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MEN are often better than their system. Individual Romanists are often Christians, though the Romanism is unchristian. There are many private members of the Church of Rome for whom we cannot but feel a genuine sympathy. Especially among the lowly and simple-hearted, there are those to whom God has revealed himself through all the veils of form which man has interposed. For them, whoever they may be, we have a true fellowship as believers in Jesus. Unknown perhaps to us, it is our joy that "the Lord knoweth them that are his," and that he will bring them at last out of that maze of superstition into his heavenly kingdom. Nor would we question that among the priesthood of Rome, especially in Germany, France, and our own country, there are individual men devoutly consecrated to Christ, who accept the admixtures of evil in that Church as a necessity which they deplore, and who hope, especially in this land, to see their Church at last purged of these admixtures and made pure and evangelical. But when we turn from such men to the system, we find ourselves at once in conflict with it—a conflict of faith, of conscience, of the heart. As Christians, and as Americans, we are compelled to make its falsehoods known. While it was comparatively modest; while it pleaded for a place among our modes of worship as a need of the foreigners who thronged our shores; while it demanded only what was granted by our liberties to every denomination, it passed unnoticed. We had forgotten what it was. It has walked among us in disguise. Large numbers of our most enlightened people are still ignorant of its spirit and its aims. With many it is regarded as a harmless superstition: with others as an ordinary variety of the Christian religion. At last it begins to act out its own character, it be

comes arrogant and aggressive. It claims exclusive privileges. It meddles with our educational institutions. It organizes proselytism. It interferes with private liberty. It spreads publications which contradict the Gospel and falsify history. It accumulates wealth in the hands of ecclesiastics. It insinuates its influence into municipal affairs, and obtains special grants of the public money for its sectarian uses. It developes, in short, its inherent and thorough antagonism to the liberties and the Christianity of the land, and we are compelled to rebuke its preten- ́ sions and expose its character and aims.

Consider, then, what the system of Romanism is, both as a religion and as a policy.

As a religion, observe that the Roman Catholic Church possesses the true faith. Men who look at the Papacy in history, at its perversions of truth, at its persecution of the saints, sometimes deny that it has in it any elements of Christianity. This is a mis-judgment. The Church of Rome has the whole truth in possession and on record. This is in reality one of the weightiest counts in that indictment which is laid against her in the high court of Heaven. The truth once delivered to the saints has never been more clearly defined, or more clearly stated, than it has been in standard writings of the Fathers, which are owned as authorities in the Roman Catholic Church. All this Romanism inherited from the purer ages of Christianity. The godly men of past time who, though within its pale, partook not in its corruption, cherished and embalmed these truths in their works of doctrine and devotion. The grand crime of the Papal Church on this point is, that this truth which it has in possession it has hidden from mankind. It has instituted rites, traditions, and figments of its own, for that pure word of God after which men everywhere hunger.

The Gospel of Christ in the Church of Rome lies immured and concealed, just as underneath its great cathedrals lie the bodies of real or imaginary saints. You enter St. Peter's at Rome, and are surrounded and dazzled by the display of architecture and of decorative art. Wealth untold has been lavished in rearing the vast structure, in covering it with splendors of mosaic and statuary, the memorials of the great Popes. and benefactors of the Church. At last you come to the dark cell, around which circling lamps shed a dim light, and there you are told reposes the body of St. Peter. Above, the glory and aggrandizement of men; beneath, in silence and gloom, the grave of an Apostle. So it is that the teachings of Peter and Paul and Christ lie buried beneath the traditions of Romanism. The truth of God is in possession, but it is swathed and coffined, bound and sealed from the hearts of men. When its children ask bread, the Church of Rome gives them a stone. and by accident that any Romanist finds through ordinances the true Way of life.

It is by exception his teachers or his

Look closer at this system as a religion. What has it instituted for the plain Word as Christ and his apostles left it?

First, the dogma of the Pope's supremacy and vicegerancy as the Vicar of Christ, holding in his own person an absolute spiritual authority over all souls. Peter, as the Scriptures represent him, had no prominence except that which his years, his ardor and his frank utterance naturally gave him. He erred even as an Apostle, was rebuked and set right by Paul, and yielded meekly. Seven hundred years after, the Bishop of Rome, claiming a succession from Peter, who cannot be proved ever to have been in that city, under that title, assumes to open and shut the gates of life to all mankind.

Next, the Pope and Council claim to be the sole and infallible interpreters of divine truth, on the ground that on them is bestowed the dispensation of the Holy Ghost to unfold and supplement the written Word. Still further, they pretend to be the sole trustees of the divine anointing, so that all office and ordination in the Church of God must be derived in succession from their hands. In that manner the hierarchy of Rome is constituted-a spiritual domination-utterly without warrant in Scriptures, and opposed directly to all the teachings of our Lord; who said to his disciples, "ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them, but it shall not be so among you ;" and whose last injunctions to the eleven bound them to an equality of rank and a mutual deference and regard.

And now this system of delegated power, having been organized, must be imposed on the body of believers. The priest must, by some visible operation, be raised above the people into a supernatural reverence and dignity. This it accomplished through the doctrine of the Mass.Denied, combatted for a time within the Church, it is nevertheless adopted into the faith of Romanism, that, by the priestly invocation, the wafer of bread and the wine are changed, at every celebration, into the actual body and blood of Christ, and that he is thus offered anew in sacrifice every day for the sins of men. No doctrine could more squarely contradict the express statement of Paul, that Christ was offered "once for all” in contrast with the repeated sacrifices of the old Hebrew ritual. Nothing could more obscure and destroy the whole truth of a completed Redemption, through His blood who on the cross exclaimed "It is finished." In any but a dark and ignorant age this notion would have been scouted by every Christian heart as impious. But it prevailed. It accomplished its end. It swept out of the Church the simple pastoral office, and interposed, between the people and their Lord, a priestly caste, a set of human mediators, clothed with supernatural authority and dread.

The delusion is enhanced by the withdrawal from the people of the cup at the Sacrament, a direct violation of the command of Christ.—