings of the poor, intrusted to his keeping, and yet how mildly do daily newspapers discourse on the delinquency. Certainly the sleepless vigilance of that consummate machine in political strategy, the Papal Church, has under its control almost all sources of worldly power, which are yielding every year a little more to her claims.