The Papacy’s Growing Influence
NEWSPAPERS everywhere are talking about the wonderful strength, vitality, and growing influence of the Papacy. Below is a characteristic utterance, from the City Argus, of San Francisco, of December 2. In speaking of the soon passing away of Leo. XIII., and how the Papacy is tied up in the vital international problem of Europe, the Argus says:— Nothing could show more eloquently the actual gain to the Papacy involved in its loss of temporal power. With it the popes had sunk into political unimportance hardly distinguishable from that of the Armenian patriarch. Without it Leo, in fifteen years, raised the Papacy again to the dignity and prestige of a great political force, commanding an amount of attention which recalls the days of Borgias and the Medicis. But this gain Rome does not see, and therefore she will use it, and the influence which it has brought her, to again obtain control of that which she has lost. She will do this to her own final destruction, as well as that of the governments of earth. God's word has predicted both.