Something about the Catholics.
That there is a significant and alarming tendency on the part of the American people to make concessions to the Roman church, is evident from the statements made in the following paragraphs. The Chicago Journal, of Jan. 16, 1874, says:— “A proposition is pending in the House of Representatives for the appointment of an Assistant Chaplain of the State Penitentiary, who shall be a Roman Catholic, and be designated by the Catholic bishop of Chicago. We are not surprised that the proposition encounters opposition. The idea of the Legislature of Illinois officially recognizing any one religious denomination as entitled to any special privileges is monstrous. It would be all proper and right enough for the Penitentiary authorities to permit the Catholic clergy, or the clergy of any other denomination, to visit and administer to the convicts at certain and proper times; but it would be very improper, and a violation of the spirit of our institutions, for the Legislature to designate either Catholics, Protestants, or infidels, as entitled to special recognition by law. Let church and State be forever kept apart, both in and out of the Legislature and the Penitentiary. The Catholic convicts can and should have the benefit of spiritual advisers of their own faith without legislative action in their behalf; but this can be done without either voting to the Catholic bishop the right of appointment, or recognizing the Catholic denomination as entitled to special privileges. By-and-by the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Universalists, or any other religious sect, might claim like consideration at the hands of the Legislature, and if it should concede it in this case, how could it refuse it in those?” The N. Y. Sun narrates the following circumstance that lately took place in Georgia:— “No Roman Catholic bishop in this country has ever commanded so great a degree of confidence among Protestants as the late Bishop England, of South Carolina. One cause of this confidence was his great liberality in all points where he could make reasonable concessions to Protestants. Whenever he was offered the use of a Protestant church to hold his services in the large district of his diocese, embracing all of South Carolina and a portion of Georgia, he gladly accepted it. On one occasion he was called on to do duty for a Protestant pastor, in a small village in Georgia, under the following circumstances: He had been obliged with the loan of a Protestant church, for the purpose of delivering a course of lectures upon the Catholic religion. On Saturday evening the regular pastor visited him and asked of him the favor that he would continue to occupy his pulpit the next day, saying: ‘I have been so engrossed with the subject of your lectures during the week, I have forgotten to prepare my sermon.’ ‘I should be happy to oblige you,’ said Bishop England, ‘but you know my church principles will admit of no copartnership in the services of religion.’ ‘That makes no difference,’ replied the Protestant minister, ‘regulate everything to suit yourself. My flock desire it so, and I am willing.’ Bishop England, not to be out-done in liberality, promised that nothing should be said or done to create disapprobation in the congregation, or offend the minister. “The next morning, the novel spectacle was presented of a Roman Catholic bishop, arrayed in his ordinary Episcopal vesture, walking up the steps of a Protestant pulpit. He began the services by asking his congregation to sing a hymn, which he had selected from their hymn book, but in common use also among Catholics. He then took his text from a Douay translation of the Bible, and after offering such a prayer as all could join in from a book of Catholic devotion, he preached them a sound, practical discourse, and dismissed them with a blessing. The congregation were lost in wonder at the worship they had so often heard announced as idolatry. Is it any wonder that a man endowed with such extraordinary tact and judgment was several times invited to preach before the Legislature of South Carolina?” To show the character and intentions of the papal power in this country, we give the following from Thos. Carter, D. D., in The Methodist, of Jan. 10, 1874. After speaking of the work of the papists in Mexico, Mr. C. says:— “Such is a brief statement of occurrences which have come to light in one particular district of Mexico. Similar scenes are no doubt being enacted in many other parts of the country, especially in districts retired from public notice. The priestly party are everywhere, with perhaps a few bright exceptions, arraying themselves against the laws of reform and exercising all the powers of the confessional and the thunders of excommunication to produce a complete anarchy. They feel themselves subject to another power, the papal hierarchy, outside of the country, and that power they are determined to obey whether it conflicts with obedience to appointed rulers or not. When they cannot openly effect a collision, as in Mexico city, they undermine the authority of the laws as much as possible, and whenever an outbreak occurs, they are ready to incite their adherents to deeds of blood and violence. The dying leader of the rebellion referred to, in his last moments, just before receiving the sacrament, asserted that it was the priest Giles who set the rebels on in the assassination of Varela, and this man was found with his eyes torn out, his tongue cut off, with other atrocities committed upon him too brutal to name. These men, in the garb of ministers of the gospel, are the men against whom Mexico is now struggling to the death, a foreign power within the nation, an enemy to light, liberty, and the true gospel.” “Is the Roman Catholic church anything less hostile to us in the United States? Are the priests of her church less enemies to our republican institutions? Do they not, as far as they dare, in the same way, arm themselves against what we most love and cherish? If they could preach in a foreign language, and that language could be understood by their flock and not by our people at large, would not their preaching be harangues in favor of a political crusade? The writer, some years ago, in the city of Detroit, listened to a sermon in the French language, delivered in the French Cathedral of the Roman Catholic church of that city, by one of its priests. The sermon was such as he would not have dared to utter before an English congregation, consisting, as it did, of a tirade against free institutions and republican liberty. Mexico is struggling to cast the poison from her bosom. She is banishing her Jesuits, breaking up her convents, confiscating her church property; while we, in the United States, are taking the first step to our embraces, giving a free license to the second, taking no notice of the accumulation of the third; doing in fact a work which, unless we fall, body and soul, into the grip of Rome, we shall have all to undo again as Mexico is doing to-day. “We might remember, with profit, the ancient fable of the peasant who found a viper in his field, cold and stiffened by the frost; he took it to his home, warmed it into life before his fire, when it turned, and, fastening its fangs in his flesh, inflicted a mortal wound. The medieval institutions, which other nations have cast forth and spurned, we are warming into vigorous life. It needs no prophet’s eye to see that, this attained, they will strike a death-blow to our Bible, our schools, and our boasted liberties. This attained, the hand that writes these lines, and every other hand that would dare to pen such truths, will wither in a re-established inquisition, and our star-spangled banner wave over a monstrous religious despotism exceeding, perhaps, as our vast territory is limitless, the power wielded once by papal Rome.”