Archbishop Manning's Claim That the Pope Is Christ
A PROVIDENCE, R. I., paper says:— “It is one of the singular features of the time that with all the intellectual activity of the age, the advancement of science, the tendency to materialism and the general decay of distinctive superstition, there should be manifest, at the very moment when the temporal power of the pope is expiring, an inclination on the part of his most enlightened followers to accept his spiritual claims and decrees with more abject submissiveness than at even the darkest periods of ignorance and superstition. Archbishop Manning, of England, in a recent lecture, as stated in the Times, announced his firm belief that the pope is the very Christ, divinely inspired and entitled to the same reverence and obedience that Christ himself was when here in person. There is a little confusion in the language, for there is no need of an if in the case, granting that the pope is Christ, as, if he is, he certainly is here in person, and no more or less can be made of the words used. Dissenters and Protestants of course find it impossible for a man to believe implicitly anything and everything that may be said by any other man; but Bishop Manning has gone far beyond all this, and having worked himself into the belief that the pope is Christ he finds no more difficulty in believing what the pope says than Protestants do in believing the Bible.”