IS THIS A CATHOLIC COUNTRY?
At the opening ceremonies of the great Fair at Chicago, at the moment the President touched the button to set the machinery in motion, the spectator, looking over the immense crowds of people gathered from every State in the Union and every country on the globe, would have seen in the front ranks, in the place of honor, and most conspicuous, as apparent head and front of the vast array, a large banner on which was a cross! This statement may appear unbelievable, but an artist has photographed the scene at the moment, and his pictures cannot falsify. And, true to that initiative, the Catholic Church leads. It had 40,000 feet of the best building for its church exhibit—a space into which all that assigned to all the Protestant churches might have been placed and scarcely noticed. The American pope led in the religious congress, with bizarre eloquence about the Bible and the Constitution—the Bible, which is forbidden to all but priests, and the Constitution, which the Catholic Church has anathematized, and daily treads underfoot. Think of it! Catholicism, which has, since its beginning, persecuted near unto death, with fiendish hate, free thought and free speech, standing up before the assembled world, and shouting itself hoarse for liberty and constitutional right! Why, it scorns liberty, hates freedom, and knows no rights but such as God has given its priesthood!—Selected.