p. 26 | A Wonderful Contrast by R. M. Kilgore

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 21, 1875

A Wonderful Contrast.

By R. M. Kilgore

[ALL eyes are turned in the direction of the papacy, and are witnessing the waning away of that power once so universal. Under the above heading, the Cincinnati Weekly Times, Dec. 24, 1874, speaks as follows; indicating in a marked manner the fulfillment of Dan. 7: 26. R. M. KILGORE.]

“In the midst of this common quarrel with the church of Rome—while Bismarck is handling his battle-ax against the church, as Coeur de Lion handled his for it; while Gladstone is fighting Manning with paper pellets; while bishops and emperors are waging war in Brazil, and popery and no popery turns the tide of battle in Spain—one mighty fact stands out, clear-limned and bright, against the lurid background of the past: the fact that the dominance of the spiritual power over the civil is gone forever.

The wildest dream that crazed romancer ever penned, smiles into every-day reality beside the contrast which the present and the past present in this particular. Instances crowd upon the memory, but two will amply suffice. Eight centuries ago—it lacks but three years of being exactly eight centuries, with the next month—in the depth of a terrible winter, the emperor of Germany, after exhausting the resources of his realm in a vain battle with Gregory VII., crossed the icy Alps to beg with utmost humiliation the pardon of the pope. For three days, clothed in the white raiment of a penitent, cold and fasting, this haughty monarch stood amid the dreary snow before the gates of Canova, pleading for the forgiveness of the inexorable pontiff—the Vice-Regent of Christ upon earth.

Our second scene is amid the lagoons of Venice, under the great lions of St. Mark. The fierce struggle of Frederick Barbarossa with Pope Alexander III. has culminated in the defeat of the emperor. In the place of St. Mark sits his Holiness, arrayed in his pontifical robes, with the highest dignitaries of his court, and the ambassadors of the great powers of the world grouped about him. Humbly, as a whipped child, the great emperor approaches, strips off his mantle, kneels, and kisses the feet of the pope. Intoxicated with his awful triumph, and gloating over the agony of the proud warrior, the pontiff places his foot on the neck of his prostrate enemy, and exclaims in a loud voice: “Thou shalt tread upon the asp and the basilisk; the lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot.” “Not to thee, but to Peter,” cried the outraged and agonized emperor. “To both me and Peter,” replied the pope, with another pressure of his heel upon the bowed neck.

And now how changed the scene. Stripped of his temporalities, without a friend or an ally among the rulers of the earth, with a hostile king in the Seven-hilled City, the aged prelate sits trembling upon his throne, with nothing but feeble remonstrances for Bismarck, and still more feeble epithets for Gladstone. And what is the secret—what the causes—of this marvelous change? Not the force of arms, and not the voice of battle. It is the growth of intellect—the resistless march of science. The popes have fallen upon the battle-field of their own choice. The sovereign power that made the earth the center of the universe; that forbade that it should move about the sun; that murdered Hypatia; anathematized Copernicus; burned Bruno at the stake, and imprisoned Galileo; has been finally beaten at every point by its opponent, and now finds its power confined to a daily narrowing circle of ignorance and superstition.

And to this opponent—the intellectual growth of the people—the pope and his cause may well be left. Bismarck may persecute, and Gladstone write pamphlets, for their own private ends; but the fall of the papacy will be neither hastened nor retarded thereby. Animal force has never yet availed anything against a great religion, and never will. It falls, if it falls at all, before something infinitely more powerful—the resistless march of intellect.”