p. 8 | Rome Surrendered

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 27, 1870

Rome Surrendered.

Rome has surrendered, and is now held by the Italian troops. The inhabitants received their deliverers from Papal tyranny with enthusiastic demonstrations of delight. The Pope, it is stated, ordered his troops not to resist. In that, for once he proved himself infallible, as resistance would have been both a folly and a crime—a folly because of its uselessness, and a crime because it would have sacrificed the lives of soldiers without hope of success.

Thus ends the temporal power of the Papacy. For, whatever bargain Italy may make with the Pope, there can be but one temporal sovereignty in Rome, after it becomes the capital of Italy, and that will be the civil government. Whatever else the Pope may save from the wreck, he cannot possibly retain the sceptre of civil power. The tiara must take its place below the crown in authority, however much interest it may retain in matters spiritual. Really, Rome was surrendered at Sedan. The Pope was conquered by the Germans, along with Napoleon. It was France that has so long kept Italy out of Rome. When the sword of Protestant Prussia struck down the leading Roman Catholic Power of the world on the fatal field of Sedan, it also shivered the sceptre of temporal sovereignty in the grasp of the Pope. And this, although the war between Germany and France is not in any manifest sense a religious war.

What will be done by Italy with her prize yet remains to be seen. Probably she will deal tenderly with the Pope, being herself a Catholic Power; but the time is forever past for the Church of Rome to exercise political sovereignty over nations, to hold a rule above the reach of civil law, or to claim kings, governments, and peoples, as its vassals.

“That spell upon the minds of men Breaks, never to unite again.”—Detroit Post.