Condition of the Papacy.
By Uriah Smith
Prophecy has spoken perhaps more pointedly, explicitly, and fully in relation to the papacy than in reference to any other antichristian or wicked power. Hence that power must become one of the most marked indexes of the time in which we live. After its long period of triumph and strength and wealth and exaltation, it was to come down from its lofty pinnacle of glory into the dust with shame and humiliation. Just before the end, and reaching to the end, the prophet said that they should take away his dominion to consume and destroy it. Let Catholics themselves tell how impressively this is now fulfilled. Cardinal Cullen, Aug. 21, 1866, says:— “There is no friendly power now capable of of supporting the head of the church. . . Nearly everything has been taken from him.” The pope was then master of Rome, but that city and the surrounding territory, the last vestige of the pope’s temporal power, has now passed into the hands of his enemies. The cardinal further says:— The Italians “avow the deadliest hatred to the pope, and to religion.” Garabaldi says: “I believe there is not in all the world a country less Catholic than Italy.” The Boston Pilot, a Roman Catholic paper, prints the following from its correspondent in Rome:— “Good Romans see no other future than a future which will, in all probability, outstrip in horror and bloodshed the work of destruction . . . in Paris.” At a great meeting of Catholics in Dublin, a resolution was presented in which occur the following words:— “We view with grief the apathy with which the governments of Europe have permitted His Holiness to be assailed in his rights, and stripped of his territories.” In addition to this, take the fact that in Italy, and even in Rome itself, the convents are being emptied of their monks, and converted into public institutions, that some thirty of them have recently been appropriated by the State, some of them bearing very historic names, and that Protestantism has more than forty chapels in Rome open every Sunday, and we can realize something of the change which has taken place in the condition of the papacy, and its nearness to the end of its career, an end to be consummated by the glorious appearing of our Lord and Saviour. U. S.