THE Holy Father, “his Holiness,” as the Pope is called, has again lifted up his voice for us to hear. He calls to us, though his words are addressed to his own bishops, and he says, “No small share of Our thoughts, and of Our care, is devoted to Our endeavor to bring back to the fold, placed under the guardianship of Jesus Christ, the Chief Pastor of souls, sheep that have strayed.”
The Pope then speaks of the words of our Lord. “He requires the assent of the mind to all truths without exception. It was thus the duty of all who heard Jesus Christ, if they wished for eternal salvation, not merely to accept His doctrine as a whole, but to assent with their entire mind to all and every point of it, since it is unlawful to withhold faith from God even in regard to one single point.” This is a striking passage, and by it the most vigorous of Protestants are willing to stand, provided the passage is intended to convey a present faith in Christ’s words. “It is thus the duty of all who hear Jesus Christ, if they wish for eternal salvation . . . to assent . . . to all and every point of His words,” Page after page follows this foundation statement, quotation after quotation from the fathers, doctrine after doctrine about “the universal jurisdiction of St. Peter,” “bishops,” and “Roman pontiffs” ―of none of which matters Jesus Christ ever spake. And after all the pages of the Pope’s arguments the climax is as follows: “The faithful will listen to Our Apostolic Voice. My sheep hear my voice’ (John 10:2727My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: (John 10:27)). . . . What Christ, has said of Himself We may truly repeat of Ourselves: ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice’ (John 10:66This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them. (John 10:6)).”
So the voice of the Pope in the Vatican is the same as the voice of Jesus Christ, whose holy words we had just been asked to accept with our “entire mind,” and upon “all and every point”! Poor old Pope, daring in his pride to send round to all his bishops such words of blasphemy! We note that the “Tablet” ― whence we have taken the quotations―puts “Our” with a capital, and “my” without one; the Pope shall have the honour, Jesus Christ shall be without it. And a very strange Christ, and very little like the Christ of God, is he who can be seen in the Pope! His “Holiness” lives in luxury, his palace is the finest in the world, it is crammed full of pictures and statuary, and it abounds in gems of art. His great idol (the brass image of Peter, so-called, really of Jupiter) has its treasury filled with jewels and ornaments of such superb costliness, that a handful of them would suffice to build and endow a hospital in Rome―the city of beggars and poverty. He has thousands of priests and “sisters” in Rome, but the care of the poor and the sick fall chiefly to the lot of a few Protestants, who love the voice of Jesus the Good Shepherd, and know not that of the stranger in the Vatican.
If the Pope understood that we English-speaking people love our Bibles, and are careful to study them―he might have remembered our Revised Version, the united labor of English and American scholars―then he would have spared himself the endeavor of seeking to confuse the readers of his long letter, about the “fold” and the “flock.” The Lord Jesus, our Good Shepherd, said of His sheep and the Jewish fold, that the shepherd “calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” The fold, He said, is not the place for His sheep, and He contrasted that enclosure with the open country, saying: “there shall be one FLOCK, One SHEPHERD.” Come back to the “fold,” says the Pope―that walled-in and walled-up seclusion which contains no pasture for the sheep and lambs of Jesus. Come to me as your shepherd. But if the Pope be our shepherd, Jesus is not, for He says, “there shall be ONE Shepherd.”
Whose voice then shall we hear, the Good Shepherd’s, or the Pope’s? It is impossible for the flock to obey contrary voices. Which shall we obey?
Jesus does not say there shall be a fold, quite the contrary. This is not the day for even the God-formed Jewish fold, it is the day for the One flock, and for the sheep and the lambs to follow the One Shepherd. Jesus will never surrender His title of the One SHEPHERD, nor the labor of love that sweet title involves.
And what sort of “fold” does the Pope ask men to enter? A place where the sheep of God can find no pasture; an enclosure indeed, wherein is no liberty to worship God, or to rejoice in Christ Jesus. The “fold of Rome” is a cruel prison, and not a place of pasture.
No, no! the voice of “his Holiness” the Pope, from his gorgeous palace, is not the voice of the One Shepherd; it does not bear the faintest resemblance to it, and it will not deceive one of Christ’s sheep.
In England and the United States of America, where so many people are listening to the voice of the Pope in preference to the voice of the Son of God, it is well to know how Our Shepherd is being heard under the very walls of the Pope’s palace, and how that many a poor Italian in Rome now rejoices in His love. True, the fine people, notably the grand ladies of Rome, love the voice of the Pope, and as the Pope says, “My sheep hear my voice.” And such as visit the Pope’s churches and hear his priests’ sermons, know the Pope’s voice about the fathers, bishops, councils, holy orders, and what not. They know, too, that the voice of the Pope cannot tell his sheep how God justifies the ungodly, how a man is saved from his sins, how a man may have peace with God, or how he may escape the judgment to come.