Papist

“ Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; ”

“ It is vain, that persons calling themselves the friends of freedom assert, that the intolerant principles of Papists have changed, as they have become enlightened. Popery is ever the same—or it is no longer the Roman Catholic religion;—it cannot change without being at variance with its own principles;—for it maintains its Popes infallible, and its faith unchanged, from the institution of Christianity to the present age. ”

“ That we are Papists, (we, who are daily and hourly preaching that very doctrine which is so solemnly anathematized by the whole church of Rome) is such a charge, that I dare not waste my time in industriously confuting it. Let any man of common sense only look on the title pages of the sermons we have lately preached at Oxford, and he will need nothing more to shew him the weight of this senseless, shameless accusation;—unless he can suppose the governors both of Christ-Church and Lincoln-College, nay, and all the university, to be Papists too. ”

“ That they are ready and prepared for this ungodly change, is evident from their maintaining and asserting all the vilest and most formidable tenets of popery; and by their uniting in all the traitorous intrigues, in all the basest and bloodiest councils of papists. But that the papists would protect or prefer them afterwards, is more than doubtful: It is not likely, that they will trust those whom by experience they know no trust can bind. They know that those who have betrayed you, and a King who has protected and preferred them, will betray also even papists. ”

“ This has as frightful an aspect as the other, and perhaps more so; as many think there is less danger of their turning Heathens, than their turning Papists. But be not frightened at nothing; perhaps the tables again may be turned upon the objectors. Whether Christ’s tasting death for every man be Popery or not, I am sure absolute predestination is; and it argues, that they who start that objection are ignorant of the tenets of the Papists. It is well known, that that large fraternity among the Papists called Dominicans, were all rigid predestinarians, as well as those called Jansenists. ”

“ But Providence interposed, and these miserable dupes of Romish priests received a check, which, if followed up, will have a salutary effect in future. But, I pray you, be on your guard; watch the movements of Papists among you: have no confidence in them; have as little as possible to do with them. Trust them in nothing which may either directly or indirectly involve their religion. I most solemnly appeal to our national and state legislatures, to exclude them from every office of honor, profit, or trust, while they have any connection whatever, spiritual or temporal, with the Pope of Rome. ”

“ They know full well that such a creed cannot be sustained either by reason or Scripture, and hence it is, they want all power concentrated in the Pope of Rome, in order to extirpate their opponents, Protestant heretics. Papists understand the character of Americans, and are well aware, that if sufficiently satisfied of the existence among them, of a sect who believed in a doctrine so absurd, and so impiously profane, as that of the real bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they could not countenance them. ”

“ Still, this appalling ignorance on the part of the Papists did not afford any excuse or ground for charitable treatment. Their malice, particularly that of the Popes, is too great. “The Popes are a pot-boil of the very worst men on earth. They boast of the name of Christ, St. Peter and the Churches and yet are full of the worst devils in hell, full, absolutely full, so full that they drivel, spew and vomit nothing but devils.” ”

“ Just so the Papists adore their images; because per imaginem, they adore prototypon. 2. What if we should yield to the Bishop that kneeling and holidays are with us applied to another service, and used with another meaning than they are with the Papists? Doth that excuse our conformity with Papists in the external use of these ceremonies? If so, J. Hart637 did rightly argument out of Pope Innocentius, that the church doth not Judaise by the sacrament of unction or anointing, because it doth figure and work another thing in the New Testament than it did in the Old. ”

“ Their writers assure us that Papists are now grown much more mild and moderate, and have none of the ferocity and cruelty which was the temper of former times, and that they condemn persecution for a mere diversity of religious sentiments. ”

“ But I may be told that nothing is to be dreaded in this country from Papists; that they have neither numbers, nor means, to accomplish their designs upon our institutions. Let us see whether this is so. I have stated, in a former page, the number of bishops, priests, seminaries, and Papists, in this country. I have also shown you, to a demonstration, that if the number of emigrant Papists should continue to increase for the next thirty years, as they have for the last eight, they will be a majority of the population of the United States, and the Pope our supreme temporal ruler. ”

“ It is a most horrid aggravation of those men's sins, who make their honouring of the saints departed a cover for their hating and persecuting their followers; or that make it an engine for the carrying on some base design. Some make it a device for the advancing of their parties and peculiar opinions. The papists make it a very great means for the maintaining the usurped power of the pope, giving him the power of canonizing saints, and assuring the world what souls are in heaven. ”

“ He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of merdiferous Sacrament.” [528] The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil himself would have ejected him” (‘a posteriori’) . [529] Elsewhere he voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. ”

“ From all which, and much more of this nature which might be mentioned, it doth appear, that the Papists place their justification not so much in any work of holiness really brought forth in them, and real forsaking of iniquity, as in the mere performance of some ceremonies, and a blind belief which their teachers have begotten in them, that the church and the pope having the absolute dispensation of the merits of Christ, have power to make these merits effectual for the remission of sins, and justification of such as will perform those ceremonies. ”

“ They had been told incessantly that they were Papists in disguise; that they were dishonest men, professing one thing and teaching another; till at length they began to believe it themselves. It was very hard to bear. To be stigmatized as Papists when they were writing strongly against Rome; violators of Rubrics when they were enjoining obedience to the Rubrics; upholders of human tradition when they were thanking God that the Church rested on no human names, but was derived from the Apostles; founders of a party when they advocated the maintenance of One Catholic Church ”

“ The creative power of the Deity alone can change them. It is the special boast of the [Pg 138] papists and the Jesuits that the system of laws which governs the papacy has the stamp of Divine approval upon it, and that, therefore, it has always been, and still remains, the same—"Semper eadem," is their motto. Hence it is important to us to know the nature and extent of the spiritual powers asserted by Pius V over the English Government and people, in order to ascertain whether, if a parallel case existed to-day, or may exist hereafter, the same papal powers may not be again invoked. ”

“ That to fancy the words of consecration perform what the papists call transubstantiation, by converting the wafer and wine into the real and identical body and blood of Christ, which was crucified, and which afterward ascended into heaven, is too gross an absurdity for even a child to believe, who was come to the least glimmering of reason; and that nothing but the most blind superstition could make the Roman catholics put a confidence in any thing so completely ridiculous. ”

“ When they are at Rome, they do there as they see done, puritans with puritans, papists with papists; ”

“ I assume that the pope stands for that spiritual bishop who, in the highest way and in the most similar way, occupies the place of Christ, just as Peter did after the ascension. But if any person whatsoever is to be called pope—whom the Western church accepts as Roman bishop—appointed to decide as the final court ecclesiastical cases and to teach the faithful whatever he wishes, then there is an abuse of the term, because according to this view, it would be necessary in cases to concede that the most unlettered layman or a female, or a heretic and antichrist, may be pope. ”

“ The Papacy itself had made Papal rule impossible to vigorous peoples. With curiously narrow ambition Popes have always preferred even limited temporal importance to unlimited spiritual sway. Two Popes, nay at one time three, had struggled not for the supremacy of religion but for merely personal pre-eminence. Popes had fought Popes, councils had fought councils, and each had called in the friendly infidel to fight the catholic enemy. The catholic sack of catholic Rome had been accompanied by greater lust and more copious bloodshed than the sack of Rome in olden time by northern Infidels. ”

“ After endeavoring to connect every great movement of recent and mediæval history inimical, or supposed to be inimical, to Germany with the machinations of the Papacy, he goes on to say: “It is, in my estimation, a falsification of politics and of history when His Holiness the Pope is considered exclusively as the high-priest of any one confession, or the Catholic Church as representative of churchdom in general. The Papacy has been in all times a political power which, with the determination and with the greatest success, interfered in all the relations of this world ”

“ The ideal of the Papacy was perhaps the noblest which has ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. According to it, the Pope was to be the High Priest of God and Vicar of Christ, higher than the kings of the earth. ”

“ John preclude Papias from having believed him to be the author of a Gospel Had he known of such a document he would surely have mentioned it as much as Matthew and Mark, and Eusebius would not have failed to reproduce the testimony.
Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, seems to have been a fair average specimen of the early Christian. Probably he was very devout and pious, but most certainly he was not strong in intellect, and was ready to give credence to old wives' tales concerning the Christ or his Apostles. ”

“ Most humorous of all is the fact that all this pagan world lives in the shadow of the Papal throne. In the eyes of Romans, however, the Pope has never been the High-Priest of Christ on earth. He is simply the Pontifex Maximus, and does not even wish anyone to regard him in any other light. ”

“ Papias was bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia, in the first part of the second century of the Christian era. Though of moderate capacity, and entertaining extravagant ideas of the millennium, he was entirely honest, and there is no reason to question his testimony as to what he was told in respect to Matthew and Mark. He suffered martyrdom about A.D. 163. From fragments of his writings found in Eusebius and in the works of Irenæus, it appears that “John the Presbyter” gave him information in respect to the First and Second Gospels. ”

“ If there must needs be some sort of love in the papacy, what becomes of it when a pope does not love Christ at all, and seeks in it only his own gain and honor? And there have been many such, yea, almost all since the beginning of the papacy. You have not escaped me yet—you must confess that the papacy has not always existed, it has often perished, because it was ofttimes without love. ”

“ Thus He established the service in the heavenly sanctuary. The little horn, the Papacy, as far as was within its power, took away from the people the mediation of Christ in the heavenly sanctuary, and substituted for it the Roman priesthood, with the Pope as Pontifex Maximus, or high priest. Power over this truth of the gospel and over the people of God was allowed to the Papacy because of transgression (Dan. 8:12, R. V.) , just as the people of Jerusalem were given into the hand of the king of ancient Babylon for the same reason. ”

“ Then came the first popes, mere heads of burial associations, the slow rise of the all-powerful papacy ever struggling to conquer the world, unremittingly seeking to realise its dream of universal domination. At the time of the great popes of the middle ages it thought for a moment that it had attained its goal, that it was the sovereign master of the nations. Would not absolute truth and right consist in the pope being both pontiff and ruler of the world, reigning over both the souls and the bodies of all men, even like the Deity whose vicar he is? ”