p. 16 | A Barrier Yet to Meet by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 9, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 32.

A Barrier Yet to Meet.

By Editor

The Catholic Mirror of July 22 congratulates Cardinal Gibbons on the occasion of his seventy-first birthday, and among other things says:

It must be no small part of the pride which fills the cardinal on this day to feel that the church, which had before it in the '60's so many chasms to bridge, so many rivers to ford, so many cliffs to scale, has bridged them, forded them, and scaled them all victoriously through the support lent by his and other valiant arms. . . . It must be with joyous heart, indeed, that the cardinal turns at this milestone, and views, from the summit he has laboriously won, the past with all its difficulties overcome, its dangers faced, its barriers of prejudice broken down, and its countless thousands won for the church, and who still toil in the valley.

But there is one barrier which that church is yet to meet, and that is the eternal truth of God in the judgment,—truth which she has perverted by tradition, truth which she has trampled down, truth the disciples of which she has put to death, truth embodied in the law designed of God as a hedge to His people, but which that church has broken down, truth personified in the life of the Incarnate Word, whom Rome has crucified afresh, and locked in her sepulcher of dead forms from her starving devotees. But when Rome meets these at the bar of God, all her mitered power and gilded pomp will perish in the presence of Him from whom Rome has shut away the millions by cordons of priests and dead saints. Those of her flock who are saved then will be saved despite the ministrations of her perversions of truth. For Cardinal Gibbons, or any other Roman Catholic, we have naught but the honor due all men, our kindest wishes and earnest prayer but for the "body of doctrine" by which Catholics are held in direst bondage, and which, when accepted, will ruin the world and nations, we have no use, and we wish that every Roman Catholic would so conclude before he meets God's truth in the judgment.