We have traced, however briefly, the origin, progress, and loftiest height of the papal system. This was reached by the great abilities of Innocent III. But how varied and full of all contrarieties and contradictions is that marvelous and mysterious history! We pause for a moment to reflect on the hypocrisies and tyrannies, the assumed piety and positive cruelty, of that woman Jezebel. It was she who sent the choicest of her children in early times to dwell in the lonely mountain cave or the secret cloister, under the pretense of there peacefully contemplating the glory of God and being transformed to His image. But again we hear her with altered voice rallying the myriad hosts of Europe to go forth and rescue the Holy Land from the foul grasp of the uncircumcised Philistines, and defend the banner of the cross on the holy sepulcher. Now she becomes callous to the common feelings of nature, insensible to the miseries of mankind, and stained with the blood of millions. For two hundred years she employed all her power in promoting the destruction of human life by the ruinous expeditions to the Holy Land. And as each successive Crusade proved more hopeless and disastrous than the former, she redoubled her exertions to renew and perpetuate those scenes of unequaled folly, suffering, and bloodshed.
But turn again and behold the double aspect of her character at the same moment. When the Crusaders came in sight of Jerusalem they alighted from their horses, and uncovered their feet, that they might approach the sacred walls as true pilgrims. Loud shouts were raised, O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! as if holy fear were moving their hearts. But when the governor offered to admit them as peaceful pilgrims, they refused. No, they were determined to open their way with their swords, and to wrest by military ardor the holy city from the hands of the unbelievers. Hardly had they scaled the walls when they rushed forth to the indiscriminate massacre of Mahometans and Jews, and filled the holy places with blood. And then, for a little while, the work of carnage and plunder was suspended, that the pious pilgrims might perform their devotions; but the places on which they came to kneel in adoration were covered with slaughtered heaps. This is a true picture of the spirit and character of Jezebel as manifested in all ages and countries. When Dominic himself grew ashamed of the bloodstained missionaries of Innocent in Languedoc, having seen thousands of the peaceful peasantry murdered in cold blood, he retired to a church and prayed for the success of the good cause; and the victories of Montfort and his ruffians were attributed to the prayers of the saintly-minded Spaniard. This was a crusade, not against Turks and Infidels, but against the saints of the Lord, because they dared to speak of certain abuses in holy mother church. And, the more effectually to chastise her children, she invented the Inquisition, that engine of domestic persecution, torture, and death.
And, strange as it may seem now-a-days, and cruel beyond all compare, wholesale destruction of human life and property was the very life-blood of popery. She grew rich by appropriating the contributions that were raised for the purposes of the Crusades; and she grew strong through weakening the monarchs of Europe by exhausting their treasures and depopulating their countries. Thus was the papal zeal inflamed to a burning passion for the Crusaders; and thus it passed from Urban II. and the Council of Clermont down to his successors. Every thought of the papal mind, every feeling of the papal heart, every mandate that issued from the Vatican, had but one object in view—the enriching and strengthening of the Roman See. No matter how subversive of all peace, how baneful to all society, she pursued her own interests with a callous uncompromising obduracy. Excommunications were used for the same purposes of papal aggrandizement. "The heretic forfeited not only all dignities, rights, privileges, immunities, even all property, all protection of law; he was to be pursued, taken, despoiled, put to death, either by the ordinary course of justice—the temporal authority was bound to execute, even to blood, the sentence of the ecclesiastical court—or if he dared to resist by any means whatever, however peaceful, he was an insurgent, against whom the whole of Christendom might, or rather was bound, at the summons of the spiritual power, to declare war; his estates, even his dominions if a sovereign, were not merely liable to forfeiture, but the church assumed the power of awarding the forfeiture, as it might seem best to her wisdom.
"The army which should execute the mandate of the pope was the army of the church, and the banner of that army was the cross of Christ. So began crusades, not on the contested borders of Christendom, not in Mahometan or heathen lands, in Palestine, on the shores of the Nile, among the Livonian forests or the sands of the Baltic, but in the very bosom of Christendom; not among the implacable partisans of an antagonistic creed, but on the soil of catholic France, among
those who still called themselves by the name of Christian."
Such was, and is, and ever must be, the spirit and character of the church of Rome. How dark the picture! How sad the reflection, that she who calls herself the true church of God, the holy mother of His children, and the representative of Christ on earth, should have been transformed, by Satanic agencies, into a monster of the most sickening hypocrisies, and "abominable idolatries!" She became the foster-mother of the most open, unbounded, saint, relic, picture, and image worship—of the theory of transubstantiation, and the practice of the confessional. Outwardly her unscrupulous ambition for secular glory, her intolerance in persecuting to extermination all who ventured to dispute her authority, her insatiable thirst for human blood, have no parallel in the most barbarous ages of heathenism.
And is this the church, thou mayest well exclaim in thy reflections—is this the church that so many are joining in the present day? Yes, alas, alas; and so many of the upper and intelligent classes! Such conversions, surely, can only be the fruit of the blinding power of Satan, the god of this world. (2 Cor. 4:3, 43But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: 4In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. (2 Corinthians 4:3‑4).) Many young ladies from the best families in England have submitted, in blind devotion, to be shorn of their natural covering, and imprisoned in a nunnery for life; and many of the aristocracy, both lay and clerical, have joined the communion of the Romish church. But she is not changed: the change is with those whose light has become darkness, according to the word of the prophet: "Give glory to the Lord your God, before He cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look for light, He turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness." (Jer. 13:1616Give glory to the Lord your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness. (Jeremiah 13:16).) As she was in the days of Gregory VII., Innocent III., Cardinal Pole, and bloody Mary, so is she today as to her spirit, had she only the power. But what must be the guilt of the English converts, with the New Testament before them and seeing the contrast between the blessed Lord and His apostles, and the pope and his clergy; between the grace and mercy of the gospel, and the intolerance and cruelty of popery! Rather let my reader remember the exhortation, "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.... for by her sorceries were all nations deceived; And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth." (Rev. 18.)
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