The Papacy Imitated by C. S. Longacre

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · May 3, 1906

The Papacy Imitated

By C. S. Longacre

Dr. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, superintendent of the National Reform Bureau, who is now touring this country and delivering a lecture every night in some church, and expects to continue in this line of work for two years, is seeking public indorsement of his Sunday bills before Congress.

The first thing he announces in his lectures (for they are the same every night in each place) is the statement that “our government is a wheelbarrow government.” You must get behind it and push it if you want it to move. By your vote here in favor of the bills which our Bureau has now before Congress, you are taking hold of the handles of the wheelbarrow and giving it a tremendous push. There is nothing that has so much influence upon Congressmen and Senators as a unanimous vote on a certain measure by a local mass-meeting. The church people in a church are then asked to vote on the affirmative side of his separate bills before Congress, the first of which is to close the doors of the Jamestown (Va.) Tri-Centennial Fair on Sundays. It is an easy thing to make a vote unanimous when only an affirmative vote is called for, as was done at Washington, Pa.

Dr. Crafts says the Reform Bureau has drawn up a bill before Congress that shall require the gates of the Jamestown Fair to be closed on Sundays under contract that Congress shall reserve the right to seize the property of the fair to the amount of the entire appropriation that Congress shall grant, which is estimated to be three million dollars. If they violate the agreement, as they did at the World's Fair of Chicago, then Congress shall seize the property to the appropriated amount and confiscate it. Dr. Crafts said this contract was the only thing that kept the St. Louis people from opening the doors on Sunday, and that the Bureau deserved the credit for the wisdom of the excellent scheme. You touch a man's pocketbook, and you can bring him to time on every issue, said he.

If this is not going back to the Dark Ages and walking in the steps of the papacy, then I do not know the black horse and his rider in the apocalyptic vision. Well might this modern agitator of religious intolerance be styled the Pope of the “Christian Lobby,” to the Image of the Papacy. This is no new scheme, but the same old scheme of the Church of Rome and the court of Rome. A few quotations will show whether we are drifting. I quote from “Pope Marcellus’s Decrees, Corpus Juris Canonici,” part 2, chap. 18: “It is permitted neither to think nor to teach otherwise than the court of Rome directs.” Also “Decretals of Gregory IX,” book 5, title 7: “The secular powers shall swear to exterminate all heretics condemned by the church; and if they do not, they shall be anathema.”

Here is a sample of Dr. Crafts’ policy and scheme, of which Pope Boniface VIII is the author: “Inquisitors may compel the heirs of those who favored heretics to fulfil the penance enjoined by delivering up their goods. After the death of a man, he may be declared a heretic, that his property may be confiscated.”—“Decretals.”

The Church of Rome never had a more effective weapon in whipping the world into forced obedience to her mandates than the coalition with the civil court of Rome to carry out her biddings, to confiscate the property and goods of heretics condemned by the church.

That a free people should allow such a wicked scheme to be enacted into law is a marvel. May the friends of religious liberty raise a loud cry of warning against the papal scheme that is so zealously fostered by apostate Protestantism.

C. S. LONGACRE.