PRESENT WORLD MOVEMENTS IN PROPHECY
By A. O. Tait
To many it may seem an incongruity to speak of a Protestant Papacy. So devoted and loyal are many Protestants to their cause, that they may be inclined to regard the thought of a Protestant Papacy as an absurd slander. To all such we would make the request that they consider and weigh without bias the facts that will be presented in the paragraphs that follow. Of course it must be understood that in speaking of a Protestant Papacy we are not considering Protestantism in its broadest, truest sense; we are not speaking of Protestantism as it has been understood in theory; neither are we speaking of it as it was taught by some of the Reformers that helped to start the great Protestant Reformation in its onward and uplifting course. We must speak of it as it was taught by some and practised by many others. For just as the Papacy itself grew up in the true church that followed Christ and the apostles, even so did this Protestant Papacy grow up in the very midst of the renewed church that struggled to rid itself of the rubbish of error, despotism, and superstition through the mighty workings of the Spirit of God in the Reformation. In a previous article attention has been called to the efforts that have been made by men to dominate the earth in universal empire. We had one world empire after another until the climax was reached in the empire of Rome. And when Rome came to her zenith and began to crumble and decay she had the idea of universal empire firmly fixed in the minds of men. Even the barbarians that were making incursions into her territory and breaking her to pieces were so impressed by her greatness and grandeur that they too imbibed the idea that Rome must stand a universal empire till the end of time. This idea of universal empire was taken up and fostered by the church as she began to apostatize. The church too must be universal, and she must have a universal State, or universal civil arm, to support her in her work. And these sentiments grew into the "Holy Roman Empire," as was shown in last week's paper — an empire in which it was claimed that we had a universal holy church supported by a universal holy State. With these ideas so strongly entrenched in the minds of men, it should not be a marvel that many of the Reformers that were contemporary with Luther should have imbibed the idea that the State should compel conformity in matters of religion. Martin Luther himself maintained strongly that the Reformation did not need the State to protect or to defend it, for the mighty power of God was behind it, and the power of the Infinite did not need the arm of civil power to assist or to protect His followers in their work. The Gospel was the purest, and had done its mightiest work, when the first apostles carried it into the very teeth of the heathen Roman Empire. Rome, aided by the Jewish nation, that rejected Christ, sought to suppress the new faith by imprisoning and killing its advocates. But the Gospel was carried right over every obstacle to triumphant victory. And it was this power that is inherent in the Gospel itself that was needed, so Luther affirmed, and not the civil State, to help it along. But Zwingli thought to depend upon the carnal sword; and altho his name has come down to us as one of the greatest of the Reformers next to Luther, yet history has had to record the sad fact that he helped to inspire an army to go against those of the Catholic faith, and the great Reformer perished ingloriously on the field of battle. He thus fulfilled the words of the Master whom he sought earnestly and faithfully to serve even tho he was misguided: "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." John Calvin was also one of the prominent Reformers who went against the tyrannies of the Papacy, at least in theory; but he could not allow freedom of conscience to Michael Servetus, and so he burned him at the stake. His notion seemed to be that it was wrong for the Catholic to burn any one at the stake, for the Catholic did not have the true faith; but he being right in faith, he must not allow any differing views, and therefore it was all right for him to resort to the stake to suppress heresy. Thus it will be seen that some of the earliest and most prominent Reformers stained their work by resorting to the very methods of the Papacy that they were protesting against. And in these acts they laid the foundation for the church-and-state notions of the Papacy to be brought into the Protestant ranks. The great enemy of all truth was not content with bringing the tyrannies of persecution into the church that followed the apostolic times, but he must lead the church of the Reformation to think that it must depend on the civil power and persecute those who would not yield to the creeds that it formulated. The Reformation kept growing stronger and stronger until practically all of Western Europe came to be called Protestant countries. There were only a few exceptions to the rule. Germany became a strong Protestant country, but she had a State religion — she preserved much of the church-and-state notions of the Middle Ages and of the Papacy. England became strongly Protestant, but she also established a State religion; and so with Holland, Switzerland, and others of the nations of Western Europe. And not only was Protestantism established as the State religion in these nations, but the Protestantism that was thus established became just as bitter in its persecution as had been the Papacy. In this way it showed that no difference what name you call a thing by, that will not keep it from persecuting, provided it adhere to the principles that lead to persecution. The following paragraph from Gibbon, speaking of the work of the Reformation, is worthy of more than a passing glance in this connection: The chain of authority was broken, which restrains the bigot from thinking as he pleases, and the slave from speaking as he thinks: the popes, fathers, and councils were no longer the supreme and infallible judges of the world; and each Christian was taught to acknowledge no law but the Scriptures, no interpreter but his own conscience. This freedom, however, was the consequence rather than the design of the Reformation. The patriot Reformers were ambitious of succeeding the tyrants whom they had dethroned. They imposed with equal vigor their creeds and confessions; they asserted the right of the magistrate to punish heretics with death. The pious or personal animosity of Calvin proscribed in Servetus the guilt of his own rebellion; and the flames of Smithfield, in which he was afterward consumed, had been kindled for the Anabaptists by the zeal of Cranmer. The nature of the tiger was the same, but he was gradually deprived of his teeth and fangs.—"The Roman Empire," chapter 54. Speaking of "the Reformation and its effects," Bryce says: The principles which had led the Protestants to sever themselves from the Roman Church, should have taught them to bear with the opinions of others, and warned them from the attempt to connect agreement in doctrine or manner of worship with the indispensable forms of secular government. Still less ought they to have enforced that agreement by civil penalties; for faith, upon their own showing, had no value save when it was freely given. ... In almost every country the form of doctrine which triumphed associated itself with the State, and maintained the despotic system of the Middle Ages, while it forsook the grounds on which that system had been based. It was thus that there arose national churches, which were to be to the several Protestant countries of Europe that which the Church Catholic had been to the world at large; churches, that is to say, each of which was to be coextensive with its respective State, was to enjoy landed wealth and exclusive political privilege, and was to be armed with coercive powers against recusants. . . . They could not claim to have in any one man or body of men an infallible organ of divine truth; they could not even fall back upon general councils. . . . The dominant party in each State, if it did not claim to be infallible, was at any rate quite sure that it was right, and could attribute the resistance of other sects to nothing but moral obliquity. The will of the sovereign, as in England, or the will of the majority, as in Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and Scotland, imposed upon each country a peculiar form of worship, and kept up the practices of medieval intolerance without their justification.—"Holy Roman Empire," edition of 1907, pages 381, 382. The foregoing extracts are merely samples of statements with which history is replete, showing that mere Protestantism is not sufficient to keep the human being from intolerance and bigoted persecution. We must have the real Christianity as taught by Christ and exemplified in His life. Among Protestants, as among papists, there has been a disposition from the start to coerce the consciences of men and to torture them if they did not yield. The only nation of any consequence that has ever existed that has not had a State religion is the United States. And wherever there has been a State religion there has always been more or less of persecution. Next week we will give some of the evidence that shows that this very generation in which we live is to set itself to establish a world-wide holy empire, and when it comes all history shows that it will attempt to persecute.