Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.
By Editor
SO-CALLED Liberal Protestants at the present time are fondly hoping that they will see some such change in the Roman Catholic Church as has taken place in their own experience. In our opinion they are reckoning without their host. Roman Catholicism still pursues its traditional way. Higher criticism may have crept into that church, but it is cast out again. It will never yield to modernism. In a recent work by a Liberal Protestant entitled "Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism," the author states that he believes in Catholicism. He states: "I believe in the Roman Catholic Church as it shall be a thousand years from now." That is, with the idea that the Roman Catholic Church shall change during the intervening time, still holding its wonderful organization, but holding at the same time very liberal doctrines. The Roman Catholic Church will not change. All her devotees know that just as soon as she does, she loses her identity. At the same time that Liberal Protestantism is lauding the Roman Catholic Church and seeking a sort of union with it on the basis of compromise, the Roman Catholic Church is denouncing Protestantism as a heresy, and telling us she is only waiting a little while for Protestantism to die; in fact, some of our Roman Catholic friends declare that Protestantism is already dead; and they certainly judge rightly from the view-point of the many utterances which we hear from professed Protestant teachers at the present time. Yet true Protestantism is not dead; it still lives. Its faith is still centered in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ as revealed in the Book. By that it stands, by that Protestants are willing to risk their all. They can not regard the great apostasy in the Roman Catholic Church as a part of genuine Christianity. True Protestants are willing to admit that there are Christian Catholics, not BECAUSE of Roman Catholicism, but in SPITE of it. They are willing to concede the same fairness and privileges for Roman Catholics in teaching and instructing the world that they ask for themselves; but they do not believe, nay, more, to be true to God's word, they can not believe that the teachings of Roman Catholicism are correct. They feel that it is their duty to oppose those teachings. They have nothing against Catholics, but they have much against Catholicism. God's word must not be made void by human criticism on the one hand or human tradition on the other. It must stand clear and free as in the days of Pentecost, and as it was in some of the times of the Reformation. The greater reformation lies before us; that of the sixteenth century was but the breaking of the morning, the clearing away of some of the clouds, the opening up, so to speak, of the spiritual heavens, the location of great guiding stars of God's Book; and that reformation will go on until the remnant church is stripped of every human fable, of every human tradition which makes void the word of God, of all science falsely so called, of everything that seeks by human wisdom to becloud the simple, clear utterances of the Bible. True Protestantism will not find its power in worldly federations, in union of church and state, but in vital union with the Lord Jesus Christ.