Papism

“ The Papist faith is that subtlest, most fascinating form of art for art’s sake—religion for religion’s sake. From the years it has taken boldly all symbolism that rouses the emotions of its own significance—from its pagan altars to the saying of prayers by rote. Whatever of outward pomp and majesty all other worship has known, whatever of mysticism and of craftsmanship and of artistry all other worship has known, this splendid church has taken into itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not know how other people are disposed; but, for my part, I hate no man for his religion; I look upon a papist as my countryman and neighbour, though I happen myself to be a protestant. And, if I know what advice is good for him, I can see no reason why I should not give it him, or why he should not take it.
A papist has sense, I suppose, like other men, to see his interest and advantage ”

“ To have had a papist for our king;—a papist, if not born, yet from his infancy nursed up at Rome;—a papist, one of whose sons is advanced to the ecclesiastical dignity of a Cardinal, and both under the strongest obligations to support the interest of that church, whose superstitions, as well as political state principles, they have sucked in, and imbibed even from their infancy. ”

“ The great aim of the papists was to strike terror into the minds of the whole nation; and while they had not the most distant intention of extending mercy to those who professed themselves penitent, they were nevertheless anxious to secure a triumph to the Catholic faith (as they called their system of idolatry and tyranny) , by having in it their power to read, in the public auto-da-fé, the forced retractions of those who had embraced the truth. ”

“ In Melanchthon’s Schmalkalden writing “On the Power and Primacy,” we read, that “the Popes defend godless rites and idolatry”; they had introduced horrible darkness into the Church. “The marks of Antichrist agree with the empire of the Pope,” as is plain from Paul. [1470] “The Pope arrogates to himself the right to alter the doctrine of Christ.... He even claims rights over the souls of the departed.” “He makes himself God,” for he recognises no authority above him. “These errors he vindicates with the utmost cruelty ... slaying all who differ from him.” ”

“ But it is also true that neither plants nor institutions can altogether shed the husk of their immaturity. They are not entirely adapted to the conditions under which they reach their full development. The Papacy in the zenith of its power and renown is partly new and partly old. When we consider the papal theory, as it floated before the mind of a Gregory VII or an Innocent III, it produces in us the same impression of symmetry, logical consistency and completeness, which we experience on entering for the first time one of the great medieval churches. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He acts just as he pleases in accordance with the imaginary interior inspirations which he believes he receives.” “He does just the same as Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists, for he treads under foot the outward Word of God, trusts entirely to higher illumination and gives vent to his own fond inventions against Holy Scripture; which is the reason why we blame him. We care not for mere human thoughts; what we want is the outward Word.” [356]
“In short, what shall I say? No error, superstition or idolatry is too gross to be admitted and accepted; at Rome they even honour the Pope as God. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most sacred deposit of Divine Revelation has been committed by Jesus Christ to the custody of the Church, and century after century she has guarded it with the utmost jealousy and fidelity. Like a loyal watchman, stationed on a lofty tower, the Pope, with anxious eyes, scans the length and breadth of the world, and, as the occasion demands, boldly, and fearlessly, and categorically condemns and anathematises all who, through pride or cunning, or personal interest and ambition, or love of novelty, attempt to falsify or to minimise or to distort the teaching of Our Divine Master. ”

“ The Pope is a murderer of souls. He destroys the flock of Christ and fleeces it. More savage is he than Judas, and more unjust than Pilate, and worse and more wicked than Lucifer. He has exchanged all the ten commandments of God for this single one of his own, ‘Give me money, money, money.’ The Pope with his clergy are the forerunners of Antichrist, rather than the servants of Christ. ”

“ The historian might almost venture to say that the Papacy was not evolved, but created. It has assuredly, in its varying fortunes, reflected as faithfully as any other institution the changes of its human environment, yet for each new adaptation to favouring circumstances it has had to await the advent of a great Pope. Seven men, one might say, created the Papacy: Gelasius I., Leo I., Gregory I., Hadrian I., Nicholas I., Gregory VII., and Innocent III. Each one of these deepened the foundations and enlarged the fabric of the great religious principality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In those tranquil subtleties and meek submissions they both labour to conceal the fact, that if they are to be Papists, they must be worshippers of the Virgin Mary; they must be worshippers of imaginary saints; they must be worshippers of stocks and stones, as the images of those imaginary saints; and they must be prepared to do the bidding of the Papacy, even though that should amount to the dissolution of society; for to this they must come. This is their yoke. To this every man who apostatises is bound for life: he must drag the whole length of the chain. ”

“ 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 religion is likest to be of God which is most charitable, and not that which is most uncharitable, and malicious, and like to Satan.
To conclude, no man shall be saved for being no papist, much less for being a papist. And all that are truly holy, heavenly, humble lovers of God, and of those that are his servants, shall be saved. But how many such are among the papists, God only knoweth who is their Judge. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the development of the papacy, the religious element worked first, and afterward the civil power. The former worked upon the ignorance and superstition of the people till it had them awed into submission, and then all was ready for a union of church and state, and temporal power as well as spiritual became the possession of the pope.
In the decline of the papacy, also, the religious element did the first work, and receiving an impetus from the Reformation it gained power till the claims of the pope to temporal dominion were denied him, and the power wrested from his blood-stained hands. ”

“ To him real freedom from the world lies in true mastery in control of one- self but not of oneself alone. On the day when he was crowned Pope, he voiced, as had Leo I and all great Popes, the conviction that the Papacy is the primacy of the Roman and universal Church in the everliving Peter. Nevertheless his words sound more personal, more related to himself, than do those of the Pontiffs who preceded him: "But who am I, that I should sit aloft above the kings and occupy this throne of splendour? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Still, it must be clearly understood that whether speaking ex cathedrâ or not, the Pope is always the Vicar of Christ and the divinely appointed Head of His Church, and that we, as dutiful children, are bound both to listen to him with the utmost attention and respect, and to show him ready and heartfelt obedience. Anyone who should limit his submission to the Pope's infallible utterances is truly a rebel at heart, and no true Catholic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whatever then the Papists may pretend, or even some good men among them may have thought, experience showeth, and it is more than manifest by the universal and approved practice of their people, that they place not their justification so much in works that are truly and morally good, and in the being truly renewed and sanctified in the mind, as in such things as are either not good nor evil, or may truly be called evil, and can no otherways be reckoned good than because the pope pleases to call them so. ”