Toleration of Rome

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

Toleration of Rome.

THE organs of the Roman Catholic hierarchy are teaching us how they would act, only give them the power in this country. The Tablet says of the Papists, that “they have as much right to keep them (Protestants) out of their land as to keep out the plague of cholera.” The suggestion that a persecuting Catholic ought not to complain of Protestant persecution is declared to be “completely without reason;” for it is a very different thing when the Catholic Church persecutes and when any of the sects presume to do so. “Protestant persecution means sectarian tyranny—it is the highest impudence of tyranny and conceit. But Catholic ‘persecution’—to use the word popularly—is the ‘legislating for God.’” In apologizing for the murder of a Protestant in Mexico who had been guilty of the heinous crime of reading the Bible to his countrymen, it says: “Lynch law is a barbarous remedy, and 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 (Protestant) having become interested in the Bible, proceeds to interest his neighbors.”—American Protestant.