GAVAZZI ON ROMANISM by Wm. Penniman

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 9, 1881

GAVAZZI ON ROMANISM.

By Wm. Penniman

BY WM. PENNIMAN.

IN Gavazzi's concluding lecture on Romanism in his condemnation of the worship of relics, we find the following:—

“But if the worship of relics is so stupid and revolting, what will you say about the worship of images? The papists say, in the face of the second commandment, that it is right to worship images; and it is also true that in order to worship images they must entirely violate the second commandment of the decalogue, and you cannot find in all their edition of the Bible the second commandment at all. Still they pretend to have the ten commandments the same as the Protestants. Yes, ten commandments! But though the Bible system is a connected system, the priests of Rome took the last commandment of the decalogue, and, like good upholsterers, cut in pieces the last commandment in order to eke out the ten commandments. The second commandment, which forbids the worship of images, is cut off entirely, and the last commandment is divided, so that the ninth commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife;’ and the tenth, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ox, nor his ass,’” etc.

As Gavazzi has described so truly and forcibly what the papists have done to the second and last commandment, it is to be regretted that he did not see what they have done to the fourth. They not only “say in the face of the second commandment that it is right to worship images;” but they also say in the face of the fourth that the church has power to change the law of God; thus setting up a counterfeit Sabbath in place of the Sabbath of the Lord, in fulfillment of Dan. 7 : 25, which says this power should think to change times and laws. Truly the “Bible system is a connected one,” and the papists have attempted to sever the very connecting link in the center of the moral law, which links the system together.