LOSING GROUND | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 6, 1879

LOSING GROUND.

A CORRESPONDENT of the Christian Intelligencer writes: “In Milan, Turin, Pisa, Florence, and notably in Rome, I gleaned but one impression,—that the Papal Church was fatally and irretrievably losing its hold upon the masses of Italy. An eminent man, who enjoys the friendship of the present pope, remarks in an article furnished to a late number of the Contemporary Review, that, ‘if the word Protestant could be accepted as the synonym of anti-papal, the people of Italy are at the present moment the most Protestant nation in the world.’ Go from one cathedral to another, and while you witness the pageant of the ritual, or listen to the richest music, you look about you and wonder at the absence of worshipers. The splendid churches remain, but the spirit which once builded them is gone. They remain, but instead of being thronged with eager worshipers, they are only vast ecclesiastical show-shops, and shrines for the worshipers of art alone. Indeed, they seemed painfully like the mausoleums of a dead faith.”