WILL IT PAY? by A. H. Darrow

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 2, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 31.

WILL IT PAY?

By A. H. Darrow

WILL the approaching Catholic triumph in the United States, which so many blind, infatuated Protestants are aiding, prove a desirable thing? Let us take a retrospective, historical view of this question, and see.

In the beginning of apostasy in the Christian church, the vacillations of church councils and the selfish ambition of bishops combined with the popular, the political, and the imperial demand for order and tranquility, made necessary the rise of a strong central head in the church if the apostate body was to be kept intact.

Concerning the one individual who did perhaps more than any other to bring about this result, the historian Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, says:

"The genius of Leo [I.] was exercised and displayed in the public misfortunes; and he has deserved the appellation of the Great, by the successful zeal with which he labored to establish his opinions and his authority, under the venerable names of orthodox faith and ecclesiastical discipline."—Vol. 2, p. 455.

Let it be remembered that Leo I. was the first pope, or Roman bishop, who ever succeeded in so completely dominating a church council as to cause his mandate to be substituted for the decree of a decided majority of the council. See "Two Republics," Chapters XVIII. and XIX.

Under his "authority" and "discipline" and the guidance of his successors, prayers for the dead, the worship of saints, martyrs and angels, and other unscriptural practises which had been already begun, were confirmed, and the deification of the dead and buried Mary, mother of Jesus, the adoption of a priestly garb of mixed pagan and Jewish origin, worshiping in Latin, worship of images and relics, baptism of bells, obligatory celibacy of priests, doctrine of church infallibility, sale of indulgences, transubstantiation, auricular confession, purgatory, etc., were successively adopted as doctrines and customs of the church. Patristicism, or the doctrine of the infallibility of the church fathers, became prevalent and overruling in the church, and, as a consequence, the intolerance of opposing doctrines and opinions, which had always characterized the pagan religions, was embraced by the Catholics, and has ever since been one of their most cherished tenets.

Says the Hon. George Bancroft, in his History of the Formation of the U. S. Constitution: "In the earliest states known to history, government and religion were one and indissoluble. . . . No one thought of vindicating religion for the conscience of the individual, till a voice in Judea, breaking day for the greatest epoch in the life of humanity by establishing a pure, spiritual, and universal religion for all mankind, enjoined to render to Cæsar only that which is Cæsar's. The rule was upheld during the infancy of the Gospel for all men. No sooner was the religion adopted by the chief of the Roman Empire, than it was shorn of its character of universality, and enthralled

by an unholy connection with the unholy state."—Last Chapter.

In consequence of this union of church and state and the amalgamation of Christianity with Paganism, freedom of thought ceased, new discoveries in science were curtailed; "throughout the East, men in terror destroyed their libraries, for fear that some unfortunate sentence contained in any of the books should involve them and their families in destruction. The universal opinion was that it was right to compel men to believe what the majority of society had now accepted as the truth, and, if they refused, it was right to punish them. No one was heard in the dominating party to raise his voice in behalf of intellectual liberty."—"Draper's Hist. Intel. Dev. of Europe," p. 231. "Already the Catholic party, in preparation of their commencing atrocities, ominously inquired, 'Is the vengeance of God to be defrauded of its victims?'"—Id., p. 209.

And so it went on from bad to worse till the fourth Council of Lateran, in its third canon, set forth the infamous decree, that—

"if any temporal lord, when required and admonished by the church, shall neglect to purge his land from this heretical taint, let him be bound in the chains of excommunication by the metropolitan and other bishops. And if he disdain to give satisfaction within a year, let this be signified to the sovereign Pontiff, that henceforth he may declare the vassals of such lord absolved from their allegiance, and may devote his land to be occupied by Catholics, who, exterminating the heretics, may possess it without any contradiction, and may preserve it in the true faith."—"Labbe," vol. XI, p. 148.

This quotation, in all its bold and base avowal of the worst charges ever made against the Romish apostasy, is alone sufficient to refute the assertions of Archbishop Spalding and others who try to make it appear that kings and emperor's were mainly responsible for the bloody and malignant persecutions which stain the annals of the Roman Church.

It is useless to more than mention the burning of the Serapion; the destruction of the Alexandrian Library; the wars of Justinian, "undertaken at the instance of the orthodox clergy," in which it is estimated that twenty-five million people lost their lives that Roman Catholicism might live and triumph; the internal strifes of the church. Then, as Draper says, bishops were concerned in assassinations, poisonings, adulteries, blindings, riots, treasons, civil war; when patriarchs and primates were excommunicating and anathematizing one another in their rivalries for earthly power, bribing eunuchs with gold, and courtesans and royal females with concessions of episcopal love, and influencing the decisions of councils asserted to speak with the voice of God by those base intrigues and sharp practise resorted to by demagogues in their packed assemblies! Among legions of monks, who carried terror into the imperial armies and riot into the great cities, arose hideous clamors for theological dogmas, but never a voice for intellectual liberty or the outraged rights of man.—"Hist. Int. D. of E.," p. 240.

Nor is it worth the while to more than allude to the hatred displayed against learning by Pope Gregory the Great, whose motto, "Ignorance is the mother of devotion," caused him to "expel from Rome all mathematical studies," to "forbid the study of the classics," to "burn the Palatine library founded by Augustus Cæsar and valuable for the many rare manuscripts it contained;" who "boasted that his own works were written without any regard to the rules of grammar" and of whom it was said that "he was as inveterate an enemy against learning as ever lived."—Id., pp. 264-265.

But it should not be forgotten, that after Charles Martel had saved Roman Catholic Europe from Mohammedan conquest and rule, and solely because he had taken some church revenues and applied them to the support of his army, he was "eternally damned" by the same pope and clergy which subsequently forged a celestial letter from St. Peter to persuade his son, Pepin, to conquer and bestow upon the pope the dominion of the Lombards. His son, Charlemagne, an equally zealous churchman, crowned by the pope, "invariably insisted on baptism as a sign of submission, punishing with appalling barbarity any resistance, as on the occasion of the revolt, A.D. 782, when, in cold blood, he beheaded in one day 4,500 persons at Verden."—Id. pp. 273-275.

Charlemagne himself "never succeeded in learning how to write;" and his schools "proved a failure," because "the Roman pontiffs and their clergy, very few of whom knew how to read, scarcely any to write, as far as they troubled themselves with any opinion about the matter, thought that knowledge was of more harm than good."—pp. 276, 277.

Pope Adrian had made money by selling his vassals as slaves to the Saracens; and, under the rule of Louis the Pious, "the slave trade greatly increased." "France, at this time, had literally become a theocracy, the clergy absorbing everything that was worth having." "We have now approached the close of a thousand years from the birth of Christ; the evil union of the church and state, their rivalries, their intrigues, their quarrels, had produced an inevitable result, doing the same in the West that they had done in the East; disorganizing the political system, and ending in a universal social demoralization."—Id. pp. 276-279.

Yet this same union of church and state is what Catholics are everywhere contending for, and what they expect to accomplish here. Through such union John Huss was slain, also Jerome of Prague, and millions of other heretics. By it they have reduced flourishing provinces to destitution, and decimated or cruelly tortured the population of numerous districts. After all his efforts to throw the blame for religious persecution on the state, Archbishop Spalding overturns his whole argument by saying, in his remarks on the multiplicity of sects in the United States: "The fatal source of all this mischief is the principle of private judgment in matters of religion, in opposition to that of authority."—"Essay on the Spirit of the Age," p. 392.

He thus denies for his church and for all people the right of private or individual judgment, and in so doing, justifies every act of persecution of which the Romish church has ever been guilty. Shall we uphold a church, or system, or principle, that stand for a union of church and state, for universal social demoralization, for religious persecution; and which, instead of bettering, makes worse even the heathen nation which it subdues and dominates? O build on Christ, the Rock of Truth, and not on ecclesiasticism, or you will find in the great Judgment Day that the storms and floods have swept away your only refuge.