“They shall take away his power to consume and destroy it unto the End.”
From our exchanges we gather the following facts concerning Popery and its attempt to enforce the new dogma of the immaculate conception.
“DECAY OF POPERY:—One of the most sufficient facts as to the coming doom of Popery is its increasing weakness in its old strong holds. Even at Paris it is declining. The number of priests in that city in 1790 was 5000. As the population has doubled, the present number, to keep up the relative proportion, ought to be 10,000; whereas it is now but 800.”
“THE SCRIPTURES IN SPAIN:—In a single town in Spain, there are, it is stated, nearly four thousand persons who have abandoned papal worship, and who assiduously study the holy Scriptures as their only rule. In other towns there are many persons, including not a few of the clergy, who protest against the tyranny and superstitions of the Church of Rome.
In relation to the new dogma, the Genesee Evangelist says,
“The Pope was too much in a hurry with his recent addition to the creed of his faithful followers. They were not all ready for its reception; and it is becoming evident, that it meets with warm resistance from many individuals scattered throughout the realms of the Popedom, whom it will be difficult to subdue, or to exclude, or even to reduce to silent dissent. In France, where, according to the concordat between the Government and the Pope, a document like the late decree in behalf of Mary’s immaculate conception can not be published even in the parish churches without the approval of the supreme civil authority; it has never yet though it is now nearly a year old, obtained the approbation of the Emperor, or of his Minister for Public Worship and Instruction. Nor, as we are given to understand, is it likely to receive their authorization. While this lasts, the Popery professed in France must differ in a very important respect from that of the Papal States in Italy.
There is a dogged resistance to the new dogma, and that in very high and influential quarters.” And it is said that an Archbishop of Paris has written “an address” of “wonderful boldness and vigor, which for freedom of thought and expression is worthy of the stauntest Protestant alive.”
On this subject, Dr. Cumming, of England says; “In France, Napoleon III., it is said, has authorized the circulation of the Protestant Bible amid the ranks of the French army; whole communes are renouncing Romanism; and the Parish church at Villefavard, where mass was celebrated, is now, I understand, a Protestant church. A Roman gentleman told me that in Rome, nine tenths of the population are hostile to the present Hildebrandic domination exercised by a camarilla of miserable priests under Pio Nono; that one third of them, at least, are Protestants searching the Bible for truth; and, that if the French bayonets were withdrawn—that stain upon French greatness—Pio Nono would not occupy his throne for many hours afterwards.”
Again he says, “Italy is a vast volcano, like its Vesuvius, ready to explode, its miserable rulers at their wit’s end how to keep their serfs, ecclesiastical serfs they may be, but serfs still, in a state of subjugation. Rome, the capital of Christendom, as it vaunts itself, is propped up, not by Austrian bayonets, which, bad as it might be, would still be the bayonets of an ultramontane daughter—a loyal child of the Roman Catholic Church; but by the bayonets of Republican France, that never yet accepted ultramontanism.
“What do you think of the story of that stupid dogma called the Immaculate Conception, or the determination come to, that the virgin Mary never was born a sinner, that she was at her very conception infinitely pure and spotless? It was just the Pope at his wit’s end, trying to make a little capital in Christendom, in order to lead the nations, beginning to be sick of his supremacy, to dream that he had recovered the long-lost power of creating new dogmas still. But instead of being a triumphant achievement, it has proved a contemptible failure.”