Romish Mission | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Nov 16, 1876

Romish Mission.

THE Roman Catholics excel all other Christians in making proselytes. They have marvelous success as propagandists. It requires very little indeed to make a devout son of “holy mother Church.” Missionaries of that Church are sent into the world with their robes, their rosaries, and their crosses. An appeal is made to the senses, and baptism is the glorious consummation of their evangelizing labors. The word of God is not read or expounded. The cardinal doctrines of the gospel are not taught. The idolatrous rites and ceremonies of pagan people are scarcely interdicted or abolished. The civilization of the most degraded tribes and clans of heathen people is not materially improved.

Missionaries had been on the Pacific Coast three-quarters of a century before California became a portion of our territory. Most of the Indian tribes had been converted to Romanism, yet no school had been taught, nor were the tribes in the slightest degree improved in their morals and habits of living. Burrowing in the ground, and wretchedly filthy in their persons, they spent their weeks, months, and years in idleness, living like beasts, and as ignorant of the principles of the Christian religion as they were when the priests first landed upon these shores.

What is a religion worth that utterly fails to refine, purify, and elevate its votaries?

A native convert in China recently said to an English missionary:

“Twelve years ago we knew nothing about this doctrine; twelve years ago, though the Romanists had been here two hundred years, we had not the Bible; we did not know what the gospel was.”

What is true in China is true elsewhere. Only in Protestant Christian countries does the papal Church instruct her people. It is only where Protestantism predominates that Romish priests establish schools and inculcate principles of morality among the people. They do such work, not of choice, but of necessity.

The masses of adult citizens in Spain, in Italy, in Mexico and in Central and South America are unable to read. Not one out of five in the city of Rome knows the alphabet. The mummeries of the Church service—it were burlesque to call it worship—are faithfully taught; nothing more is deemed safe, since knowledge would lessen the priest’s power over his parishioners. “Ignorance is the mother of devotion!” An educated people can not long be hoodwinked by a corrupt hierarchy.—California Advocate.