IS PROTESTANTISM DEAD?
By J. W. Scoles
THERE are some so-called Protestants to-day who are so broadly liberal that they profess to have great charity for the Church of Rome and her work of persecution in past ages. The argument of this class, whose following is unfortunately increasing, by the way, is to the effect that Romanists to-day are not what they were two and three centuries ago; that the ignorance of those times was largely responsible for the tyranny of the Romish Church, but that this church now sees how cruel such work was in the past, and, with broader and more charitable views, she is ready to forget these things and unite with other churches, as one of the great factors in the work of “establishing the kingdom of the Redeemer upon earth,” and so on, ad nauseam. It makes one tired to hear and read so much of this sniveling, hypocritical cant upon this question. If the Romanists of to-day are not the same as they were a few centuries since, it is simply because the circumstances have changed, not the church. That this is the case is abundantly proved by the stand taken time and again upon this question by Rome herself. It is the boast of all Catholicism that the church never has erred, and never varies either in spirit or in practice. How often will it be necessary for Protestants to hear the assertion, “The Church of Rome never changes,” made by those high in authority in this self-same church, before they will believe this? All this profession, accompanied, too, by the “thunders of the Vatican,” to the same effect, is to pass for nothing is it? and we are to conclude that the whole thing is simply a by-play, a farce being enacted for the benefit of the weak-kneed Protestant world, are we? A farce it may be in the eyes of some, but if so, the fires of burning victims light up all the trappings of the stage, already crimson with the “blood of the saints,” until it becomes the ghastliest farce ever enacted on the foot-boards of this world. No; the persecution of heretics in the past would be repeated to-day by the Church of Rome did she only possess the power. This is evident to any unprejudiced and enlightened mind, and the following dispatch from Rome, under date of May 28, will only confirm the fact:— “The Pope has ordered that on the day of the unveiling of the monument to Giordano Bruno, who was put to death as a heretic in 1600, all the Papal guards and gendarmes shall keep within the grounds of the Vatican. Those on furlough have been ordered to return immediately.” This ought to be enough to open the eyes of every Protestant in the land to the truth of the situation, which is simply this: that the Church of Rome has been tolerant for a few years past, only because it was out of her power to do otherwise; but with the recognition, in a measure, of her former position by some of the leading rulers of the earth, and with the prospects that by diplomacy she may possibly yet regain a share of her former prestige, the old spirit of the hierarchy is at once manifested in such orders as the Papal injunction just referred to. And if we read the signs of the times aright, such events as this, together with the apparent indifference of apostate Protestantism, are simply the prelude to the triumphal restoration to power of this antichrist, in the hour so soon to come, when all the world shall wonder after the beast whose deadly wound was healed.