THE WORD OF GOD PLAINLY FULFILLED IN REGARD TO THE PAPACY.
By Wm. Penniman
We read in 2 Thess. 3:4, that the “man of sin shall be revealed, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped, so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.” It can be shown that this man of sin has styled himself “Lord God, the Pope.” What a blasphemous title! This title proclaims his infallibility. A majority of Catholic divines in their last council also proclaimed it. Buck, in his Theological Dictionary, says, “Infallibility is evidently an attribute of the Supreme Being alone, which we have all the foundation imaginable to conclude he has not communicated to any mortal or association of mortals.” The human being who challenges infallibility seems to imitate the pride and presumption of Lucifer, when he said, I will ascend, and will be like the Most High. A claim to it was unheard of in the primitive and purest ages of the church; but it became after that period the arrogant pretensions of papal ambition. The following from the New York Weekly Witness, of Sept. 14, 1876, will show how nearly the text quoted is fulfilled by the papacy:— “The following is a description of a picture which has been profusely circulated in Rome by the Jesuits, and which is doubtless, by this time, more or less scattered in other countries. Its object is to familiarize the people with the worship of the pope, which is gradually superseding the worship of the Virgin, as that superseded the worship of Jesus Christ. The picture is double, the upper part showing what is passing in Heaven, the lower part what is passing on earth. In the first, there is the figure of a venerable old man to represent the Eternal Father. On his right hand a little lower is the Virgin standing on the moon. On his left is St. Peter, kneeling on one knee and looking to the Virgin and not to God. In the scene on earth, Pius Ninth, wearing his triple crown, is seated on a pedestal, receiving on his head a ray of light which comes from a dove representing the Holy Spirit. The pope does not even turn his head toward the Almighty, but shows as the principal person of the whole picture. Around the pedestal are four men, symbolizing the four quarters of the globe, all kneeling to the pope, and none of them looking up to God. “It will be remarked that the Lord Jesus does not come in anywhere in this symbolic representation of Roman Catholic worship, and that is just about the real state of the case. He is cast out of what professes to be his true and only church just as completely as he was cast out by the rulers of the Jewish church, when he came to his own, and his own received him not.”