Part III. Popery the Foe of Liberty.

Chapter I. Percecution.

TYRANTS, the more effectually to secure power, have ever professed supreme regard for man’s highest interests. It was under the plea of extending Grecian learning, the proudest gift of human genius, that Alexander burned villages, sacked cities, and trampled upon rights dear as life itself. Under the cloak of unrivalled regard to the unity of God, Mohammed established, what had otherwise been impossible, a despotism as cruel as the most heartless fatalism could devise.

What others secured by reiterated protestations of devotion to one single principle, Rome attained by seizing upon the Gospel. The religion of Jesus, the fountain of all true liberty, personal and national, civil and religious, was so obscured by error as to become, in the hands of those claiming sole right to impart religious instruction, a most powerful engine of Satanic cruelty. When, therefore, all other agencies had failed in crushing the spirit of freedom, the Romish Church, in the sacred name of religion, a religion proclaiming good will to men, solemnly inaugurated a system of persecution unparalleled in the annals of the most blood-thirsty Paganism.

Popery, in her noonday of glory, unblushingly denied to those rejecting her dogmas even the right of inheriting property, of collecting moneys justly due them, and of bequeathing even the savings of poverty to their own children.* Is not this a fulfillment, to the very letter, of that ancient prediction, “He caused . . . . that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name?” (Rev. 13:17) For the single offense of rejecting Papal supremacy, the true followers of Christ were subjected to every species of annoyance which diabolical malignity could invent. With the design of tempting, or forcing men, from worldly considerations, to yield unquestioned obedience, treachery, deception, and cunning were freely resorted to, and in some instances with such success as to rivet the detested system of Popery upon people who loathed the very name.

* The Council of Constance anathematized “all who should enter into contracts or engage in commerce with heretics.” In a decree of Pope Alexander III., this sentence occurs: We therefore subject to a curse both themselves and their defenders and harborers, and under a curse we prohibit all persons from admitting them into their houses, or receiving them upon their lands, or cherishing them, or exercising any trade with them.” Frederick II, in an edict against the enemies of the faith,” orders “their goods to be confiscated, their children to be disinherited, and their memory and their children to be held infamous forever.”

When even these agencies, powerful as they were, proved ineffectual, others more potent still were speedily devised. The Inquisition, or, where the establishment of this was impossible, holy wars relentlessly waged against heretics, it was hoped, would bring all men within the pale of Mother Church. The employment of such agencies was clearly foretold. “And it was given unto him to make war with the saints and to overcome them.” “And he had power . . . to cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” “I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.” Rev. 13:7,15; 17:6.

That the Papacy makes persecution an essential of religion—although the Rev. James Kent Stone, Rome’s latest conquest, in his “Invitation Heeded,” ridicules the assertion—is certainly susceptible of clear proof. In its defense arguments are drawn, by their most eminent theologians, from Scripture, from the opinions of emperors, from the laws of the Church, from the testimony of the fathers (that inexhaustible treasury of unanswerable reasoning!), and from experience. That death is the proper penalty of presuming to disobey His Infallibility, is, we are told, the teaching of reason as well as the dictate of piety. Heretics, unless destroyed, will contaminate the righteous. By tortures inflicted on the few, however, the eternal salvation of the many may be secured. Nay, even to the deluded infidels themselves it is a mercy; it sends them to hell before they shall increase the torments of perdition.*

* “The blood of heretics,” says the Rhemish annotators, “is no more the blood of saints than the blood of thieves, man-killers, and other malefactors, for the shedding of which, by order of justice, no commonwealth shall answer.—Rev. 17:6.

Bossuet declares: “No illusion can be more dangerous than making toleration a mark of the true Church.”

Nor was the defense of a doctrine so essential as the right of the Church to persecute, left to the ingenious, though possibly fallible reasoning of bishops and cardinals. Even Popes, infallible vicars, in the exercise of sovereign authority, undertook the laudable task of hounding on crazed fanatics to murder men, women, and even defenseless children, in the name of the meek, loving, forgiving Jesus. Urban II. issued a bull declaring: “No one is to be deemed a murderer who, burning with zeal for the interests of Mother Church, shall kill excommunicated persons.” In 1825, Pope Leo XII. suspended his plenary indulgence on “the extirpation of heretics.” Can immutability change? Can infallibility err? Has any Pope of the last thousand years disapproved of persecution? Has Pius IX. abrogated one solitary law against heretics?

Even Councils, not provincial—the authority of these, Papists might possibly call in question—but general Councils, and of these not less than five, have enjoined or sanctioned the extermination of heretics, giving their voice for death as the proper punishment of what they choose to denominate heresy. Surely the Romish Church, if the declarations of her priests, bishops, cardinals, Popes, and Councils prove anything, is the deliberate defender of persecution, even to death, for opinion’s sake. Every priest, therefore, in taking oath “to hold and teach all that the sacred canons and general Councils have delivered, declared, and defended,” swears to believe and to teach Rome’s right to torture and burn heretics, that is, Protestants.*

* In the oath commonly administered to bishops occur these words: “Schismatics and rebels to our Lord, the Pope, and his successors, I will, to the utmost of my power, persecute and destroy.”

+ Frederick IL., loyal son of Popish arrogance, issued an edict, asserting the divine right of kings “to wield the material sword… . against the enemies of the faith, for the extirpation of heretical depravity.” “We shall not suffer,” he adds, “the wretches, who infect the world with their doctrines, to live.”

Even kings “were compelled by Church censures to endeavor, in good faith, according to their power, to destroy all heretics marked by the Church, out of the lands of their jurisdiction.” Four Councils, the Third Lateran, the Fourth Lateran, Constance, and Trent, endorsed this order.+ That the woman, Mother of Harlots, sitting upon a scarlet colored beast, and drunken with the blood of the martyrs, should be aided in her work of death by the civil authority, was plainly foretold: “These ten horns which thou sawest, are ten kings. . . . . These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.”—Rev. 17:3, 13.

And with terrible energy did Rome vindicate her much-vaunted right to persecute. The holy Inquisition, Satan’s masterpiece, with St. Dominic, a raving fanatic, for its first general, Innocent III. for its founder, a powerful order of monks for its defenders, and kings for the executioners of its fiendish penalties, became an engine of unexampled cruelty, sending terror into every land, suspicion into every home, and anguish into almost every heart. Neither age, nor sex, position nor past services, were guarantees of security. A word jestingly spoken, or neglect in bowing to the consecrated wafer (the elevated bran-god), or a look of contempt cast upon a begging friar, might prove the occasion of imprisonment and torture. Personal resentment, or even suspicion, especially where the parties suspected were wealthy, might lead to arrest. Even ladies, in many instances, were torn from endeared husbands, or doting parents, because lust inflamed their fiendish persecutors.*

* When the French, on entering Aragon (1706), threw open the doors of the Inquisition, sixty young women were found, the harem of the Inquisitor General.—Gavin’s “Master-Key to Popery.”

+ In Spain alone, 18,000 were employed, whose business it was, with Satanic cunning, to insinuate themselves into every company, speak against the Pope and the Church—thus beguiling the unwary— and drag the suspected before the holy Inquisition.

Having made certain, through spics, that the person whom they determined to arrest was at home, the officers of the inquisition, at the dead hour of midnight, knocked at the door. To the question, “Who is there?” a voice from the darkness responds, “The holy Inquisition.” Terror opens the door, and the daughter, the son, the wife, or the husband, seized by ruffians, is carried away to the cells of a dungeon, the remaining members of the family not daring to complain, scarcely to disclose their grief. Theirs is a sorrow unknown except to him whose eye never slumbers, who counts the tears of suffering innocence.

These officers, the better to fit them for their fiendish business, were earnestly admonished not to allow nature to get the better of grace. In some instances they were actually ordered to arrest their own near relatives, that by conquering human weakness they might prove themselves worthy of the favor of Holy Mother. Fiendish heartlessness! Adamantine cruelty !

The accused were never confronted with the accuser. They were ordered to confess; refusing, torture was applied to extort an acknowledgment of guilt. If to save themselves from present anguish, they confess to doubts in regard to the real presence, papal supremacy, priestly absolution, the worship of images, the invocation of saints, the existence of purgatory, or the doctrine of infallibility, they sentence themselves to martyrdom; refusing to confess—perhaps because conscious of no crime—they are tortured to the extent of human endurance, and then bleeding, lacerated and trembling, are thrust into a loathsome dungeon to pine in solitude, unrelieved, unpitied, friendless, dying a hundred deaths in one. Were ever laws devised more evidently contrary to the plainest dictates of equity?

These punishments, inflicted in an underground apartment denominated the “Hall of Torture,” were of every species which fiendish ingenuity could invent. Of the unfortunate victims of Papal fury, some were suffocated by water poured into the stomach; others, with cords fastened around the wrists behind the back, and heavy weights suspended from the feet, were drawn up to great heights, and then let fall to within a few feet of the floor, dislocating every joint; some were slowly roasted in closed iron pans; of some, the feet smeared with oil were roasted to a crisp; of others, the hands were crushed in clamps, or the bodies pierced with needles. The Auto da fé periodically closed the horrid tragedy. On a Sabbath morning, day sacred to him whose essential attribute is love, numbers of these lacerated beings were led forth—and in the name of Christianity!—to the place of burning. The heart, sickening at the recital of such deeds of hellish cruelty, and recalling the names of such worthy martyrs as Wycliffe, Huss, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer, and thousands of others, joins, with a holy fervor of devotion, in the prayer of the redeemed souls ceaselessly ascending from under the altar of the Almighty: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth ?”—Rev. 6:10.

Having found, after centuries of trial, that the Inquisition and the Crusades were powerless in crushing the pure religion of Jesus, that, in fact, “the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the Church,” Rome endeavored, in the language of Scripture, to wear out the saints of the Most High. In place of death she substituted every species of annoyance which malignant hatred inspired of Satan could invent. Comparatively few however were induced to betray the Lord. “Therein is the faith and patience of the Saints.”

When the number of those denying the Pope’s supremacy became, in any country, too great to be killed by the Inquisition, holy wars were advocated. With the cross, symbol of love, on their banners, the Papal legions went forth in cold blood to butcher men, women, and children. For the mortal sin of presuming to employ the faculties God gave them, they must be utterly destroyed. In these Crusades the Romish Church actually gloried, and does still glory, feeling no remorse for the massacre of thousands, no shame for the extinction of kingdoms and people.

Armed with a bull of indulgence, the Papal emissaries went forth to preach the Crusade. Everywhere they exclaimed, “Who will rise up against the evil doers? Who will stand up against the workers of iniquity? If you have any zeal for the faith, any concern for the glory of God, any desire to reap the rich benefits of Papal indulgence, receive the sign of the cross, join the army of Immanuel, lend your aid in purging the nations, and extending the holy Catholic religion.” ‘

These crusades were waged not against those guilty of great sins, but against those whose only crime was a refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of Rome’s arrogant bishop. This was the deep-seated error which roused such unequalled fury. Those communities which failed to recognize the proud pontiff enthroned in the eternal city as Christ’s Vicar on earth, must pay the penalty. The sword, and fire, and death, must proclaim that the rights of property and the comforts of home belong alone to those who permit His Holiness to think for them.

By way of extenuating the guilt of the Crusaders, modern Papists, though ardent advocates of Papal immutability and of the infallibility dogma, remind us that civilization had then made but little progress. These crusades, say they, are justly chargeable, not to Romanism, but to the barbarism of the times. Who instigated those wholesale butcheries? Infallible Popes. Who lauded those unparalleled atrocities which for centuries disgraced humanity? Infallible Popes. Does infallibility need the light of civilization’s dim taper? Erring Protestants might, with some show of candor, advance such a plea, but for Papists, it is a betrayal of doctrines vital to their system. Have they shown any sorrow for the past? Have they expressed repentance for the slaughter of unoffending Christians? Have they abandoned the right to persecute? Deceive ourselves as we may, Popery is the same unblushing monster of cruelty, unchanged, and unchangeable. Pharisee-like, while promising liberty of conscience, she is continuously engaged in honoring, applauding, and even canonizing those whose only title to fame consists in the horrid cruelties practiced towards the innocent followers of Jesus.

The blood-thirsty vengeance of the Popes against the infidels of the Holy Land, what pencil shall do justice to that scene of horror? Crusades, carried on with infernal fury for more than a century, caused the death of 2,000,000. Followers of Christ the Turks were not; but did butcheries convert them? Did they and their children learn to love that Saviour in whose name they were slaughtered? Can we even hope that in the moment of death on the hard-fought battle-field, many, even one, turning a tearful eye towards the ensigns of the hated foe, sought mercy from him whose cross emblazoned that blood-stained banner? The blood of these clings to the skirts of Romanism.

In the indictment against Popery, another specification is the deliberate massacre of 300,000 Waldenses and Albigenses. Against these true successors of the Apostolic Church, who, even on the concession of their murderers, were abstemious, laborious, devout and holy, Pope Innocent III. raised an army of 500,000. These blood-hounds of cruelty were let loose with intense delight upon those whose only crime was the belief, publicly and fearlessly expressed, that Rome was the “Babylonish Harlot” of the Apocalypse. Even Count Raimond, their Catholic sovereign, because tardy in the work of utterly exterminating his loyal subjects, was publicly anathematized in all the churches. Trembling under excommunication, the Count took solemn oath to pursue the Albigenses with fire and sword, sparing neither age nor sex, until they bowed to Papal authority. Rome, however, not content with even such abject subserviency, ordered him to strip naked and submit to penance. Nine times was he driven around the grave of the Monk Castelnau, and beaten with rods upon the bare back.

In the taking of Beziers, the Pope’s legate, when asked how the soldiers should distinguish the Catholics from the heretics, shouted: “Kill all; the Lord will know his own.” When the demon had completed his work, the city, swept by fire, was the blackened sepulchre of 60,000.

Bearing the standard of the cross, and singing “Glory to God,” the army of the Crusaders, under the bloody Montfort, entered Menerbe. Pointing to a prepared pile of dry wood, the legate roared: “Be converted, or mount this pile.” The merciful flames soon released the faithful from the relentless fury of their persecutors.

The persecutions in the valleys of Loyse and Frassinicre were cruel beyond description. Christians, after receiving the most solemn assurances of protection, were thrust into burning barns, suffocated in caves, led forth by scores and beheaded.

And the Waldenses of Calabria were subjected to barbarities no less incredible. Their children, forcibly taken from them, were placed in monasteries to be educated in the detested system of Popery. Large “numbers of truly devout Christians, encumbered not unfrequently with the aged, and even with helpless babes, were driven to the mountains, there to meet death in every conceivable aspect of horror : some were starved, some frozen, some buried alive in the drifting snows, some

But why proceed further? To recount Popery’s cruelties, even a tithe of them, is impossible. Her history is echoed in the carnage of the battle-field, in the sighs of suffering innocence, in the unmeasured anguish of widowhood. Her pathway upon the earth is but too plainly visible, marked in blood, the blood of fifty millions of earth’s noblest. Of this martyred host who can conceive the agonies? Can language convey any adequate conception of the sufferings of the Moors in Spain, the Jews in the various Catholic countries they have inhabited, the Christians in Bohemia, Portugal, Britain, and Holland?* Known alone to God are the sufferings of his chosen ones. In his book of remembrance are recorded the tears, the sighs, the sorrows of Christ’s struggling Church.

* In the last-mentioned country, the Duke of Alva boasted that in the short space of six months he had caused the death of 18,000 Protestants.

To relate the intrigues, deceptions and atrocities by which Rome succeeded in crushing out Protestantism in poor, down-trodden Ireland, we shall make no attempt. They are part of her history written in blood, —only other illustrations of the same intolerance.

In France, “with infinite joy”—if human joy can be infinite—Popery shed the blood of the saints. Passing by the butcheries of Orange and Vassey, the heart sickens in recounting the incidents of the Bartholomew massacre. On that day, recalled by Protestants only with shuddering horror, the demon of Popish cruelty went forth by royal command, to gorge himself with blood. The poor Huguenots, assembled in Paris under the pretext of a marriage between the Protestant king of Navarre and the sister of Charles IX., were attacked by hired assassins at midnight, and, notwithstanding the pledges of protection repeatedly and solemnly given (the occasion of their presence, and their defenseless condition) were slain in such numbers that the streets ran blood to the river. The dead bodies, dragged over the rough pavements, were thrown into the Seine. Even the king himself, from a window in his palace, viewed with seemingly intense delight the work of death going forward in the court beneath. Above the groans of the dying, and the curses of the soldiers, his voice could he distinctly heard, shouting, “Slay them, slay them.” Even those pressing into his immediate presence to implore mercy and plead his pledged protection, received this as their only answer, death from his hand. In one week, according to Davilla, 10,000 were slain in Paris alone. And the slaughter in the capital was the signal for rekindling the fires of persecution throughout the entire empire. In nearly all the provinces the scenes of Paris were re-enacted; at Lyons, at Orleans, at Toulouse, at Meaux, at Bordeaux. In these massacres 30,000 perished.

And upon this sea of blood—heaven forgive them— the Pope, the Church, and the king delighted to look. Standing over the dead body of Admiral Coligny, whom by assurances of friendship he had drawn within his grasp, Charles exclaimed: “The smell of a dead enemy is agreeable.” To the Pope he sent a special messenger: “Tell him,” said Charles,—“ tell him, the Seine flows on more majestically after receiving the dead bodies of the heretics.” “The king’s heart,” exclaimed one of Rome’s proud cardinals, “must have been filled with a sudden inspiration from God when he gave orders for the slaughter of the heretics.” And then— as if the Papacy must needs put on the scarlet robe— the Pope and the cardinals, entering one of Rome’s grandest cathedrals, returned solemn thanks to God, the God of mercy; thanks for the slaughter of Christians! thanks for the cold-blooded murder of thousands of unoffending followers of Jesus!

The record of these events, like that of the revolution in later times, France would now gladly bury in oblivion. They are spots on her history, however, which ages of tears can never efface. And that Papists of the present day ardently desire to reverse the testimony of history, or obliterate these unpleasant facts, is but too plain from the futile efforts repeatedly put forth, as in the “Invitation Heeded,” the Catholic World, the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, to prove that the Pope and the cardinals were grossly imposed upon. Deceived by Charles’ special messenger into returning thanks for the murder of heretics, instead of expressing gratitude to God for the overthrow of those rebelling against civil authority! Certainly such a defense is well worthy the system it seeks to shield.

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