THE DRAGONIC SPIRIT

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 20, 1876

FromThe Review and Herald, Review and Herald, Vol. 48, No. 4.

THE DRAGONIC SPIRIT.

The following shows from their own lips the spirit that still reigns in the Catholic Church. Give them the opportunity and the power, and they will exhibit its diabolical fruits in our own land:—

“Felix Martinez, Protestant Mexican, began not long ago to read the Bible to his neighbors. For this, and this only, a number of Catholic Christians broke into his house at night, and in the presence of his wife, who plead in vain, knocked him down with a club, then shot him dead, and ended by hanging the body in the wife's presence. Harper's Weekly, referring to the case, called the murdered man a martyr; whereupon the New York Tablet [Roman Catholic] says:—

“Martyr! If a man were to outrage my wife or daughter, and I were to slay him in a moment of uncontrollable indignation, would he be a martyr?” As much so as this Felix Martinez. What is the meaning of this nonsensical cant about his ‘becoming interested in the Bible and interesting his neighbors?’ So some Mexicans shot him because he ‘was interested in the Bible.’ What is this pitiful, unctuous euphemism for a man's insulting the religion of the people, wounding their profoundest religious convictions, and insulting all they hold most dear, but a hypocritical falsehood? The people were not wise to execute summary vengeance on him; but people are not wise when all the tenderest feelings of their hearts are wounded. Lynch law is a barbarous remedy; but lynch law is not confined to Mexico, and if it could ever be justifiable, it is when, in a country devoted to the Catholic faith, a blaspheming infidel, having become ‘interested in the Bible,’ proceeds to interest his neighbors.”