PAPAL IDOLATRY

AN EXPOSURE

OF THE DOGMA OF

TRANSUBSTANTIATION

AND

MARIOLATRY

DEDICATED TO

CARDINAL GIBBONS,

of Baltimore, Md.

with

“THE GOD OF ROME EATEN BY A RAT,” “THE REASONS WHY WE MUST PUT OUR TRUST IN JESUS ALONE AND NOT INVOKE MARY,” AND “THE REASONS WHY I WILL NEVER RETURN TO THE CHURCH OF ROME.”

BY

REV. CHARLES CHINIQUY.

————————

MONTREAL

1895.

To His Eminence the Cardinal.

————————

As you are the highest dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church on this Continent of America, I have thought it was my duty to dedicate to you this new edition of Papal Idolatry, with the hope that, by the mercy of God, its perusal would help to enlighten your mind and change your heart.

    Truly yours,

      C. CHINIQUY.

St. Anne, Kankakee Co., Ill.,

        January, 1890.

Table of Contents

PAPAL IDOLATRY.

————————

FIRST CONSIDERATION.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION IS IDOLATRY.

In order that both Protestants and Roman Catholics may understand that we are perfectly correct when we say that the Church of Rome makes a god of a wafer, and is, in consequence, an idolatrous church, I copy here the blasphemous decrees of the Council of Trent.

COUNCIL OF TRENT,

HOLY SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST.

Canon I.  “If any shall deny that in the Sacrament of the most holy Eucharist there is contained truly, really and substantially the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, but shall say that he is only in it in sign or figure, or power, let him be accursed.”

Canon II.  “If any man shall say that in the Sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, there remains the substance of bread and wine, together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and remarkable conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body, and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, while only the appearance of bread and wine remains, which conversion the Catholic Church most aptly calls Transubstantiation, let him be accursed.”

Canon VI.  “If any man shall say, that in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ, the only begotten Son of God, is not to be adored, and that outwardly with the worship of Latria, and therefore that he ought neither to be venerated by any especial festive celebration, nor carried solemnly about in processions, according to the universal and laudable rite and custom of the Church, or that he ought not publicly to be exhibited to the people that he may be worshipped, and that the worshippers of him are idolaters, let him be accursed.”

Canon VIII.  “If any one shall say, that Christ, as exhibited in the Eucharist, is only spiritually eaten, and not also sacramentally and really, let him be accursed.”

The Catechism of the Council of Trent speaks still more clearly, and says:—

“The Pastors will explain that in the holy Eucharist (the consecrated wafer) the true body of Jesus Christ is contained with all that constitutes a body and belongs to it, such as the bones and nerves, and that is a whole Christ.”—“Council of Trent Catechist.”

Both Roman Catholics and Protestants acknowledge that Idolatry is one of the greatest sins that man can commit. But what is “Idolatry?” It is the giving to a created being the respect, adoration, and love which are due to God alone. To make a God with our own hands, or to worship as a god any of the creatures which are on earth, in the air, in the sea, or even in heaven, is Idolatry.

On Mount Sinai, in the midst of lightnings and thunders, God Almighty wrote on the stone with his own fingers:—

“I am Jehovah thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them; for I Jehovah thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing loving kindness unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.”—Exodus xx., 2 to 6 (ASV)

God has never proffered any words more plain, simple, and clear than these. The young school-boy, as well as the most profound philosopher, understands that by these words God Almighty forever forbade to make a god of a thing which is created, even if that created thing dwells in “heaven above.”

Now what does the Right Rev. Cardinal Gibbons and all the priests of Rome do every morning? Do they not take a “created thing,” a wafer, in their hands, and do they not change that wafer into God? Do they not adore that wafer, when turned into God? Do they not command their people to adore that wafer, after they have changed it into the Supreme Creator of the Universe and Saviour of the World?

What was the crime of Aaron and the people in the desert when they made the golden calf? Was it not Idolatry? But where is the difference between the crime of Aaron and the iniquity of Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, and all the priests of Rome? The only difference is that the first one made a god of the melted gold bracelets and earrings of the Israelites; while the latter make their gods of a little dough baked between two well-polished heated irons. Aaron said to the people—“Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives; of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molded calf: and they said, ‘These be thy gods. O Israel, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt’” (Exodus xxxii.) Now the Roman Catholic Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, with all the priests, every day, say to their servants, “I want to make new gods, and new Christs; I have no more in the tabernacle. Bring some flour of wheat, mix it with a little water, and bake the dough between this heated graving tool.” And the servants of the cardinal and the priests bring some wheat flour, mix it with a little water, and bake the dough between that heated graving tool. And a moment after, the bishop and the priests, holding in their hands those wafers baked in that heated graving tool, say. “This is Jesus Christ the Lamb of God. This is God Himself, who, being incarnated, has saved you on the cross.... Come and adore him.” And the people say in their heart, and they sing with their lips, “This is our incarnated god, who died on the cross to save us... Let us adore him.” And prostrating their faces to the dust they adore their god whom their priest has just made before their eyes, with a wafer baked in a heated graven tool! (See Figure 1 for an example of such a tool.)

Is not the idolatry of Cardinal Gibbons and his priests as gross and criminal as the idolatry of Aaron and his people? Is not the wafer god of the Pope as contemptible, ridiculous, impotent, powerless as the gold calf-god of Aaron? Are not the two forms of idolatry as insulting to the great God who has said: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them?”

In order that both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants may better understand the abominable idolatry of Rome, and how the Pope is absolutely and publicly mocking and daring God Almighty in the confection of the wafer-god, I will put the commandment of God and the orders of the Pope face to face.

Figure

1

:

Wafer Iron, showing engraved images of

Christ

impaled

and

the

Roman Catholic Sunburst (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58300160)

 

 

Was it possible for the devil to mock God, and dare him in a more frightful way than by inspiring the Pope of Rome with these rules and commandments of his councils? Is not the Pope of Rome renewing the awful mystery of iniquity performed just after Adam and Eve had been created?

When God Almighty says:—“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images of anything that is in heaven; . . thou shalt not bow down and serve them,” the Pope boldly says, “Thou shalt make engraved images of something which is in heaven, and thou shalt bow down thyself and serve them.” And like the guilty mother Eve, who shuts her ears to the voice of God and forgets his solemn command, and listens to the voice of Satan, speaking through the serpent, so the guilty Church of Rome forgets the solemn laws of God, to follow the orders of Satan speaking through the popes. I know that Cardinal Gibbons with his priests will answer me: “Jesus Christ has given us the order and the power to change the wafer into our God when he said, ‘This is my body, . . this is my blood. . . . Do this in remembrance of Me.’” But I answer: “Christ has never received the power from His Father to do a thing that the Eternal Father had forever forbidden.” On Mount Sinai that Almighty God had given his command: “Never to make an engraved image of anything into God. . .nor bow down before it and adore it.” Has God ever repealed that law? No! He cannot! For himself speaking through Christ, has said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall never pass away.” Has not Christ said, “I come to fulfill the commandments of my Father.”? How could he have said these words if he had given to the popes and their priests the power to break the most solemn and sacred command of them all? No! Christ would not allow His apostles and His Church to take a wafer, make an image upon it, turn it into God, and adore it. We know that He said, “This is my body,” (Luke xxii., 19.) But this was in a figurative way, to tell them that the bread was to be broken and eaten by them, that they might ever remember “His body nailed to the cross for them.”

A moment before we hear Christ saying, “This is my body,” we hear the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ Himself saying:—

6. “Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the Passover must be killed.

7. “And he sent Peter and John, saying:—

8. “Prepare us the Passover that we may eat.

9. “And they said unto Him: Where wilt thou that we prepare?

10. “And he said unto them: Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water, follow him into the house where he entereth in.

11. “And ye shall say unto the good man of the house: The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guest chamber where I shall eat the Passover with my disciples?

12. “And he shall show you a large upper-room furnished: there make ready.

13. “And they went, and found as he said unto them; and they made ready the Passover.

14. “And when the hour was come he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.

15. “And he said unto them: With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

16. “For I say unto you: I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.

17. “And he took the cup and gave thanks and said: Take this and divide it among yourselves.

18. “For I say unto you: I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God shall come.

19. “And he took bread, and gave thanks and brake it, and gave unto them saying: This is my body which is given for you; this do in remembrance of me.” Luke xxii.

It is true that here Christ says: “This is my body.” But the very moment before, looking on the roasted lamb, he had said; “This is the Passover. I want to eat the Passover. Prepare the Passover. I have desired to eat this Passover with you.”

Could Christ really kill, prepare and eat the Passover? No. Never. For the “Passover” was the passage of the exterminating angel over Egypt, when he killed the first-born of every family, on the door-post of which the blood of the Lamb was not seen. That “passage” or passover of the angel could neither be killed, roasted nor eaten; for the simple good reason that a passage, a passover, can neither be killed, roasted nor eaten. But as the lamb was killed and eaten to make the Israelites remember the “passage” of the angel over Egypt, that Lamb was called the “passage,” the “Passover.” Then Christ, with all the Israelites, instead of saying, “We will kill, cook, and eat the Lamb which makes us remember the ‘Passover,’” they said, “We will kill, prepare and eat the ‘Passover.’”

So Christ, having given the bread to be eaten by his disciples, that they might remember his crucified body (do this in remembrance of me), had to call that bread “his body.” It was then as it is now; “When a thing is chosen to represent another thing, it is called by the name of the thing it represents.” For instance, when a man shows the portrait of his wife and children to his friends, he does not generally say, “This is the portrait, the remembrance of my dear wife and my beloved children;” he simply says: “This is my wife; these are my children.” When one looks at the large photographs of Cardinal Gibbons, he says, “This is Cardinal Gibbons; look at his fine jolly face; see his jovial or dignified mien.” Nobody, except fools, can be tempted to think and say that it is really the amiable Roman Catholic Cardinal of Baltimore, because he has heard “This is Cardinal Gibbons.” He knows very well that it is only some paper, with the shades and colors put by the artist. Nevertheless, he calls that paper and those shades and colors “Cardinal Gibbons,” for the simple reason that it is, then, to make them remember his Lordship.

So Christ said: “Kill the Passover,” though the Passover could not be killed. He said, “Prepare the Passover,” though the Passover could not be prepared. He said: “I eat this Passover,” though he could not eat the Passover. So he said: “This is my body,” though it was not his body. He said: “Eat this, my body,” though they could not eat his body.

But once more: As the bread was the representation of his body, Christ had to call that bread “body.” Christ could not eat his own body; but he could eat what was to represent his body. He could not possibly give his body to be eaten and his blood to be drunk, without making his disciples anthropophagi. But he could give what represented his body and his blood to be eaten and drunk without being guilty of that disgusting and criminal cannibalism. It is true that Christ said: “This is my body.” But do you not read in Genesis lxix., 9, “Judah is a lion’s whelp.” In verse 14, “Issachar is a strong ass.” Was Judah’s father a lion, and Issachar’s father an ass? No. But these were figures of speech, just as when Jesus said: “This is my body.”

St. Paul, speaking of the sinners, says: “Their throat is a sepulchre.” Does the Cardinal of Baltimore really believe that the throat of sinners is a sepulchre? No. Then he has no more reason to believe that the body of Christ has taken the place of the bread, after he had said: “This is my body.” In both cases the verb “is” means “represents” and brings to the mind a memorial. David says in Psalm cxxi., 105:— “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.” Will ever the Pope sufficiently forget all the laws of common sense, to tell us that the word of God is really a lamp! And when Christ says “I am the door” (John x., 9), “I am the true vine” (John xv., 1), had he really the intention to make us believe that he was a door, or a vine? Does not Paul, speaking of the “Rock” from which Moses drew the waters in the desert, say: “That rock was Christ.”

Will the Roman Catholic bishops and priests, some day, try to persuade us that the Rock was really Christ, his body, soul, and divinity, because the Holy Ghost says: “That rock was Christ?” No. They acknowledge that the Rock was not Christ, though Paul says “The Rock was Christ.” It was only a figure, a type, a memorial of Christ, and because it was so it was called “Christ.” So when our Saviour says, “This (bread) is my body. . . Do this in remembrance of me,” he makes us understand that the bread was called “his body,” because it was presented to us that we might remember “his body.”

Jesus, speaking to the Samaritan woman, said: “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” (John iv., 14.) Why does not the Church of Rome try to persuade those who believe in Christ, that they have such a large well of water within themselves, that it will flow even during all eternity? That well of water which is in every Christian to quench his thirst is just like the body of Christ, which is eaten by every one of his disciples, that they may never be hungry. Both are most beautiful and simple figures when taken in the sense they were given; but both turn into a ridiculous and disgusting idea when taken as a material reality.

SECOND CONSIDERATION.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION IS THE MOST DEGRADING FORM OF IDOLATRY.

When the Persians adore the rising sun, they give their homage to the greatest and most glorious object which is presented to our human vision. That magnificent fiery orb, which rises as a giant, every morning, from behind the horizon, to pass over the world, and pour everywhere its floods of heat, light and life, cannot be contemplated without feelings of respect, admiration, and awe. Man must raise his eyes up to see that glorious sun; he must take up the eagle’s wings to follow its giant march throughout the myriads of stars which are suspended over our heads. It is easy to understand that poor, fallen, and blind humanity may take that great object for a god. Would not this world perish without the sun? What would become of the nations which inhabit the earth, without its light and heat? Would not everything perish and die, if the sun would cease to come every day, and make us bathe and swim in its oceans of light and life? Then, when I see the Persian priests of the sun, in their magnificent temple, waiting, with their censers in hand, for the appearance of its first rays, to chant their melodious hymns and sing their sublime canticles to its glory, I know their error, but I can understand it. I feel an immense compassion for those poor idolators. But, at the same time, I feel that they are raised above the dust of this earth, and that their minds must be filled with sentiments of gratitude and adoration for that great object. Their intelligence and their souls cannot but receive some sparks of light and life. But the poor deluded Roman Catholic! Is he not a thousand times more worthy of our compassion and our tears, when we see him prostrated in the presence of that small “wafer-god,” which the servant girl of the priest has baked a few hours before in her kitchen? Is it possible to see a spectacle more disgraceful and ignominious than a multitude of men and women prostrating their faces to the dust to adore a god whom the rats and mice have a thousand times dragged away and devoured in their dark little holes? Where are the rays of light and life from that little cake? Instead of being enlarged and elevated, at the approach of that ridiculous modern divinity, is not human intelligence contracted, diminished, paralyzed, chilled, struck with idiotism and death at its feet?

Can we be surprised that the Roman Catholic nations are so fast falling down into the abyss of infidelity and atheism, when they hear their priests telling them that this contemptible wafer is the great God who had created heaven and earth at the beginning, and saved this perishing world by dying on the cross, some eighteen hundred years ago?

Rome, by her universal and terrible apostacy at the feet of the wafer-god, has overwhelmed Christianity under such a heap of infamous and outrageous impostures, that it has almost disappeared from the minds of the nations whom God had the more endowed with intelligence, as the French and Italian peoples. Go to those countries, and ask the people if they believe that their priests can make a god out of wafer, and they will shrug their shoulders in disgust and laughter at your silly question.

It is a fact that the wafer-god of the Pope has done more than anything else to destroy the religion of Christ from the minds of the learned and the intelligent. This diabolical doctrine of a god made with a little cake is, today, believed in France, Italy, Canada, Spain, etc., only by some old women and poor ignorant people who cannot write nor read their own names. The rest try to believe it; they make supreme efforts to believe it; but they cannot.

We heard, a few years ago, that the Siamese had been overwhelmed with desolation, when their big white elephant died, after having been the object of their adoration for more than a century. But, fortunately, the numberless priests of the dead god had not lost a single hour; after they had buried their departed divinity with due honors, they had ransacked their deep and dark forests, and had soon come back with a bigger and younger living white elephant. The lucky animal was carried in triumph all over the kingdom, with a gold chain of fabulous value to his neck, gold cloth, sprinkled with the richest pearls and diamonds on his back. In the midst of the sweetest melodies; the hymns of adoration, and the clouds of incense from the golden censers which every priest carried in his hands, the newly found god was installed in his magnificent temple; and, there from morning to night, he is adored by the millions of Siamese who recognize him for their god.

All this is very sad, humiliating! Yes!

But there is something more sad and humiliating than taking an elephant for the great God who has created and saved this world; it is to see the Pope of Rome, with his hundreds of millions of blind and deluded slaves, prostrated before a contemptible wafer, baked between two heated irons, and adoring it as the great, eternal, almighty God, creator of heaven and earth!

The elephant of Siam is surely a noble god, when compared with the modern divinity of the Pope. That elephant may be taken as the symbol of strength, magnanimity, patience, etc. Let a man go and insult or attack him; he can protect himself; with his mighty trunk he will take his enemy, throw him up very high in the air, and cause him to fall a corpse on the ground. He can crush his foes under his feet; he can protect his friends, and save them in the hour of danger. There is life, motion and strength in that elephant god. He can go by himself from one place to the other. He can move with his feet, see with his eyes, hear with his ears.

But look at the divinity of Rome. Come and see its hands in that wafer; they cannot move! The feet, they cannot walk! The eyes, they cannot see! The ears, they cannot hear!

There is neither life, nor strength, nor motion in this Roman Catholic divinity. Let a rat or a mouse come and bite the elephant-god of Siam, and you will see how he will instantly punish it. But let a rat or a mouse come and attack the poor defenceless wafer-god of the Pope, as it very often occurs, and you will see how that modern Majesty will be powerless to protect itself, and how it will soon be crushed under the teeth of his weak enemies, and engulfed into their stomachs, to be digested as a crumb of common bread.

THIRD CONSIDERATION.

GOD HIMSELF TURNS THE WAFER-GOD OF ROME INTO RIDICULE.

So speaks our mighty and eternal God, through his Prophet Isaiah, ch. xliv. 9-20:

They that fashion a graven image are all of them vanity; and the things that they delight in shall not profit; and their own witnesses see not, nor know: that they may be put to shame.

Who hath fashioned a god, or molded an image that is profitable for nothing?  Behold, all his fellows shall be put to shame; and the workmen, they are of men: let them all be gathered together, let them stand up; they shall fear, they shall be put to shame together.

The smith worketh with tongs in the coals, and fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with his strong arm: yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth; he drinketh no water, and is faint.  The carpenter stretcheth out a line; he marketh it out with a pencil; he shapeth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compasses, and shapeth it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house.  He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the holm-tree and the oak, and strengtheneth for himself one among the trees of the forest: he planteth a fir-tree, and the rain doth nourish it.

Then shall it be for a man to burn; and he taketh thereof, and warmeth himself; yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread: yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.

He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied; yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire.  And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image; he falleth down unto it and worshippeth, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.

They know not, neither do they consider: for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand.  And none calleth to mind, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination? Shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?

He feedeth on ashes; a deceived heart hath turned him aside; and he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?”

Who can read those words of the old prophet without finding in them the condemnation of the monstrous imposture and idolatry of the wafer-god?

Let us put face to face the words of God and the facts connected with the confection and the usages of the wafer-god of Rome to see the perfect similarity between the old idolatry of the days of Isaiah and the modern idolatry of Rome.

FOURTH CONSIDERATION.

OUR SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST FORETELLS THE ABOMINABLE IDOLATRY OF THE WAFER-CHRISTS OF ROME, AND WARNS HIS DISCIPLES AGAINST IT.

We read this remarkable prophecy about the false Christs of Rome in Matthew, ch. xxiv., v. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26:

“And except those days shall be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.

“Then, if any man say unto you, ‘Lo, here is Christ, or there,’ believe it not.

“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

“Behold, I have told you before.

“Wherefore, if they shall say unto you; ‘Behold, he is in the desert.’; go not forth; or ‘behold, he is in the secret chambers.’; believe it not.”

The Son of God prophesies, here, four things about the false Christs, against the worship of whom he warns us.

1st. There will be many of those false Christs.

2d. Sometimes they will be here and sometimes there.

3d. That it will be told of that Christ that he is in the desert.

4th. That the false Christs will dwell in secret chambers.

Those four characters by which our adorable Saviour invites us to recognize, and shun the false Christ of whom he speaks, coincide perfectly with the false wafer-Christ of Rome, and I here publicly challenge not only Cardinal Gibbons, but all the bishops and priests of Rome, to deny or explain away those four characters of their wafer-Christs.

1. No priests or bishops will deny that there are many, very many, Christs in their midst. For it is a public fact that every church contains from a dozen to five hundred and more of those Christs who are shut up in the gold or silver ciboriums. I do not exaggerate when I say that there are more than a million of those Christs worshipped every day in the different churches of Rome.

2. No priests nor any bishops will dare to deny that their false Christ is “sometimes here and sometimes there.” For every day they have to carry it to the sick and dying under the name of “Holy Viaticum.” When Patrick O’Brien, for instance, is very sick in the morning, does not the priest of Rome carry his Christ to his house, at the northern part of the town, that the poor deluded man may adore and eat him? And do not the deluded Catholics run to the house of the sick man when they hear that their Christ is “there,” to adore him “there?” And when, at the end of the same day, that same priest hears that Bridget O’Donohue is sick and dying, at the southern extremity of the town, does he not again promptly carry his Christ, under the name of “Viaticum,” that the poor deluded girl or married woman may adore and eat him? And then, again, do not the blind and so cruelly deceived Roman Catholics, when hearing that their Christ is “here,” in this southern part of the town, run at the double-quick from every side to come and adore their Christ “here.” This morning they were running to the northern side of the town to worship their Christ “there.”. . And this evening they run at their full speed again towards the southern part, to adore him “here.”

The Saviour of the World had said, “If any man say unto you, Lo! Here is Christ, or there, believe it not.” But the Pope with his bishops, say to their poor blind slaves, “When your priests will tell you that here is Christ, or there, believe it!” In this matter, as in every other question, the Pope is directly—absolutely—opposed to Jesus Christ. Our Saviour positively says: “When they tell you, Lo! Here is Christ, or there, believe it not.” The Pope says: “When they will tell you, Lo! Here is Christ, or there, believe it!”

3. The third character of the false Christ of Rome is as clear and evident as his first and second one, and I challenge the bishops and the priests to deny it.

“If they shall say unto you: Behold He (Christ) is in the desert, go not forth.”

What is a desert? A place where nobody dwells. A desert is a place where people may pass a few hours for some particular purpose, but they have no idea to live and reside in it. It is not a fit place to dwell in. . . . After a few hours of stay in the desert or passage through it, they get out of it, leaving nothing behind them. And that place, after having seen several people in its bosom for some time, remains a desert, a perfect wilderness. So is the church where, for an hour or two, the people go to pray or sing and hear a sermon. After the public service, every one goes out of it, and it remains a desert, a solitude. Nobody lives there except the rats and the mice. The fact of their Saviour Jesus Christ remaining alone in a deserted place, in a solitude where nobody attends him, has so painfully struck some devoted Roman Catholics, that they have written beautiful and tender pages on the want of love and respect of the people who left such a glorious Saviour, and Son of God alone, in a solitude, a desert, without anyone to adore and praise Him. More than that, the Jesuits have lately instituted a new order of devotees, whose duties are to never let their so-called Saviour alone. Each member of that society is bound to select an hour in the day or the night which they will pass in the church in adoring him. In that way, a certain number of churches have ceased from being a desert, a solitude... For in those churches there are always some worshippers who one after the other, come to pass their hour before the altar and offer their homage to their wafer-Christ. But these very efforts made by the Jesuits to prevent the accomplishment of the prophecy of Christ, is its most undeniable confirmation.

The Son of God, speaking of the false Christ, said, “If they shall say unto you: ‘Behold He (Christ) is in the desert, go not forth.’” But the Pope says: “When the priest tells you, Behold He (Christ) is in the desert, go forth and adore Him there, in that desert.”

4. The fourth character by which our adorable Saviour warns us against the deception of the wafer-Christ and god of Rome, is that “He will dwell in secret chambers.”

“Wherefore, if they shall say unto you, behold he is in the secret chambers, believe it not.” (Matt, xxiv., 26.)

Can any bishop or priest of Rome deny that their modern and false Christ is, day and night, in secret chambers, where they themselves, with their own hand, shut him up every morning?

If any one of our readers, particularly among the Protestants, has any doubt about that fact, let them not believe what we say here, but let them go to the Roman Catholic Bishop or priest of the nearest city or town, and let them politely invite the Pope’s representative to come with them to his church. And when there let them walk around the church till they come before the altar, and then, let them stop, and look with attention at the altar. They will see, above the front table of the altar, a beautiful door, which is almost invariably the most richly decorated part of the church. With very rare exceptions, the sculptor has put there the most perfect sculpture which his chisels could make; and the gilder has plated or gilded it with his utmost skill and perfection. When the inquirer will have admired the workmanship of that door, let him ask the bishop or priest of Rome, “Is there a secret chamber behind that door?” And the bishop or his priest will have to answer, “Yes; there is a secret and most sacred chamber behind that door, which we call ‘The Tabernacle.’” Let the inquirer continue his questions, and ask: “Is there anybody in that secret and most sacred chamber which you call ‘The Tabernacle?’” and the Roman Catholic dignitary will be forced to answer: “Yes; there is somebody in that sacred chamber.” Then, let the inquirer ask: “Who is there? By what name do you call the being who dwells in that secret chamber?” And the Roman Catholic bishop, with his priests, will have to answer: “It is Jesus Christ who is there.” The inquirer, puzzled at that answer, will probably say to the bishop: “You do not mean, sir, that it is the living and glorified Christ, with his body, soul and divinity, who is there in that secret chamber; . . . . you surely mean only that it is a memorial, a simple remembrance of Jesus Christ!” Assuming, then, an air of solemnity and awe, the Roman Catholic Cardinal will answer: “Yes, sir! I mean that it is Jesus Christ Himself, the living Christ, the glorified Christ, in person with his body, soul and divinity, who is in that most holy tabernacle.” I consent to be branded before the world as an impostor, and to be publicly punished as a sacrilegious calumniator, if the bishop and the priest of Rome do not give these answers, or some others which come to the same sense.

But if this public acknowledgment of Christ in secret chambers is made by the Church of Rome herself, through her most accredited authorities, who can deny that the awful prophecy of the Son of God is accomplished in our very midst? Who will not see with his own eyes, and hear with his own ears, that the false Christs, foretold by the Saviour of the world, are taking possession of the world; they are multiplied without measure in every city or town: they are adored everywhere by the blind multitudes whom the Pope keeps abjectly prostrated at the feet of their idols in these secret chambers.

With Paul, when contemplating that grand and terrible mystery of iniquity, must we not say?—

“The mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he is taken out of the way.

“And then shall that wicked one be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming.  Even him whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders.  And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth that they might be saved.

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie.  That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”— 2 Th. ii.

FIFTH CONSIDERATION.

TRANSUBSTANTIATION MAKES GOD INFERIOR TO MAN, AND CHANGES MAN INTO GOD.

The Creator is above the created thing. But it is evident that, in the impious dogma of Transubstantiation, the priest of Rome is put much above his God.

It will not require long reflection to understand that, by his magical power, in the act of changing the wafer into their god, the popes and the priests of Rome become infinitely stronger, more powerful, and superior to their poor ignominious divinity. For they assure us that the very moment the priest speaks, God obeys, and submits himself to the will of that priest; He can not resist; He can not delay; He must come down from His throne, and lodge his humanity and divinity in that little round and thin cake on which the officiating priest has said: “Hoc est enim corpus meum.”, [Latin meaning “This is for my body.”]

The marvellous act of Joshua is nothing but child’s play when compared with the miracle performed by the priest of Rome every morning. Joshua had to deal only with two of the inanimate creations of God, when he stopped the sun and moon in their march through the skies; but it is with the Creator, the Master of the sun, the moon, and the stars and all the worlds, that the priest has to deal, to whom he issues commands, and by whom he is obeyed.

The power of the priest over God, in that dogma, is absolute, personal, without appeal, no power of delay. He must come down from His throne, quicker than lightning, into that cake, and transform it into His divine, eternal, almighty person of the Son, at the will and bidding of the priest, not only once a day, but as often as it will be the pleasure of the priest to pronounce on a wafer, or any other crumb of wheat bread, the magical words: “Hoc est enim corpus meum.”

Let both the Roman Catholics and the Protestants well consider that the Church of Rome, positively, says that her priests can perform that tremendous miracle not only once a day, at mass, but at every moment of the day and night that it will please them to pronounce those words, with the required intention, the bread is changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. For instance, let the bishops and priests of Sydney and Melbourne, of Paris and London, of Constantinople and Peking, of Rome and Geneva, of New York and Quebec or Chicago, pass through the streets of those cities today, and, stopping before their bakeries, pronounce on the loaves of bread which are there, under their eyes, the words, “Hoc est enim corpus meum.” there will not remain a single loaf of bread in any one of those bakeries! Every loaf will have been changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. Every loaf will have become a god, which you must adore under the pain of eternal damnation! More than that, every particle of those loaves, if they are crushed into fragments and pulverized, will be changed into the true body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ! And eternally cursed must be those who will not adore each one of those millions and millions of fragments and atoms of bread as the great and merciful God who created the world with a word from his lips, and saved it when incarnated, by dying on the Cross.

But if these considerations are not sufficient to convince the mind of every intelligent Roman Catholic and Protestant of the diabolical character which the dogma of Transubstantiation bears on its face, let them reflect on the following propositions, which I challenge the Catholic bishops of the whole world to deny.

The Church of Rome not only teaches her blind followers that every good priest has the tremendous power of transforming the wafers, and all the wheat loaves of bread which are on the earth, into gods, at every hour of the day or night, in the churches, in the streets, in the bakers’ carts and bakers’ shops; but also that every “bad priest,” every drunken priest, every interdicted and excommunicated priest, has the same power over God. And no pope, no bishop, not God Almighty Himself, can take away from those bad, drunken, interdicted, excommunicated priests, that super-divine power of changing the millions of loaves of bread which are on this globe into as many bodies, souls, divinities of Jesus Christ!

For instance, do not the bishops, and the priests of Rome tell their people that I, the ex-priest Chiniquy, am one of the most wicked men the world has ever seen? Yes! This is what they have many times proclaimed in their press and in all their pulpits, on the five continents of the globe. Well, it is one of the articles of the religion taught by the infallible Church of Rome, that I, Chiniquy, the infamous, the interdicted, excommunicated priest, Chiniquy, still possess that supreme power over the God of Rome.

Is it possible to find a more cruel and infamous being than Archbishop Purcell, of Cincinnati? That king of modern swindlers, as every one knows, has these last twenty years, made use of his high position in the Church of Rome to induce thousands and thousands of his poor people to lend and trust him their money, to the amount of nearly four millions of dollars. With it he lived in luxury with his dissolute nuns and priests; he built splendid palaces, and a magnificent cathedral, where he was worshipped as a god during many years. But when the day came for refunding the money into the hands of the poor orphans and widows who had trusted him their last cent, he coldly rejected them, declared bankrupt, and retired to one of his palaces to continue to live like a prince in the midst of his nuns! Well, day after day, for twenty years, when he was working that great iniquity, he ascended his altar, took the wafers in his hands, and pronounced the magical words, “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” upon them, and turned them into his God! That God, though surely unwilling to come into such criminal hands, though abhorring that cruel heart, though reproving that guilty soul, was forced to come down, in person, into those hands, rest in that heart, and unite most intimately and personally with that soul! That infamous Roman Catholic Bishop has still a supreme, direct, personal, irresistible power over his Jesus Christ. The Pope can interdict and excommunicate him, but he can not deprive him of that supreme power which he, once for all, gave him over his God Almighty and his eternal Son. That eternal and Almighty God of Rome is now tied to the will of that public swindler with a more powerful chain than the vilest dog is tied by his chain to the hand of his master! He must follow him wherever he goes, stop where he stops, go right or left, up or down, according as Archbishop Purcell, of Cincinnati, wishes him to go!

Do not the Roman Catholics agree with the Protestants, in confessing that their Pope Alexander VI. was one of the most infamous monsters and debauchees the world has ever seen? Do they not acknowledge that, not satisfied with living in public concubinage with his own sisters, he seduced and dishonored his own daughter, Lucretia? Is there not a perfect unanimity among the historians of both Roman Catholic and Protestant persuasions to say that Pope Alexander VI. must be put at the head of the monsters who have overstepped the limits of human depravity, impiety and infamy? But, notwithstanding all that, the Church of Rome assures us that this incarnated devil, not only was infallible, but that he never lost the supreme, personal and direct power which his ordination gave him over the Son of God. She says that every time Alexander VI. pronounced the words, “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” over a wafer, or any piece of wheat bread, Christ was coming quicker than lightning into his hands to be manipulated, insulted by him, or given to his concubines, that they might be fed with His true body, blood, soul and divinity! And if anyone has any doubt about that, he is cursed and damned by the Church of Rome. Nay, he must be burned like Wishart, drowned like Mary Lamb, of Perth, or thrown from the top of the high mountains down on the naked rocks, like thousands and thousands in Piedmont, or tortured and slaughtered as so many millions were all over Europe, by the bloody Inquisition.

After such blasphemies, who can have the least doubt that Roman Catholicism is the most impious and satanic religion the world has ever seen? They acknowledge that every time I pronounce the words, “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” over a wafer or a loaf of bread, with the required intention, that wafer or that loaf of bread is changed into the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ! They say that every one of those wafers and loaves of bread must be adored by the people under pain of eternal damnation! Does not the Church of Rome confess by that, that all her priests, and even the excommunicated apostate Chiniquy, as she calls me, are stronger than her poor, weak, miserable God? He can not resist us? . . . Though He is angry against me, he must come every time I force him to come into that wafer, which I transform into Him; though He is absolutely opposed to my doing so; though He must be horrified to come into such criminal hands, He is powerless in my presence! At my word, He loses His divine and infinite power of resistance! He must quickly obey me, and come in His human and divine person at my bidding, into my hands. He must let me put His human and divine person into my tin boxes, transport Him from Montreal to San Francisco, from San Francisco to New York! . . He, the poor God of Rome, can not help it; He must follow me wherever I go, and he must silently allow me to distribute Him into the hundreds of lecturing meetings I have held, or will hold, in the various cities in the United States.

Does not the Church of Rome proclaim by that horrible diabolical doctrine (which is her doctrine) that not only her good priests, but her bad and renegade priests, are more above God in power, dignity, prerogatives, than heaven is above the earth? Does not the Pope prove by that horrible doctrine that he and his priests are the anti-Christ of whom Paul speaks?—“Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped: so that he, as God. sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.”—2 Th. ii.

Where can we find that “man of perdition, who exalteth himself above God,” if he is not the Pope and his priests, who boast that, at every hour of day or night, God Almighty is bound to come at their bidding into that little cake, and when there, He is absolutely powerless to resist them! They carry Him in their vest or pant pocket; they drive Him in their buggies through the country, or force Him to accompany them in sailing or steam ships, and cross the seas and the oceans; shut Him up in their secret chambers, or tabernacles, where more than once, the rats and mice put an end to His miserable existence.

For let not the Roman Catholics forget that their God, when once under the spell of their priests, becomes absolutely impotent to protect his divine person against any one of his foes—nor even against any one of the elements by which men are taught, and apt to protect themselves. He is burned in the fires which attack Him in His secret chambers; He is drowned in the rivers and the seas, where he sometimes falls with the priests who carry Him in their vest or pant pockets; and He is crushed into atoms under the wheels of the cars with the priests who have sometimes the misfortune to perish in those terrible railroad accidents. Though, often, man can protect himself against the fire by running away, the poor God of Rome has no way of escape from fire. There He is, absolutely motionless and powerless before the devouring flames. He can neither fly away on His wings, nor run away with His feet.

Man, fallen into the deep waters of the sea, or endangered by the rapid rivers, has often saved himself by swimming. But the impotent, inert God of Rome can not swim; He must perish there, and be buried in that watery grave without even being able to make any effort to prolong his miserable and humiliating existence.

How many times I have heard, in Canada and the United States, the poor deluded Roman Catholics’ lamentations, when the fire had destroyed their churches; “Oh! What a calamity!” they cried; “The good god is burned.” “Le bon Dieu est brȗlé!”

But I consider it my duty to put before the intelligence of the Roman Catholics who have not yet entirely silenced the voice of their reason, a new consideration which their Church keeps, as much as she can, out of sight. In her sacred book of the mass called “Missale,” she acknowledges that several times, when the priest has eaten the wafer-god and drunk the wine-god, he vomits them before they are digested. She laments much over those sad circumstances; she looks really distressed when she sees her great eternal God vomited out of the stomach of her priests, and rejected, there, on the floor, in the midst of the other vomited matter in which he is seen floating . . . But as the Church of Rome is infallible, and as she is evidently directed by the Holy Ghost in everything she does and says, she has found, in her divine wisdom, a most marvelous remedy, not to cure the sick stomach of her priests, but to show her great respect for her wafer-god . . . When the priest has vomited his God from His stomach, and His Divine Majesty is seen drowned in the midst of the putrefied and stinking matters which the stomach has rejected, the infallible, holy, apostolical Church of Rome invites her priest to eat again and swallow what he has vomited, in order that her glorified Saviour may have the honor to pass the next quarter of an hour in the sickly stomach of her priest!

What a grand and sublime spectacle the Church of Rome presents here, to the admiration, nay, the adoration, of man! Who will not confess that she has the true marks of the holy, pure, undefiled Church of Christ, when she asks you to come and adore her great God and Saviour, there, on the floor, swimming or floating in the midst of the vomited matters rejected by the sick stomach? And then, to show you with what profound respect and adoration you must look upon her Divine Redeemer, she requests her priest to swallow again what he has vomited!

Now, I ask— was it possible for the devil to invent anything more insulting to God and man, than that abominable dogma of Transubstantiation? Could the Divine Person of God and His Christ be more outraged, insulted and degraded, than by that lie which makes man believe that he may take his god with a little cake, eat it, vomit it, and swallow it again? Has the great God of Heaven and earth been ever outraged or insulted by the ancient or modern heathen nations as He is today, when He is said to be personally vomited from the stomach of a miserable man; personally swimming and floating in the putrefied rejects of the Pope’s stomach? Is it not evident that the impious dogma of Transubstantiation is the last, the utmost limit of the lies of Satan? Is not that blasphemous dogma the last limit of the blasphemies by which hell could insult God? Is it not evident that, when that dogma raises the Pope of Rome infinitely above God in power and dignity, it brings down the Divine and eternal person of God into the most degrading, humiliating position into which any being can be degraded?

Satan, not being able to kill our great God, has at last succeeded, through the Pope, to drag Him down from His throne and drown Him in the vomited matters rejected by the stomach of the priest! What a triumph for Satan in his war against God and His beloved and eternal Son! What a victory, when he could persuade man that he had the power to create the God of Calvary with a wafer, eat Him, vomit Him, and swallow Him again!

Evidently, Transubstantiation is the masterpiece of the devil. And if anyone has any doubt about this, let him come and see what I have seen several times, when I was a priest: let him come and see what the Church of Rome acknowledges to happen oftener than people suspect. Yes, let those who are not certain that Transubstantiation is the most stupendous blasphemy which has come out from hell, come and see the priest of Rome creating his god with a wafer, vomiting him, and swallowing him again, to vomit him a second time, as is generally the case. For it is next to impossible for the stomach to keep a second time putrid matter it has once ejected. When looking with amazement at that horrible spectacle, he will surely hear a voice from heaven whispering in his ears — “For this cause, God shall send them strong delusion, that they believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure of unrighteousness.”

THE GOD OF ROME EATEN BY A RAT.

Has God given us ears to hear, eyes to see, and intelligence to understand? The Pope says No! But the Son of God says Yes. One of the most severe rebukes of our Saviour to His disciples was for their not paying sufficient attention to what their eyes had seen, their ears heard, and their intelligence perceived. “Perceive ye not, neither understand? Have ye your heart yet hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? Having ears, hear ye not? And do not ye remember?”—(Mark viii., 17, 18.)

This solemn appeal of our Saviour to our common sense is the most complete demolition of the whole fabric of Rome. The day that a man ceases to believe that God would give us our senses and our intelligence to ruin and deceive us, but that they were given to guide us, he is lost to the Church of Rome. The Pope knows it; hence the innumerable encyclicals, laws and regulations by which the Roman Catholics are warned not to trust the testimony of their ears, eyes or intelligence.

“Shut your eyes,” says the Pope to his priests and people; “I will keep mine opened, and I will see for you. Shut your ears, for it is most dangerous for you to hear what is said in the world. I will keep my ears opened, and will tell you what you must know. Remember that to trust your own intelligence, in the research of truth and the knowledge of the Word of God, is sure perdition. If you want to know anything, come to me; I am the only sure and infallible fountain of truth,” says the Pope.

And this stupendous imposture is accepted by the people and the priests of Rome with a mysterious facility, and retained with a most desolating tenacity.

It is to them what the iron ring is to the nose of the ox, when a rope is once tied to it. The poor animal loses its self-control; its natural strength and energies will avail it nothing; it must go left or right, at the will of the one who holds the end of the rope.

Reader, please have no contempt for the unfortunate priests and people of Rome, but pity them when you see them walking in the ways into which intelligent beings ought not to make a step. They cannot help it. The ring of the ox is at their nose, and the Pope holds the end of the rope.

Had it not been for that ring, I would not have been long at the feet of the wafer-god of Rome. Let me tell one of the shining rays of truth, which were evidently sent by our merciful God, with a mighty power to open my eyes. But I could not follow it; the iron ring was at my nose, and the Pope was holding the end of the rope.

This was after I had been put at the head of the magnificent parish of Beauport, in the spring of 1838. There was living at “La Jeune Lorette,” an old retired priest, who was blind. He was born in France, where he had been condemned to death, under the Reign of Terror. Escaped from the guillotine, he had fled to Canada, where the Bishop of Quebec had put him in the elevated post of Chaplain of the Ursuline Nunnery. He had a fine voice, was a good musician, and had some pretensions to the title of poet. Having composed a good number of Church hymns, he had been called “Père Cantique;” but his real name was “Père Daule.” His faith and piety were of the most exalted character among the Roman Catholics; though this did not prevent him from being one of the most amiable and jovial men I ever saw. But his blue eyes, sweet as the eyes of the dove; his fine yellow hair, falling on his shoulders as a golden fleece; his white rosy cheeks and his constantly smiling lips had been too much for the tender hearts of the good nuns. It was not a secret that “Père Cantique,” when young, had made several conquests when in the monastery. There was no wonder at that. Indeed, how could that young and inexperienced butterfly escape damaging his golden wings at the numberless burning lamps of the fair virgins? But the mantle of charity had been put on the wounds which the old warrior had received on that formidable battlefield, from which even the Davids, Samsons, Solomons and many others had escaped only after being mortally wounded.

To help the poor blind priest, the curates around Quebec used to keep him, by turns, in their parsonages, and give him the care and marks of respect due to his old age. After the Rev. Mr. Roy, curate of Charlesbourg, had kept him five or six weeks, I had taken him to my parsonage. It was in the month of May— a month entirely consecrated to the worship of the Virgin Mary, to whom Father Daule was a most devoted priest. He was really inexhaustible, when trying to prove to us how Mary was the surest, the only foundation of the hope and salvation of sinners; how she was constantly appeasing the just wrath of her Son Jesus, who, were it not for his love and respect to her, would have long since crushed us down.

The Councils of Rome have forbidden the blind priests to say their mass; but on account of his high piety, he had got from the Pope the privilege of celebrating the short mass of the Virgin, which he knew perfectly by heart. One morning, when the good old priest was at the altar saying his mass, and I was in the vestry hearing the confession of the people, the young servant boy came to me in haste, and said, “Father Daule calls you; please come quick.”

Fearing something wrong had happened to my old friend, I lost no time and ran to him. I found him nervously tapping the altar with his two hands, as if in an anxious search for some very precious thing. When very near to him, I said, “What do you want?” He answered with a shriek of distress “The good god has disappeared from the altar. . . . . He is lost! J’ai perdu le Bon Dieu. . . . . Il est disparu de dessus l’autel!”

Hoping that he was mistaken and that he had only thrown away the good god (Le Bon Dieu) on the floor by some accident, I looked on the altar—at his feet—everywhere I could suspect that the good god might have been moved away by some mistake of the hand. But the most minute search was of no avail; the good god could not be found. I really felt stunned. At first, remembering the thousand miracles I had read about the disappearance and marvellous changes of form of the wafer-god, it came to my mind that we were in the presence of some great miracle, and that my eyes were to see some of those great marvels of which the books of the Church of Rome are filled. But I had soon to change my mind, when a thought flashed through my memory which chilled the blood in my veins.

The church of Beauport was inhabited by a multitude of the boldest and most insolent rats I had ever seen. Many times, when saying my mass, I had seen the ugly nose of several of them, who, undoubtedly attracted by the smell of the fresh wafer, wanted to make their breakfast with the body, blood, soul and divinity of my poor Roman Catholic Christ. But, as I was constantly in motion, or praying with a loud voice, the rats had invariably been frightened, and fled away into their secret quarters. I felt terror-struck by the thought that the good god (Le Bon Dieu) had been taken away and eaten by the rats.

Father Daule so sincerely believed what all the priests of Rome are bound to believe—that he had the power to turn the wafer into God—that after he had pronounced the words by which the great marvel was wrought, he used to pass from five to fifteen minutes in silent adoration. He was then as motionless as a marble statue, and his feelings were so strong that often torrents of tears used to flow from his eyes to his cheeks. Leaning my head towards the distressed old priest, I said to him, “Have you not remained, as you are used, a long time motionless, in adoring the good god after the consecration?”

He quickly answered, “Yes! But what has this to do with the loss of the good god?”

I replied in a low voice, but with a real accent of distress and awe, “Some rats have dragged away and eaten the good god!!!”

“What do you say?” replied Father Daule: “the good god carried away and eaten by rats?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I have not the least doubt about it.”

“My God! My God! What a dreadful calamity upon me!” rejoined the old man; and raising his hands and his eyes to heaven, he cried out again, “My God! My God! Why have you not taken away my life, before such a misfortune could fall upon me?”

He could not speak any longer; his voice was choked by his sobs.

At first, I did not know what to say; a thousand thoughts, some very grave, some exceedingly ludicrous, crossed my mind, more rapidly than I can say them. I stood there as nailed to the floor, by the side of the old priest, who was weeping as a child, till he asked me, with a voice broken by his sobs, “What must I do now?”

I answered him, “The Church has foreseen occurrences of this kind, and provided for them the remedy. The only thing you have to do is to get a new wafer, consecrate it, and continue your mass, as if nothing strange had occurred. I will go and get you, just now, a new bread.”

I went, without losing a moment, to the vestry, got and brought a new wafer which he consecrated and turned into a new god, and finished his mass as I had told him. After it was over, I took the disconsolate old priest by the hand to my parsonage for breakfast. But all along the way he rent the air with his cries of distress. He would hardly taste anything, for his soul was really drowned in a sea of disconsolation. I vainly tried to calm his feelings, by telling him that there was no fault of his; that this strange and sad occurrence was not the first of that kind; that it had been calmly foreseen by the Church, which has told us what to do in these circumstances; that there was no neglect, no fault, no offence against God or man on his part.

But as he would not pay the least attention to what I said, I felt the only thing I had to do was to remain silent and respect his grief by letting him unburden his heart by his lamentations and tears.

I hoped that his good common sense would help him to overcome his feelings, but I was mistaken; his lamentations were as long as those of Jeremiah, and the expressions of his grief as bitter.

At last, I lost patience, and said: “My dear Father Daule, allow me to tell you respectfully, that it is quite time to stop those lamentations and tears. Our great and just God cannot like such an excess of sorrow and regret about a thing which was only and entirely under the control of His power and eternal wisdom.”

“What do you say there?” replied the old priest, with a vivacity which resembled anger.

“I say that as it was not in your power to foresee or avoid that occurrence, you have not the least reason to act and speak as you do. Let us keep our regrets and our tears for our sins; we have both committed many, and we cannot weep for them too much. But there is no sin here; and there must be some reasonable limits to our sorrow. If anybody had to weep and regret without measure what has happened, it would be Christ. For He alone could foresee that event, and He alone could prevent it. Had it been His will to oppose this sad and mysterious fact, it was in His, not in our power, to prevent it. He alone has suffered from it, because it was His will to suffer it.”

“Mr. Chiniquy,” he replied, “you are quite a young man; and I see you have the want of attention and experience which are too often seen among young priests. You do not pay a sufficient attention to the awful calamity which has just occurred in your Church. If you had more faith and piety, you would weep with me, instead of laughing at my grief. How can you speak so lightly of a thing which makes the angels of God weep? Our dear Saviour dragged away and eaten by rats! Oh! Great God! Does not this surpass the humiliation and horrors of Calvary?”

“My dear Father Daule,” I replied, “allow me respectfully to tell you that I understand, as well as you do, the nature of the deplorable event of this morning. I would have given my blood to prevent it. But let us look at the fact in its proper light; it is not a moral action for us; it did not depend on our will more than the spots on the sun. The only one who is accountable for that fact is our God! For, again I say, that He was the only one who could see and prevent it. And to give you, plainly, my own mind, I tell you here, that if I were God Almighty, and a miserable rat would come and try to eat me, I would strike it dead before it could touch me.”

There is no need of confessing it here; everyone who reads these lines, and pays attention to this conversation, will understand that my former so robust faith in my priestly power of changing the wafer into my god had melted away and evaporated from my mind, if not entirely, at least to a great extent.

Great and new lights had flashed through my soul in that hour. Evidently my merciful God wanted to open my eyes to the awful absurdities and impieties of a religion whose God could be dragged away and eaten by rats. Had I been faithful to the saving lights which were in me then, I was saved in that very hour: and before the end of that day, I would have broken the shameful chains by which the Pope had tied my neck to his idol of bread. In that hour, it seemed to me evident that the dogma of Transubstantiation was a most monstrous imposture, and my priesthood an insult to God and man.

My intelligence said to me, with a thundering voice, “Do not remain any longer the priest of a god whom you make every day, and whom the rats can eat.”

Though blind, Father Daule understood well, by the stern accents of my voice, that my faith in that god whom he had created that morning, and whom the rats had eaten, had been seriously modified, if not entirely crumbled down. He remained silent for some time; after which he invited me to sit by him. He then spoke to me with a pathos and authority which my youth and his old age alone could justify. He gave me the most awful rebuke I ever had; he really opened on my poor wavering intelligence, soul and heart, all the cataracts of heaven. He overwhelmed me with a deluge of holy Fathers, Councils and Infallible Popes, who, he assured me, had believed and preached, before the whole world, in all ages, the dogma of Transubstantiation.

If I had paid attention to the voice of my intelligence, and accepted the lights which my merciful God was giving me, I could easily have smashed the arguments of the old priest. But what has human intelligence to do in the Church of Rome? What could my intelligence say? I was forbidden to hear it. What was the weight of my poor isolated intelligence when put in the balance against so many learned, holy, infallible intelligences?

Alas! I was not aware then that the weight of the intelligence of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost was on my side; and that, weighted against the intelligence of the Popes, they were greater than all the worlds against a grain of sand.

One hour after, shedding tears of regret, I was at the feet of Father Daule, in the confessional-box, confessing the great sin I had committed by doubting, for a moment, of the power of the priest to change the wafer into God.

The old priest whose voice had been like a lion’s voice, when speaking to the unbelieving curate of Beauport, had become sweet as the voice of a lamb, when he had me at his feet confessing my unbelief. He gave me my pardon. For my penance, he forbade me ever to say a word on the sad end of the god he had created that morning; because, said he, “This would destroy the faith of the most sincere Roman Catholics.” For the other part of the penance, I had to go on my knees every day, during nine days, before the fourteen images of the way of the cross, and say a penitential psalm before every picture: which I did. But the sixth day, the skin of my knees was pierced, and the blood was flowing freely, I suffered real torture every time I knelt down, and at every step I made. But it seemed to me that these terrible tortures were nothing compared to my great iniquity.

I had refused for a moment to believe that a man can create his god with a wafer! And I had thought that a Church which adores a god eaten by rats, must be an idolatrous Church!

MARIOLATRY.

The learned Cardinal Gibbons, through his eloquent priest, Lynch, denied some time ago, that the Virgin Mary is adored and put above Christ in the Church of Rome.

This denial, in the face of the undeniable facts which I will bring forth, is really one of the most inexplicable mysteries.

If there is a thing which is as evident as two and two are four, it is that Romanism is the old idolatry of Babylon, Egypt and Rome, under a Christian mask. But this new form of idolatry is so boldly denied by some of the great dignitaries of Rome, and so skilfully concealed by others, under the spotless robe of Jesus, that not only the too unsuspecting nominal Protestants, but even the “very elect,” are in danger of being entrapped and deceived.

Go to the magnificent Cathedrals, as well as to the humblest chapels of the Church of Rome, if you have any knowledge of the old mythology, and you will see that, today, Minerva, Juno, Venus, are worshipped under the sweet and blessed name of Mary; they see again the clouds of incense burning on their altars, and the multitude of male and female devotees humbly prostrated at the feet of their idols, asking them now, as formerly, to appease the wrath of their angry God. But today, very few read the books which could throw any light on that subject, and among the few who read these books, unfortunately, the greater part remain under the impression that there is a great deal of exaggeration in what is said by Protestants against Rome.

When they meet a Roman Catholic priest, or still more, a bishop, it seems to those Protestants a want of fairness, courtesy and Christian charity to accuse, or even suspect, such refined gentlemen of idolatry.

It is that misguided charity, founded on sheer ignorance, which paralyzes, today, the arm of the Church of Christ everywhere, and makes the Church of Rome so bold and so strong that she is carrying almost everything before her in Great Britain, the United States, in Canada, and even in Australia. In consequence of that misguided charity, founded on the criminal ignorance of modern Protestants, the Church of Rome is marching to the conquest of England and the United States, and, through them, to the conquest of the world, except God Almighty interferes by a miracle to stop her triumphs. Today, the great Captain of our salvation sees his armies filled with multitudes who think more to live in peace with their implacable enemy than to fight him. For the foe has so skilfully given to his rebellious flag, the colors and appearance of the loyal one, that the deception is as complete as it is deplorable in its effects.

It is to open the eyes of the good but too confident Protestants of Baltimore that I write this short treatise to show that Cardinal Gibbons and all the priests of Rome, in spite of their denials, put the Virgin Mary much above Christ, and that they attribute to her, powers, honors and praises which ought to be given to God alone.

But, like the horse thief, the Church of Rome has a thousand ways to conceal this, her great iniquity. If you meet the thief riding on the very horse he has just stolen, and ask him whose horse he is riding, he has the most ingenious stories at hand to prove that he is honest: that there is nothing wrong about the way he got that horse. He assures you that he has bought it in such a town, or from such a traveller, or that he has borrowed it, or found it loose on the highway, and took it for a moment, with the honest determination to send it back to the owner. So it is with the soul-stealing Church of Rome. Luther, Calvin, Knox and a million other unimpeachable witnesses and martyrs, have detected that church in the flagrante delicto of idolatry. They have proved their charges with the clearest, the most crushing evidence. But, at every time, she has denied her guilt with an impudence which makes one remember the great father of lies who deceived our first parents in the Garden of Eden.

But I have been twenty-five years one of those—not horse-thieves, but soul-thieves and soul-murderers. I know all their great and small tricks, all their pious lies, all their dark caves and night recesses. I have been a quarter of a century swimming in the filthy waters in which the poor priests and the haughty cardinals and bishops are plunged, and, with the grace of God, I will show that Rome is idolatrous in her worship of Mary, with such proofs that Cardinal Gibbons will not dare to deny them.

There is a book in the Church of Rome which is esteemed sacred above every other book. It is called “Breviarium.” Every bishop and priest of Rome is bound, under pain of eternal damnation, to read every word of it at least once a year. Among the things that the learned bishop is bound to read, repeat and believe, from the bottom of his heart, every week to the glory of Mary from that book, are the following words: “Gaude, Virgo Maria, quia cunctas hereses sola interemisti in universo mundo;” “Rejoice, Virgin Mary, for thou alone hath destroyed all the heresies in the whole world.”

Of course, to address, in the presence of God and man, these blasphemous words to Mary; to believe that the Virgin Mary alone has destroyed “all” heresies which were in the world, the unfortunate priests and bishops of Rome must silence the voice of reason, which tells them that this is sheer absurdity and nonsense; they must silence the voice of conscience, which tells them that this is a blasphemous as well as a ridiculous lie; they must make asses of themselves to please their modern goddess.

For if there is a thing which is evident, it is that God has never yet seen fit to destroy all the heresies in the world. Go and consult the theologians of Rome. Ask them when all the heresies had been destroyed in the world, and they will answer you there has never been such happy days. Nay, they will assure you that all the old heresies have been continued, preached and revived by the arch heretics Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Chiniquy, etc. If, from the theologians of Rome, you go to consult the Roman Catholic historians, and ask them to tell you when all the heresies were destroyed, and the heretics confounded and silenced, they will, without a dissenting voice, answer you that this is one of the most egregious and stupendous lies that the world has ever heard. They will unanimously tell you that God Almighty has never extinguished and destroyed all the heresies which were in the world.

But to show to the Roman Catholics how the Virgin Mary is above God, the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Baltimore tells them at least once a week “that the Virgin Mary alone has destroyed all the heresies which were in the world!”

What would be the feelings and the surprise of the Virgin Mary if she heard from the lips of those reverend high dignitaries of Rome, that pious lie proclaimed at the feet of her altars?

Many among the admirers of Cardinal Gibbons will hardly believe me when I tell them he has to proclaim that puerile falsehood once a week! But it is an undeniable fact. If, in his honesty and in his perfect knowledge, he refuses to proffer that theological as well as historical and scriptural falsehood, and shrinks from repeating it, his infallible church tells him that he will be forever damned! And I here publicly challenge him to deny it.

In the famous encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI. (the predecessor of Pius IX.) against liberty of conscience, dated August 15, 1832, which begins with these words. “Mirari vos,” we read: “Sed ut omnia haec prospere et feliciter eveniant, levemus occulos manusque ad sanctissiman Virginem Mariam, quae sola universas haereses interemit, nostraque maxima fiducia, imo, Tota ratio est spei nostrae.”—“But, in order that we may receive all these blessings, let us raise our eyes and our hands to the most holy Virgin Mary, who alone has destroyed all the heresies; who is the surest foundation of our hope; nay, who is all the foundation of our hope.”

Here the infallible Pope says again, “ex cathedra,” in his most infallible way, that the holy Virgin Mary, alone, by her power without the help of God, alone, has destroyed all the heresies. But, fearing lest this infinite power given to Mary may not sufficiently convey the super-Divine power of that almighty Queen of heaven and earth, the infallible Pope adds that the Virgin Mary is “all the foundation” of the hope of mankind! “the greatest (mark the word ‘maxima’) source of their confidence!”

You see that if Cardinal Gibbons is allowed to put a great confidence in Christ, he is bound, by his church, to put his greatest (“maxima”) confidence in Mary!

I congratulate the learned Roman Catholic Cardinal of Baltimore, who seems to have the good sense not to put all his confidence in Mary, but to keep some for Christ, his Saviour. I hope he will soon inform us that he has taken away the little (though very big) word all from before the name of Mary, and put it before the name of Jesus. Yes, I respectfully advise him to refuse to say any longer with his church that all his confidence is in Mary, but to proclaim that it is all in Jesus. Then he will be a true Christian and a good Protestant!

But let us come again to the Breviarium. In the office of the “Immaculate Conception” we find the following prayer, which Cardinal Gibbons is bound to address, several times a year: “Accipe quod offerimus, redona quod rogamus. excusa quod timemus; quia tu es spes unica peccatorum”—“Receive what we offer, give what we ask, excuse what we fear; for thou art the only hope of sinners.”

No doubt that some of our readers here will again say: “Poor Father Chiniquy is always exaggerating, but he will never persuade us that such a refined gentleman, such a learned Christian as Cardinal Gibbons has ever said to the Virgin Mary that she was the only hope of sinners. No! Never such a blasphemy has fallen from the lips of a Christian so universally known and esteemed as the present Cardinal of Baltimore.”

But such is nevertheless the case. And I here again solemnly challenge Cardinal Gibbons to deny this:

That Cardinal Gibbons, with all his priests and people, are bound under pain of eternal damnation, to say to the Virgin Mary, many times every year: “Thou art the only hope of sinners!”

It is amusing to hear the bishops and priests of Rome speaking on that matter before Protestants. It is then evident that they see their idolatry—and they are ashamed of it. They then tell us that it is Jesus who is the “only” hope of sinners.

Yes! When in the presence of a Protestant public, I am glad to hear that Cardinal Gibbons protests against the ordinances of his Church, which wants him to say to Mary, “Thou art the only hope of sinners.”

I know there are many priests of Rome today (and I hope Cardinal Gibbons is one of them) who are disgusted with the idolatrous doctrines of their Church; they see with true horror the abomination of her doctrines, but they feel they are her children, and as such they put their mantle over her shoulders to conceal her shame as much as possible from the eyes of the outside world. They know well the errors of their guilty mother; but, as dutiful children, they don’t like to hear any bad talk against her. They, perhaps secretly, hope she will reform, give up her iniquities, and become a truly honest mother again. Though depraved in many things, she is such a good mother to her children, particularly when they are bishops or priests! She feeds, clothes and lodges them so well! She is so rich! Those with whom she prostitutes herself are so powerful, so numerous, so great, so noble! There are such splendors inside the walls of her house! Does she not extend her power all over the world? Does she not see several of the mightiest nations at her feet? Has she not a matchless unity? Does she not march to the conquest of the world with an irresistible power?

But, though I congratulate Cardinal Gibbons, by anticipation, for the declaration that I expect from him that he protests against the idea that “Mary is the only hope for sinners,” I cannot congratulate him for saying to Mary several times a week, when alone with his people, “Thou art the only hope for sinners.” Nor can I congratulate him when, to throw dust in the eyes of the Protestants, he cites the text of the Council of Trent, “The Catholic Church teaches it is good and profitable prayerfully to invoke saints reigning in heaven with Christ, in order to obtain favors from God.”

For, to say that it is “good” to invoke Mary, is not denying that it is “necessary” to invoke her. We can say “It is good to invoke the name of Jesus,” without contradicting those who say “It is necessary to invoke the name of Jesus.” So, when the Church of Rome says “It is good to invoke Mary and the other saints.” she does not deny that it is “necessary to invoke them.” When a thing is necessary to salvation it is surely “good.” The word “good” is left on the same side of the truth with the word “necessary.” by the Church of Rome, when speaking of Jesus as when speaking of Mary. It is in the same line of errors when applied to Mary and the saints alone. In the apostate Church of Rome, in spite of all her bold denials, the word “necessary” is contained in the word “good,” as the tree is contained in the seed.

In the days of the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome, through many of her most approved books, and through the teachings of the so-called saints, preached to her blind and ignorant slaves, as she does today, that Mary was “the only hope for sinners,” the “only foundation of their hopes,” and, on that account, it was then, and it is now, considered “necessary” in the minds of multitudes to invoke her. But, as an abandoned woman will sometimes blush for her own iniquities, put on airs of virtue, and speak words which the most virtuous woman would repeat, so the Church of Rome, at the Council of Trent, was frightened at her own impieties and idolatries. She did not dare to proclaim, as absolutely necessary, the worship of Mary as a dogma. The eyes of an indignant Christian world were upon her; she then chose a word which could be used as a kind of veil, to conceal as much as possible her gross idolatry; though there was enough in it to help to continue her implacable war against God and His Christ.

True to her diabolical mission, which is to be at the head of the enemies of Christ, and to offer another saviour to sinners, she contented herself with saying, “It is good and profitable to go to Mary to invoke her name to obtain favors from God through His Son, Jesus Christ.” In that decree she calls Christ “the only Redeemer and Saviour of the world.” But this was mere dust thrown into the eyes of the world, for she knew very well that her slaves firmly believe that “Mary is the only hope, the only refuge of sinners.” When the learned Cardinal Gibbons reads this letter he will be forced, in spite of himself, to confess that his Church says, “Mary is the only hope for sinners,” and very often he himself is obliged to say, “Mary is the only hope for sinners.” But to save appearances, and in order not to be forced to publicly acknowledge that his Church is idolatrous, and that he himself is an idolator, he will tell you that the word “only” does not mean “only.” He will bravely tell you that when he says, “Mary is the ‘only’ hope of sinners,” this does not mean at all that “Mary is the only hope of sinners.”

And if you ask him, “What, then, is the meaning of the word ‘only?’”, he will tell you that the infamous Chiniquy is an apostate, who, for good reasons, has been a hundred times interdicted, suspended, excommunicated, which will be a clear argument to prove that the Church of Rome does not insult Jesus Christ and that she is not idolatrous when she says to Mary, “Thou art the only hope for sinners.”

We have a French proverb which says, “Le menteur n’a pas de memoire et se contredit souvent”—“The liar has no memory, and often contradicts himself.” So the Church of Rome soon forgets and contradicts the few good words she says about Jesus Christ. True to her tendency to idolatry, after having said that Jesus was the only Saviour of the world, she employed all the eloquence of her orators, all the science of her theologians, to persuade sinners to address themselves to Mary, by assuring them that “she is the door of heaven, and the only hope of sinners.”

The learned Cardinal will not be worse than his Church if he tells you that the word only, used in connection with the name of Mary, as the only hope of sinners, does not mean only.

When speaking to the Protestants, and trying to deceive them by her enchantments, that Church says, with great solemnity and emphasis, “Jesus is the only hope—the only Saviour of sinners.” But laughs at these expressions when speaking to her obedient priests and blind slaves. She then says, “It is Mary, and Mary alone, who destroys all the heresies of the world! It is Mary, and Mary alone, who is the hope of sinners! It is to Mary, and through Mary alone, that the poor sinner must look to be saved!” “Maria unica spes peccatorum!”

The more one studies and knows Rome as she is, the more he is struck by the duplicity with which she speaks, and the audacity with which she denies what she has just said and done; the more he is saddened at the strange mixture of gold and dust which compose her doctrines: the more he is alarmed at the deadly poison she puts into the bread which she offers to the world.

The ignorant and blind multitudes of her followers eat the bread without suspecting the poison which is in it, and they die far from God and eternal life, in the arms of the modern goddess Mary.

It is that duplicity, that double-faced doctrine which makes the bold priest of Rome so strong, sometimes, when he is arguing with an unsuspecting Protestant. The ambassador of Rome shows only one side of his doctrine—the right side, the gospel side: and the honest Protestant, finding everything right in his adversary, expresses his regret at having been unjust towards his Roman Catholic neighbor, and is soon caught in her trap.

But it is that duplicity, that double-faced doctrine of Rome which renders her priests so timid, so weak, so ridiculously ignorant when arguing with men like Luther, Calvin, Knox, Gavazzi, or even the poor, a hundred times excommunicated, Chiniquy. For we know all the tricks of Rome: we have drunk her poisonous waters: we have plunged into the bottomless sea of her iniquities: we have in our hands all the proofs the Rome is the great mother of abominations, the great Babylon who has made the kings and nations drunk with the wine of her prostitution: but we know, also, that the Lord will destroy her with the brightness of His coming.

Let the Protestants of Baltimore and the whole of the United States read the following extracts which I copy, word by word, from one of the most approved books of the Church of Rome, and they will understand what brazen faces Cardinal Gibbons and his priests have when they deny that their Church is idolatrous in her worship of Mary:—

“The High Chancellor of Paris, John Gerson, meditating on the words of David—‘These two things have I heard, that power belongeth to God, and mercy to thee, O Lord.’ (Psl lxi., 12)—says, that the kingdom of God, consisting of justice and mercy, the Lord has divided it: He has reserved the kingdom of justice for Himself, and He has granted the kingdom of Mercy to Mary, ordaining that all the mercies which are dispensed to man should pass through the hands of Mary, and should be bestowed according to her good pleasure. (Psl. iii. Tr. 4th. S. Magn.) St Thomas confirms this in his preface to the Canonical Epistle, saying that the Holy Virgin, when she conceived the Divine Word in her womb, and brought Him forth, obtained the half of the Kingdom of God by becoming Queen of Mercy, Jesus Christ remaining King of Justice.

“The Eternal Father constituted Jesus Christ King of Justice, and therefore made Him the Universal Judge of the world: hence the prophet sang. ‘Give to the King Thy Judgment. O God: and to the King’s Son Thy justice.’ (Psl. lxx., 2.) Here a learned interpreter takes up the subject, and says; ‘O Lord, thou hast given Thy Son Thy justice, because Thou hast given to the Mother of the King Thy mercy.’ And St. Bonaventure happily varies the passage above quoted by saying, ‘Give to the King Thy judgment, O God, and to His Mother Thy mercy.’ Ernest, Archbishop of Prague, also says: ‘That the Eternal Father has given to the Son the office of judging and punishing, and to the mother the office of compassionating and relieving the wretched.’” (Glories of Mary, by St. Liguori, pages 27-29).

If these blasphemous words are not sufficient to prove that Cardinal Gibbons and his priests give an idolatrous worship to Mary, let the Protestants of the United States read the following page, from the same book, which the three last Popes have approved. They will see with their own eyes, and hear with their own ears, not from the lips of Chiniquy, but from the very lips of the Church of Rome, that the Virgin Mary is worshipped as being the intercessor between the sinner and God the Father. One of the most impudent falsehoods with which the priests of Rome blind their poor dupes, and even the Protestants who are not on their guard against the enchantments of the great mother sorceress of the Vatican, is that Mary is only intercessor between the sinner and Christ. There they will see how it is to God the Father directly she carries her petitions, and how she is considered by her devotees, and considers herself, the only mediator between the sinner and God the Father:

“We read in the second book of Kings [Samuel] that the wise woman of Tekoa said to David: ‘My Lord, I had two sons, and for my misfortune, one has killed the other, so that I have already lost a child; justice would take from me my other and only son; have mercy upon me, a poor mother, and do not let me be deprived of both my children.’ Then David had compassion on this mother, liberated the criminal, and returned him to her.”

“It appears that Mary offers the same petition when God is angry with a sinner who has recourse to her. ‘O my God,’ she says to Him. ‘I had two sons, Jesus and man; man has killed my Jesus on the Cross: Thy justice would now condemn man: my Lord, my Jesus is dead; have mercy upon me, and if I have lost one, do not condemn me to lose the other also.’ Ah, God assuredly does not condemn the sinners who have recourse to Mary, and for whom she prays, since God has given the sinners to Mary for her children.” (Glories of Mary, by St. Liguori, pages 73-74.)

Here is the true doctrine of Rome about Mary, given not by me, nor any enemy of the Church of Rome, but given by one of the greatest saints and theologians of that Church. In this blasphemous prayer, put on the lips of their modern goddess, the resurrection of Christ is forgotten and denied! He is dead. He cannot be any more the intercessor between His Father and the guilty children of Adam! But happily, they don’t want Him to pray and intercede for them. They have Mary, who says to God the Father, “Man has killed my son Jesus. Do not deprive me, then, of my only surviving son, man!”

And with such a book in his hands—such doctrine in his mind—such blasphemies on his lips, Cardinal Gibbons bravely tells us, through his priest Lynch, that the relative worship of Mary is not idolatry!

At page 118 of the same book, we read: “Saint Iraeneus says that the Divine Word, before incarnating himself in the womb of Mary, sent the archangel to obtain her consent, because he would have the world indebted to Mary for the mystery of incarnation!”

Has ever hell let more blasphemous words go from its dark recess than this? In the Church of Rome it is not the infinite compassion and love of God that we are indebted to for the incarnation of Christ —it is to Mary!

On page 119 of the same book, we read: “Also Idiot remarks that every grace, every blessing that men have received or will receive from God, to the end of the world, has come to them, and will come to them, through the intercession and by the means of Mary.” (Glories of Mary)

St. Germanus, recognizing Mary to be the source of every blessing and the deliverance from every evil, thus invokes her: “O my Lady, thou alone art my help given me by God; thou art the guide of my pilgrimage, the support of my weakness, my riches in poverty, my deliverance from bondage, the hope of my salvation. Graciously listen, I pray thee, to my supplications, take compassion on my sighs, thou my Queen, my refuge, my life, my help, my hope, my strength.” (Glories of Mary, page 120.)

But in order to show in what manner Christ is exalted above Mary in the Church of Rome, let the Protestants, whom Cardinal Gibbons wanted to blind on the 8th of December last, read the following story, published with the infallible authorities of the Popes:—

“In the Franciscan chronicle it is related of Brother Leo, that he once saw a red ladder, upon which Jesus Christ was standing, and a white one upon which stood His holy Mother. He saw many persons attempting to ascend the red ladder; they ascended a few steps and then fell. Then they were exhorted to ascend the white ladder, and on that he saw them succeed, for the blessed Virgin offered them her hand, and they arrived in that manner safe in Paradise. St. Denys, the Carthusian, asks: ‘Who will ever be saved? Who will ever reign in heaven? They are saved and will certainly reign for whom this Queen of Mercy offers her prayers.’” (Glories of Mary, page 279.)

I may here be asked by many, “How is it possible that a man of the ability and learning of Cardinal Gibbons does not see that his church is idolatrous? How can he come so boldly before the world and deny that idolatry, when it is so evident?”

There is only one way of answering that question; it is to read the second chapter of the 2d Thessalonians:

“That mystery of iniquity doth already work.

“And then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.

“Even Him whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all powers and signs and lying wonders.

“And with all the deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie.

“That they all might be damned who believe not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”

I will not accuse Cardinal Gibbons, or any of his priests, of dishonesty. My firm belief is that many, if not all, are honest in their awful errors. Yes, they are as honest as many priests of the White Elephant in Siam, or the priests of the Sun in Persia, and the priests of Mahomet in Constantinople are honest. The priests and bishops of Rome are as honest at the feet of the wafer-gods and their goddess Mary, as the priests of Baal were at the feet of their idols. Such honesty at the feet of mute and contemptible idols is one of the saddest mysteries of our poor, corrupt and fallen human nature. We must not insult or despise these men; we must pity them and pray for them.

In order to enlist more surely the pity and compassion of the disciples of the Gospel in favor of Cardinal Gibbons and his poor deluded and blind slaves, I will end this short treatise by copying two facts given by St. Liguori in that most approved and circulated book of Rome “The Glories of Mary.” These two facts will explain why the Roman Catholics are fallen, everywhere, into such a bottomless abyss of immorality and degradation, that they seem unable to be raised again to the level of the Christian atmosphere of honesty. In reading these histories, which the bishops and priests of Rome present to the people as most edifying ones, everyone will see how the modern idolatry of Rome, as its old idolatry, has brought her into the most deplorable state of moral degradation and intellectual depravity.

FIRST STORY.

“Our advocate (the Virgin Mary) has shown how great is her kindness towards sinners by her mercy to Beatrix, a nun in the monastery of Fontebraldo, as related by Cesarius and Father Rho. This unhappy nun, having contracted a passion for a certain youth, agreed to flee with him from the convent; and, in fact, she went one day before a statue of the blessed Virgin, there deposited the keys of the monastery—for she was porteress—and boldly departed. Arrived in another country, she led the miserable life of a prostitute for fifteen years. It happened that she met, one day, the agent of the monastery in the city where she was living, and asked of him, thinking he would not recognize her again, if he knew Sister Beatrice? ‘I know her well,’ he said, ‘She is a holy nun, and at present is Mistress of Novices.’

“At this intelligence she was confounded and amazed, not knowing how to understand it. In order to ascertain the truth, she put on another dress and went to the monastery. She asked for Sister Beatrice, and, behold! The most holy Virgin appeared before her in the form of that same image to which, at parting, she had committed her keys and her dress. And the divine Mother spoke thus: ‘Beatrice, be it known to thee, that, in order to prevent thy disgrace, I assumed thy form, and have filled thy office for the fifteen years that thou hast lived far from the monastery and from God. My child, return and do penance, for my Son is still waiting for thee: and strive by thy holy life to preserve the good name I have gained thee.”

“She spoke thus and disappeared. Beatrice re-entered the nunnery; and gratified for the mercy of Mary, led the life of a saint. At her death she made known the foregoing incident, to the glory of this great Queen.” (Glories of Mary, page 224.)

SECOND STORY.

“A servant of Mary went, one day, to visit a church of our Blessed Lady, without the knowledge of her husband, and she was prevented, by a severe storm, from returning that night to her own house. She felt a great fear lest her husband should be very angry with her; but she recommended herself to Mary, and when she returned home, her husband was very kind and gracious to her. Upon questioning him, she found that the evening before, the divine Mother had taken her form and attended to all the little affairs of the household. She then related the occurrence to her husband, and they both, afterwards, practised great devotion to the blessed Virgin.” (Glories of Mary, page 701.)

Thus it is that after having raised Mary above Christ, by calling her the only hope of sinners, the only foundation of our salvation, the only destroyer of heresy, the gate of heaven, etc., etc., the Church of Rome degrades and dishonors her by bringing her down to a level with women we cannot name.

Thus it is that, everywhere, the idolatrous Church of Rome has killed and destroyed the idea of what is pure and right, honest and holy among men.

WHY WE MUST PUT OUR TRUST IN JESUS ALONE AND NOT INVOKE MARY.

THE CRUCIFIED JESUS AND THE PENITENT THIEF.

“And then one of the malefactors which were hanged, railed on him, saying, ‘If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.’ But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, ‘Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we, indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds, but this man hath done nothing amiss.’ And he said unto Jesus, ‘Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.’ And Jesus said unto him ‘Verily I say unto you today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke xxiii., 39-43.)

This sublime dialogue between Jesus dying on the cross and the repenting sinner is the most touching summary of the design of the mission of Jesus Christ upon earth, as it is the measure of the unlimited confidence that the penitent sinner ought to place in the mercy of the Saviour. A few reflections upon what passed and was said upon these two crosses, are sufficient to enable us to comprehend the injury that the Church of Rome does to the Holy Virgin and to the gospel, in her efforts to turn the thoughts and the hearts of sinners towards Mary as the most solid foundation of their salvation.

During this dialogue between the Saviour and the penitent thief, St. John tells us that Mary was at the foot of the cross; then we can believe that she knew what was passing there. And how she must have felt her heart thrill with joy, in spite of her bitter grief, when she heard with loving kindness Jesus saying to the companion of his sufferings, “Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”

No doubt that the faith and conversion of the thief were infinitely pleasing to the holy mother of Jesus, and that they brought, for a moment, a happy diversion from her sorrows.

The spectacle which is presented to us upon Calvary is one of such sublimity and grandeur that man will never be able worthily to describe it. Whilst our thoughts go toward Jesus and the penitent thief, and whilst, in the stillness of reflection and meditation, we call to remembrance the words that these two sufferers on the cross interchanged, we feel ourselves penetrated by such a sentiment of love and confidence in the Saviour, that we can no longer speak of him but with tears. We feel that to distrust Jesus, or doubt His love and mercy for sinners, is one of the greatest crimes of which man can be guilty.

But let us suppose that the penitent thief, instead of addressing the crucified Jesus, and turning all the thoughts and affections of his heart toward the Saviour of the world, had turned his thoughts and hopes towards Mary, as the Roman Church advises all sinners, and especially dying sinners, to do—suppose the penitent thief, instead of saying to Jesus, “Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,” had said what all the popes, bishops and priests of Rome put into the mouth of sinners, “Lord Jesus, I have been so wicked that I do not deserve to speak to you, nor to be heard by you. But, behold your mother! Her female heart must naturally be more feeling and more compassionate than yours; she, then, will listen to me better than you will; she will be more easily touched with pity for my unfortunate lot than you. Do not take it amiss, then, that I should address myself to her in preference to you, in order to get help in the miseries that oppress me. I dare not speak to you myself, for you are the Holy of Holies, and I am a miserable sinner. But I will speak to you through your mother; she will demand from you grace and mercy for me. A good son refuses nothing to his mother! You cannot, then, refuse her what she will ask of you for me; for she has an authority over you that you cannot disown. The favor which, then, you would refuse to a criminal like me, will be easily granted to her to whom you cannot refuse anything. You are come into the world, I know, armed with the inexorable justice of your Father to punish the guilty. But whilst God the Father has given to you the mission of justice and chastisement, He has given to your mother the mission of mercy and pardon. I know that without Mary I am lost; for it is she that is the gate of heaven, the refuge of sinners. My chosen advocate is your mother; I fear nothing, for I know you can refuse nothing.”

We ask all men to whom God has given a spark of Christian intelligence, would such language in the mouth of the thief have been suitable? Would it have pleased and honored the Holy Virgin? In one word, would it have obtained from the Saviour this answer: “Thou shalt be with me in paradise.”?

Roman Catholics who read these lines, do you not understand that each of these words, if they had been spoken by the thief on the cross, would have been blasphemy—an outrage on Jesus Christ, and an insult to the Holy Virgin? But see, now, without any exaggeration, the sentiments with which your Roman Church wishes to inspire you! You know that these are the very words which she makes you learn by heart, that she makes you read in all your books, and that she announces to you by her priests, in order that you should address them to Jesus Christ!

Let us go on and suppose that, after this language was addressed to Jesus upon the Cross, the thief, speaking to the Holy Virgin, had said to her, “O Mary, the refuge of sinners, you are the only foundation of my hope and of my faith; you are the gate of heaven, the consolation of the afflicted, the salvation of sinners! It is through you alone that all the grace and blessings of heaven descend upon the earth! It is by you alone that all errors, heresies and sins are destroyed in the world! Whilst your son Jesus has for his mission to cause the inexorable justice of the Father to reign in the world, it is your part to execute mercy. . . .  All those who put their confidence in you, and invoke the all-powerful aid of your prayers will be saved! The arms of your son are always raised to punish and crush the sinner; it is yours, I know, to prevent his avenging arm from striking. I see that your son is angry with me; I feel that I have deserved his wrath. Be pleased, then, O Mary, to appease him, and ask of him grace for me, for I am so guilty that he will not listen to me if I speak to him! I put my salvation in your hands; I make myself your child, your servant, your slave. Regard me with compassion, since I deplore my sins. Cause him to remember you are his mother, and by that title you have full authority over him. O Mary, my hope and refuge, I throw myself in your arms. Save me!”

Once more we ask of our brethren of the Roman Church, would not each of these words, in the mouth of the thief on the cross, have been blasphemous against Christ? Would they not have been an insult to the Holy Virgin?

Would the humble Mary, at the foot of Calvary, have received with pleasure these insipid praises? Would she have felt herself honored by these sacrilegious prayers which the Roman Catholics repeat every day? No, a thousand times no! Never would the Holy Virgin at the foot of Calvary, whilst the blood of the great victim was falling drop by drop from the cross, have consented to have heard herself called the salvation of the world, the hope of sinners, the gate of heaven: she would have repelled with horror these words of blasphemy; she would have replied to the thief: “Ah! Wretch, when so near him who atones for the sins of the world, covered with his blood, a witness of his patience, of his mildness, and of his love even to his murderers, how can you doubt his pity for you? If I am his mother according to the flesh, he is my God, he is my Saviour, as well as yours, by his grace. Do you not know that it was to seek and to save sinners that he descended from heaven; that it is for sinners that his body is broken, his head lacerated by the thorns, his hands and his feet pierced by the nails, and it is from love for sinners that his blood is flowing, and that he will soon expire? He has spent his life in calling sinners to himself. To the worst among them he said: ‘Come unto me and you shall be consoled and pardoned.’ His wish was to be with sinners—he was called the friend of sinners. Do not fear, then, to speak to him, for he is your most sincere friend. See the marks of mildness and love which shine through the blood which covers his face. It is he alone who is the salvation of the world, the refuge of sinners, the gate of heaven. It is on his name alone we must call to be saved. Your want of faith in his mercy and love for you causes him more suffering than the nails which pierce his hands and feet. In order to obtain the grace and pardon you need, address yourself to him, and to him alone, for he only is your true friend—your brother, full of affection—your father, full of love, and your merciful Saviour. Speak to him, thou, yourself, and do hear from his mouth the sentence of pardon which is already written in his heart! But cease to insult him, and to insult me thus, by thinking I can love you more than he loves you, and that I can be more compassionate towards you than he is himself!”

Let not our dear brethren, who are still in the bonds of Romish superstition, be deceived by the idea that what would have been unsuitable and blasphemous in the mouth of the penitent thief is altogether suitable and Christian today, when Jesus is in heaven. For our Lord, although in heaven, is as near to every sinner, to hear and pardon him, as he was to the thief on the cross. His ear is no further distant from the mouth of the sinner who, today, asks mercy from Him, than it was from the crucified thief; His heart is not less kind and compassionate today than it was at the day of His death; poor sinners are not less dear to Him today than then. And He has no more need now than then to be forced by His mother to pardon the penitent sinner. The penitent thief had no need of an intercessor to touch the heart of Jesus. . . . . Although the mother of the Saviour was present there, he had not even a thought of addressing her. He understood that Jesus was his friend, his Saviour and his God; and he did not deceive himself. . . . He put in Jesus, and Jesus alone, all his hope, and he was not disappointed. He spoke boldly to Jesus as one speaks to a friend, to a dear brother, and he did well; for it was thus, as it is still thus, that Jesus wishes that we should speak to him.

And to assert that Jesus has more need, today, than he had then to be urged and roused or appeased by his mother, in order to hear sinners who return to him, would be a childish absurdity, if not an awful blasphemy.

When God, in His great mercy, opens the eyes of a Roman Catholic to the errors of his church, the first sentiment which he experiences is one of unspeakable joy for the favor which he has received. But the second thing which strikes his mind and heart is a feeling of astonishment at the facility and sort of sincerity with which he had received and believed, as incontestable truths, errors and superstitions the most palpable and anti-Christian.

Now, the error which is dearest and most deep-rooted in the heart of a Roman Catholic is, that the shortest and surest way to be heard by Jesus Christ, and to draw upon us a look of His mercy, is not to speak to him directly ourselves, but to get some of the saints in heaven that we believe are most dear to His heart, to speak to Him on our behalf. In order to support this error, all the modern theologians of the Church of Rome assure us that Jesus, being the Holy of Holies, it is quite natural that He should listen with more pleasure to the voice of one of the elect in heaven, than to that of a sinner, such as we all are. The Church of Rome, then, assures us that the saints in heaven whom I address, will hear me with more pleasure, facility, readiness, mercy and love, than Jesus Christ would do.

For if the Church of Rome, returning to the evangelical truth, which she has so long forgotten, should say to a sinner, “There is no saint in heaven who loves you so much as Jesus Christ; there is no ear so attentive as His to the voice of our repentance; there is not in heaven a mind or heart so easily or so mercifully touched with compassion for all our miseries as the soul of Jesus Christ; there is not a person in heaven who can have so much pleasure in hearing himself invoked and in seeing himself approached by the penitent sinner as Jesus,” the people would put all their confidence in Jesus, and in Jesus alone, and would address him as the gospel directs.

In short, it would be the height of folly, in every case, to go to any but Jesus to obtain any favors.

If the Church of Rome, instead of losing herself and wandering away into foolish and vain traditions, would keep to the word of God, she would say, with St. Paul, “And I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things,” (Philippians iii., 8.) If, laying aside the deplorable sophisms which form the basis of her worship of the saints, the Church of Rome would hold the language of Evangelical Truth, her people everywhere would know that in Jesus and in Jesus alone, they have all the treasures of mercy, of love and of the power of God. Their thoughts, their hearts and their hopes would turn towards Jesus, and Jesus alone; they would know, then, that the power, the mercy and the compassion of Jesus are always active, always efficacious, and above all, always at the service of the penitent sinner. Her people would know, at the same time, that these treasures of the mercy of the Saviour, who is both God and man, are monopolized by nobody; that they are not the property of any saints in particular, but that they are the treasures of every sinner who has liberty to draw therefrom, according to his repentance, love and faith.

“Whatsoever ye shall ask from my Father in my name,” said Jesus Christ, “shall be given to you.” After such a declaration from the very lips of the Saviour, how can we believe that it is necessary for one to address the saints, in order to propitiate him?

For why should Jesus Christ, in heaven, be less ready to listen to me and pity me than St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary or any other saint to whom I might wish to address myself? Can the humanity of St. Peter, St. Paul or St. Mary be more perfect than the humanity of Jesus Christ? Why should this be? And where shall we find reason for such a monstrous doctrine? To assert, as the Church of Rome does, that the saints, being nothing above us by nature, and having been sinners like us, know better our miseries, and ought to sympathize with us more than Jesus Christ, because he is incapable of sin, is to deny the humanity as well as the divinity of the Saviour; it is to deny the gospel, which teaches us that Jesus has not only known and understood our miseries infinitely better than all the saints, but also paid, even to the last farthing, the debt of our sins, and washed them away in His blood.

How would Jesus have been able to bear our sins upon Himself? How could He have charged Himself with our iniquities and paid all that was due to the justice of God, without knowing them perfectly, without comprehending their number, their nature and their malignity? But, above all, how could the Saviour of the world have undertaken to pay the debt of our iniquities if these iniquities had not excited in his mind a degree of sympathy, of compassion and of love, of which all the saints together are incapable.

Once more: let us forget, for a moment, that Jesus Christ is God; let us suppose that He is only a man, and let us fix our thoughts on this human person. We ask, can we find in the Sacred Scripture a single expression which would lead us to think that, as a man, Jesus is less kind, less patient or less merciful towards us than St. Peter, St. Paul or St. Mary? And moreover, in order that I may address myself to one saint in preference to another, I must have reason to believe that this saint will be more favorable to me than he to whom I have preferred him. To address myself to St. Mary, for example, in preference to Jesus, and to ask this woman, blessed among all women, to speak for me to Jesus Christ. I must believe that she will hear and answer me more quickly than He. For, from the moment that I believe that Jesus will be more favorable to me and more compassionate to my miseries than Mary or any other saint, I would go to Jesus. Nothing is more simple and more natural, and for this very reason, nothing is more powerful than this argument. Well, plain good sense, as well as the gospel, tells us that if Jesus were only a man in heaven, he would be there, as he was upon earth, the most compassionate, the most loving, the most charitable and the most influential of holy men. And consequently (always supposing that He is only a man) even then I would address only Him in my prayers. It is in this man Jesus that I ought to put my greatest confidence, it is from this man Jesus that I should expect the promptest aid; it is to this man Jesus that I ought to speak with most faith and pleasure.

And the most ignorant, as well as the most learned, of my brethren of the Church of Rome will be forced to confess that I am acting wisely. They could not but confess that those who put their trust in saints, less kind, less influential, less merciful than my saint protector and friend Jesus, would, to say the least of it, be deficient in wisdom.

But would any one dare to say that the holy humanity of Jesus has lost any of its love, its mercy, its influence or its kindness towards the sinner, by its perfect union with His divinity?

No! It is impossible that any Roman Catholic would dare, deliberately, to utter a word so wicked and senseless.

Well, it is, nevertheless, what all Roman Catholics unconsciously do and say each time they shrink from speaking to Jesus Christ, under the pretext that He will not hear them because of their sins, and when they address the saints whom they believe to be more ready to hear! If it is possible that this man in heaven loves us and hears us with pleasure, it is still more possible and more certain that the God-man will listen to us with pleasure, and answer us in His infinite mercy.

It is, then, inconceivable folly to leave the God-man, to shrink from speaking to the God-man, and to distrust the God-man, in order to address a man and to put all our hope in a mere man.

But this folly becomes an inexcusable crime, an abomination, an act of idolatry, when this God-man has descended from heaven to tell us himself that he is our friend, our brother, our Saviour, our advocate, our all—our God, infinitely good, infinitely merciful, and infinitely kind.

WHY I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO THE CHURCH OF ROME.

TO THE REV. BISHOP BOURGET, OF MONTREAL.

“On my arrival from the Maritime Provinces, I learned that your priests and your press organs have published that I have tried, during my last illness, to make my peace with your Church. I do not need to tell you that this is an unmitigated falsehood; you know it better than any man. ‘No, my Lord, by the mercy of God I will never submit myself again to the ignominious yoke of the Pope. And allow me to give you and your priests and your press some of my reasons.’

“(1.) Your dogma of the Apostolic Succession from Peter to Pius IX., is an imposture. You cannot find a single word in the holy gospel to show us that Peter has passed a single hour in Rome. You know very well, also, that the superiority or pre-eminence you give to Peter over the other apostles is another imposture. Every time our Saviour was asked by His twelve apostles who would be the First, the Leader, the Pope, He always answered that there would not be such a First, Leader or Pope in His Church. More than that, He positively answered the mother of Zebedee’s children that He had not received from His Father the power to establish one of His apostles over the others. ‘To sit on my right hand or on my left is not mine to give,’ (Matt, xx., 23). We have an irrefutable and infallible proof that our Saviour never put Peter at the head of the apostles as the First, the Leader, or the Pope, as you call your Supreme Pontiff, in the dispute which occurred among the apostles a little before His death. ‘And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be counted greatest.’ (Luke xxii., 24). Such a dispute would never have occurred if Jesus Christ had established as Peter the greatest or the First of them. They would surely have known it, and Jesus Christ would have answered, ‘Have you so soon forgotten that Peter is the greatest among you; that he is the first among you, from the day in which I appointed him the fundamental stone of my church?’

“But, far from answering thus, the Son of God rebukes His apostles, and tells them positively, ‘The Kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them. . . . But it shall not be so among you.’” (Luke xxii., 23-25.) Not only has that modernly forged primacy of Peter never been acknowledged by any of the apostles, but it has been openly and positively denied by St. Paul. ‘For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me towards the Gentiles.’ (Galatians ii., 8.) ‘And when James, Cephas and John, who seemed to be the pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right-hand of fellowship, that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.’ Here Peter [Cephas] is named only after James, a thing which never could have been done by St. Paul, if he had known anything of the marvellous superiority and primacy of Peter over the rest of the apostles. But please read the following words of Paul: “But when Peter was come to Antioch. I withstood him to the face, because he was to blame.” (Galatians ii., 11.) Is it not evident that Paul had not the least idea of any kind of superiority of Peter over him when he withstood him to the face; and still more when he wrote those lines? Is it not clear that the Holy Ghost has inspired Paul to give us the history of his so stern withstanding to the face of Peter that we might not be seduced by the grand imposture of the supremacy of Peter, which is the corner stone of your apostate Church?

“(2.) I will never be a Roman Catholic again, for the Roman Catholic Church is idolatrous. You worship God? Yes! But the god whom you worship is made with a wafer—it is a wafer god that is on your altar! Every hour of your priestly life you are guilty of the crime which Aaron committed when he caused the Israelites to worship a golden calf. The only difference between you and Aaron, is that his god was made of gold, and yours is made of some dough baked by your nuns or your servant girls, between two well-polished and heated irons. You have a Christ on your altars! Yes!—and you are very devoted and truly pious towards that Christ—or rather those Christs. You praise their powers and their mercies; you sing beautiful songs in their honor; but the Christs whom you worship are spoken of by our Saviour in the twenty-fourth of Matthew. ‘There will be false Christs, . . . and they shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that if it were possible they shall deceive the very elect. . . . Wherefore if they shall say unto you, ‘Behold He (Christ) is in the secret chambers, believe it not.’ Now, how do you not see that terrible prophecy is accomplished by you every time you prostrate yourselves before those Christs made of little cakes and put in the secret chambers of your church? Do you not believe in those Christs of the secret chambers, when the Son of God tells you, ‘Believe it not?’ Do you not go there to adore your wafer-god when the true Christ says, ‘Go not there?’ In vain you tell us that Christ gave you the power to make your god with the engraved wafer. We answer you that Christ Himself had not the power to make God and make Himself with an engraved wafer; for His Father had forbidden such an absurd and idolatrous act, when on Mount Sinai, in the midst of thunders and lightnings, He said, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth—thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, for I the LORD [Jehovah] thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Now, you well know that Christ came to accomplish and not to break His Father’s commandments. He could not give you the permission or the power to break them by ordering you, as you pretend He did, to make an engraved wafer, change it into your god, and bow yourself down before it; for this is idolatry!—rank, shameful idolatry! I am ready to meet you or any of your priests in any public or private discussion to show you, with the help of God, that when Christ told you to eat His body and drink His blood, He was speaking with the same figure as when He said He would eat the Passover. Though Christ said, ‘I will eat the Passover,’ He was not able to eat the Passover, for the simple reason that the passage of the exterminating angel over Egypt could not be eaten. . . . But the lamb which was eaten in remembrance of the Passover would be eaten, and that lamb was called the ‘Passover.’ By the same figure of speech the body and blood of Christ would not be eaten. . . . But the bread which represented that body would be eaten; and the bread then had to be called the ‘Body,’ by the same reason and by the same rule of language that the lamb was called the ‘Passover,’ though it was not the Passover—just in the same way and by the same rule of language that when we look at the marble statue of Monseigneur Bourget, we say, ‘This is Monseigneur Bourget,’ though it is not Monseigneur Bourget at all.

“(3.) I will never be a Roman Catholic again, because every Roman Catholic bishop and priest is forced to perjure himself every time he explains a text of the Holy Scriptures. Yes! Though it is a very big and hard word, it is the truth. From the day that you have sworn, when you were ordained a priest, to interpret the Holy Scriptures only according to the unanimous consent of the holy fathers, you have seldom preached on a text of the Scriptures without being guilty of perjury. For, after having studied the holy fathers with some attention, I am ready to prove to you that the holy fathers have been unanimous in only one thing, which was to differ on almost every text of the Scriptures on which they have written. For instance, you cannot say that the books of the Maccabees are inspired without perjuring yourself with all your priests. For the greatest part of the holy fathers tell you that these books are not inspired. You cannot, without perjuring yourself, say, when Christ said to Peter, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,’ it signified that Peter was meant by this rock, and that he is the corner-stone of the Church; for you know very well (and if you do not know it, I can show it to you) that St. Augustine and many other holy fathers positively say that Christ meant Himself when he said, ‘Upon this rock I will build my Church.’

“(4.) I cannot be any more a Roman Catholic, for I know that auricular confession is a diabolical institution.

“(5.) I will never be a Roman Catholic again, for I have seen with my eyes the inside of the walls of your church, and they are filled with all the abominations of the world. Your celibacy is of diabolical institution. Your purgatory, with the poor souls that burn in it, and are saved by paying you so many dollars, is of diabolical institution. Your waters of La Sallette and Notre Dame de Lourdes which are sold in your palace, are of diabolical institution. Your forbidding to eat meat on certain days is of diabolical institution. Your disdain of reading the Holy Scriptures is of diabolical institution. Your infallible Pope and immaculate Mother of God are of diabolical institution.

“(6.) With the help of God, I will never think of making my peace with the Church of Rome, for her priests, bishops and popes have shed the blood of millions of martyrs, from John Huss to our dear brother Hackett. On your Pope’s hands I see the blood of the 75,000 Protestants slaughtered the night of St. Bartholomew, and the blood of half a million Christians slaughtered in the mountains of Piedmont.

“(7.) I will never be a Roman Catholic again, for your Church is the implacable enemy of all the laws of God, and of all the rights, liberties and privileges of men. Your Church has degraded and brought into the dust and the mud all the nations she has ruled.

I might give you many other reasons why I would never be a Roman Catholic, but I hope these are sufficient to show to my dear countrymen, whom you so cruelly keep in the most ignominious ignorance and slavery, that, having once accepted Christ for my only Saviour, and His Holy Word for my only guide, I cannot bow down any more before your idols and wafer-gods.”

      C. CHINIQUY.

A ROMISH BISHOP’S TESTIMONY.

The “Kankakee Times” publishes the following communication from a member of the Illinois bar. Though perhaps containing nothing new or strange to those who have studied the matter, the statement made may convince such Protestants as imagine the Church of Rome to be a harmless institution, of their great error. The principles of the Papal hierarchy remain unchanged. The wearer of the Tiara would as readily depose for simple heresy any temporal ruler of today, as his predecessor, six centuries ago, deposed and deprived of his estates Count Richmond of Toulouse, for a like crime. Religious liberty is both hated and dreaded by a Church which claims the right of enforcing its spiritual decrees by the assistance of the secular arm.

In one of your past issues you told your readers that the Rev. Mr. Chiniquy had gained the long and formidable suit instituted by the Roman Catholic Bishop to dispossess him and his people of their church property. But you have not yet given any particulars about the startling revelations the bishop had to make before the Court, in reference to the still existing laws of the Church of Rome against those whom they call heretics. Nothing, however, is more important for everyone than to know precisely what those laws are.

As I was present when the Roman Catholic Bishop Foley of Chicago, was ordered to read in Latin and translate into English those laws, I have kept a correct copy of them, and I send it to you with the request to publish it.

The Rev. Mr. Chiniquy presented the works of St. Thomas and St. Liguori to the Bishop, requesting him to say, under oath, if those works were or were not amongst the highest theological authorities in the Church of Rome all over the world. After long and serious opposition on the part of the Bishop to answer, the Court having said he (the Bishop) was bound to answer, the Bishop confessed that those works were looked upon as among the highest authorities, and that they are taught and learned in all the colleges and universities of the Church of Rome as standard works.

Then the Bishop was requested to read in Latin and translate into English the following laws and fundamental principles of action against the heretics, as explained by St. Thomas and Liguori:—

1. “An excommunicated man is deprived of all civil communication with the faithful, in such a way that, if he is not tolerated, they can have no communication with him, as it is in the following verse: ‘It is forbidden to kiss him, pray with him, salute him, to eat or do any business with him.’”—St. Liguori, vol. 9, page 162.

2. “Though heretics must not be tolerated because they deserve it, we must bear with them till, by a second admonition, they may be brought back to the faith of the Church. But those who, after a second admonition, remain obstinate in their errors, must not only be excommunicated, but they must be delivered to the secular powers to be exterminated.”—St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 4, page 90.

3. “Though the heretics who repent must always be accepted to penance as often as they have fallen, they must not in consequence of that, always be permitted to enjoy the benefits of this life * * * * When they fall again they are admitted to repent, * * * * but the sentence of death must not be removed.”—St. Thomas, vol. 4, page 64.

4. “When a man is excommunicated for his apostacy, it follows from that very fact, that all those who are his subjects are released from the oath of allegiance by which they are bound to obey him.”—St. Thomas, vol. 4, page 94.

The next document of the Church of Rome brought before the Court was the act of the Council of Lateran. A.D. 1215:—

“We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that exalts itself against the holy orthodox and Catholic faith condemning all heretics, by whatever name they may be known; for though their faces differ, they are tied together by their tails. Such as are condemned are to be delivered over to the existing secular powers, to receive due punishment. If laymen, their goods must be confiscated: If priests, they shall be first degraded from their respective order, and their property applied to the use of the church in which they have officiated. Secular powers of all ranks and degrees are to be warned, induced, and if necessary, compelled by ecclesiastical censure, to swear that they will exert themselves to the utmost in the defence of the faith, and extirpate all heretics denounced by the Church who shall be found in their territories. And whenever any person shall assume government, whether it be spiritual or temporal, he shall be bound to abide by this decree.

“If any temporal lord, having been admonished and required by the Church, shall neglect to clear his territory of heretical depravity, the Metropolitan and the Bishops of the province shall unite in excommunicating him. Should he remain contumacious a whole year, the fact shall be signified to the Supreme Pontiff, who will declare his vassals released from their allegiance from that time, and will bestow his territory on Catholics, to be occupied by them, on the condition of exterminating the heretics and preserving the said territory in the faith.

“Catholics who shall assume the cross for the extermination of heretics shall enjoy the same indulgence and be protected by the same privileges as are granted to those who go to the help of the Holy Land. We decree further, that all who may have dealings with heretics, and especially those who receive, defend or encourage them, shall be excommunicated. He shall not be eligible to any public office. He shall not be admitted as a witness. He shall neither have the power to bequeath his property by will nor to succeed to any inheritance. He shall not bring any action against any person, but anyone can bring action against him. Should he be a judge, his decision shall have no force, nor shall any cause be brought before him. Should he be an advocate, he shall not be allowed to plead. Should he be a lawyer, no instruments made by him shall be held valid, but shall be condemned with their author.”

The Roman Catholic Bishop swore that these laws had never been repealed, and of course they were still the laws of his Church. He had to swear that every year he was bound under pain of eternal damnation, to say in the presence of God, and to read in his Breviarium (his prayer-book) that “God Himself had inspired” what St. Thomas had written about the manner in which the heretics shall be treated by the Roman Catholics.

I will abstain from making any remarks on these startling revelations of that Roman Catholic high authority. But I think it is the duty of every citizen to know what the Roman Catholic bishops and priests understand by liberty of conscience. The Roman Catholics are as interested as the Protestants to know precisely what the teachings of their Church are on that subject of liberty of conscience, and hear the exact truth, as coming from such high authority that there is no room left for any doubt.

    STEPHEN MOORE, Attorney.

THE JESUITS! THE GREATEST ENEMIES OF COMMON SENSE AND TRUTH.

“That we may in all things attain the truth, that we may not err in anything, we ought ever to hold as a general principle, that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities of the Church define it to be so.”—Spiritual Exercises, by Ignatius Loyola.

THE JESUITS ARE THE MOST IMPLACABLE ENEMIES OF HUMAN AND CHRISTIAN LIBERTY; THEY WANT TO BRING MAN DOWN BELOW THE BRUTE.

“As for holy obedience, that virtue must be preferred in every point. * * * Let every one persuade himself, that he who lives under obedience should be moved and directed, under Divine Providence, by his superior, just as if he were a corpse, (perinde acsi cadaver esset) which allows itself to be moved and led in every direction and treated in any way.”— Constitution of the Society of Jesus, by Ignatius Loyola (p. 221 in the 1996 ed.).

THE JESUIT SOCIETY IS THE MOST IMPIOUS ENEMY OF THE LAWS OF GOD.

“It seems good to us in the Lord, that excepting the express vow by which the society is bound to the Pope for the time being, and the three other essential vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, no constitutions, declarations, or any order of living can oblige under mortal or venial sin, unless the Superior command them in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, or in the virtue of holy obedience, which shall be done in those cases or persons, wherein it shall be judged that it will greatly conduce to the particular good of each, or to the general advantage, and instead of the fear of offence, let the love and desire of all perfection succeed, that the greater glory and praise of Christ our Creator and Lord may follow.”—Constitution of the Society of Jesus (p. 272 in the 1996 ed.).

FATHER CHINIQUY: TO MGR. LYNCH, ARCHBISHOP OF TORONTO.

    St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois,

      June 22, 1884.

My Lord:—The 12th inst., I promised to answer your letter of the 11th, addressed to the Rev. Moderator and to the Ministers of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. I come today to fulfill my promise, with the help of God.

I had accused your church to believe and say that she had received from God the power to kill us poor heretics. I said that if you did not slaughter us, today, in Canada and elsewhere, it is only because you are not strong enough to do it. I said also, that where the Roman Catholics feel strong enough, they do not think it a sin to beat, stone, or kill us when they can do it without any danger to their own precious lives.

I said that your best theologians teach that heretics do not deserve to live, and that your great St. Thomas Aquinas, whom your church has lately put among “the Holy Fathers,” positively declares that one of the most sacred rights and duties of your church is to deliver the heretics into the hands of the secular powers to be exterminated.

As I expected, you have bravely denied what I said on that subject. In your reply you complain that the quotations I made of St. Thomas, on that subject, are not correct.

Here is my answer to your denegations. I have the works of St. Thomas, just now, on my table. I will copy word for word what he says in Latin, and translate it into plain English, respectfully asking your lordship to tell the Canadian people whether or not my translation is correct: —

“Quanquam haeritici tolerandi non sunt ipso illorum demerito, usque tamen ad secundam correptionem expectandi sunt ut ad sanam redeant Ecclesiae fidem. Qui vero, post secundam correptionem, in suo errore obstinati permanent, non modo excommunicationis sententia, sed etiam saecularibus principibus exterminandi tradendi sunt.”

TRANSLATION.

“Though heretics must not be tolerated because they deserve it, we must bear with them till, by a second admonition, they may be brought back to the faith of the Church. But those who, after a second admonition, remain obstinate in their errors, must not only be excommunicated, but they must be delivered to the secular power to be exterminated.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, 4th vol., page 90)

At page 91, he says:

“Though heretics who repent must always be accepted to penance as often as they have fallen, they must not in consequence of that, always be permitted to enjoy the benefits of this life. . . . When they fall again they are admitted to repent. . . . But the sentence of death must not be removed.” (St. Thomas, v. 4, page 91).

Your lordship has the just reputation to be an expert man. You then know that in such solemn questions as are discussed just now, the testimony of only one witness does not suffice—I will then give you another testimony to prove the unpalatable truths which I proclaimed in the presence of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, viz.: That we poor heretics are condemned to death, and are declared unworthy to live side by side with our Roman Catholic neighbors. That testimony will, no doubt, be accepted as good and sufficient by the people of Canada, if not by you, since it is the testimony of your own infallible church, speaking through the Council of the Lateran, held in 1215.

“We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that exalts itself against the holy orthodox and Catholic faith, condemning all heretics, by whatever name they may be known—for though their faces differ, they are tied together by their tails. Such as are condemned are to be delivered over to the existing secular powers, to receive due punishment. If laymen, their goods must be confiscated. If priests, they must be degraded from their respective orders and their property applied to the use of the church in which they officiated. Secular powers of all ranks and degrees are to be warned, induced, and if necessary, compelled by ecclesiastical censures, to swear that they will exert themselves to the utmost in the defence of the faith, and extirpate all heretics denounced by the church who shall be found in their territories. And whenever any person shall assume government, whether it be spiritual or temporal, he shall be bound to abide by this decree.

“If any temporal lord, after having been admonished and required by the church, shall neglect to clear his territory of heretical depravity, the Metropolitan and Bishop of the province shall unite in excommunicating him. Should he remain contumacious a whole year, the fact shall be signified to the Supreme Pontiff, who shall declare his vassals released from their allegiance from that time, and will bestow his territory on Catholics, to be occupied by them, on the condition of exterminating the heretics and preserving the said territory in the faith.

“Catholics, who shall assume the cross for the extermination of heretics, shall enjoy the same indulgences and be protected by the same privileges as are granted to those who go to the help of the Holy Land. We decree further, that all who may have dealings with heretics, and especially such as receive and defend, and encourage them, shall be excommunicated. He shall not be eligible to any public office. He shall not be admitted as a witness. He shall neither have power to bequeath his property by will, nor to succeed to any inheritance. He shall not bring any action against any person, but anyone can bring action against him. Should he be a judge, his decision shall have no force, nor shall any cause be brought before him. Should he be an advocate, he shall not be allowed to plead. Should he be a lawyer, no instruments made by him shall be held valid, but shall be condemned with their author.”

When those nations came out from the dark dungeons of Popery, they could not see the light, at first, in its fullness and in all its beauty. It took some time before they could cure themselves from the putrid leprosy which centuries of life inside the walls of the modern Babylon had engendered everywhere. But you know as well as I do, that these remnants of Popery have been repudiated more than a century ago by all the Christian churches. Every year since it has been my privilege to be a Presbyterian, I have heard a constant and unanimous protest against those laws of blood and persecutions. They are kept in our records only as a memorandum of the bottomless abyss into which the people were living when submitted to the Pope. But you know well, my lord, that all those laws of blood and death have been sanctioned in your last Council of the Vatican in your Church. It was declared, then, that you are forever damned if you have any doubts about the rights and duty of your Church to punish the heretics by bodily punishment.

But, my lord, let us forget, for a moment, the numberless and undeniable proofs which I might bring to the remembrance of your lordship, to make you blush for having denied what I said about the unmanly, un-Christian principles which regulate the Roman Catholic Church towards the Protestants, when you have your opportunity. The providence of God has just put me in possession of a fact too public to be ignored even by you.

You know how the Roman Catholics of Quebec have given the lie, with a vengeance, to your denials. You know how more than 2,000 good Roman Catholics came with sticks and stones to kill me, the 17th of this month, because I had preached in a Presbyterian Church on the text, “What must I do to have eternal life?” More than one hundred stones struck me, and if I had not providentially had two heavy cloth overcoats, one to protect my shoulders and the other put around my head to weaken the force and weight of those stones, I would surely have been killed on the spot. But though I was protected by those overcoats, my head and shoulders are still as a jelly and cause me great suffering. A kind friend, Mr. Zotique Lefebvre, B.C.L., who heroically put himself between my would-be murderers and me, to protect my life at the risk of his own, came out from the broken carriage with six bleeding wounds on his face.

The city of Quebec is known to be the most Roman Catholic city in America, and perhaps in the whole world, without excepting Rome itself. Its population has the well-earned reputation to be moral, peaceful, respectable, and religious, as they understand those words among the Roman Catholics. The people who stoned me were not a gathering of a low-bred mob; it was composed of well-dressed men, many with gold spectacles: it was not composed of drunkards; there was not a single drunken man seen by me there; they were not of course, what is called “liberal Catholics,” for those “liberal Catholics,” though born in the Church of Rome, have a supreme contempt for the dogmas, practices, and teachings of the priests. Those “liberal Catholics” who, thanks be to God, are fast increasing, are only nominally Catholics—they remain there because their fathers and mothers were so; because, also, they want to attract the people to their stores, sell their pills, or desire to be elected to such and such offices by the influence of the priests. They laugh at your mitre, for they know that it is nothing but the old bonnets of the priests of Bacchus, representing the head of a fish. Those liberal Catholics are disgusted with the bloody laws and practices of the Church of Rome; they would not for anything, molest, insult, or maltreat a heretic. Those liberal Catholics are in favor of liberty and conscience. But the clergy hate and fear them. Had this class of liberal Catholics been numerous in Quebec, I would not have had any trouble. But Quebec is, with a very few exceptions, composed of true, real, sincere, devoted Catholics. They believe sincerely with your grand St. Thomas, and with your Roman Catholic Church, that heretics like Chiniquy have no right to live; that it is a good work to kill them.

This riot of Quebec, seen with the light of the teachings of St. Thomas, the Councils of Lateran, Constance and the Vatican, show that your letter to the General Assembly of our Presbyterian Church is one of the greatest blunders that your lordship has ever made. The dust that you wanted to throw in the eyes of my Presbyterian brethren is all on your face, today, as dark, hideous spots. Your friends sincerely feel for your misfortune.

For, my lord, there is a voice in the stones thrown at me; there is a voice in the bruises that cover my shoulders and my head, there is a voice also in the blood shed by the friend who saved my life at the peril of his own, which speaks louder and more eloquently than you, to say that you have failed in your attempt to defend your Church against what I have said at the General Assembly.

That you may better understand this, and that you may be a little more modest hereafter on that subject, I send you by the hand of the Venerable Secretary of our General Assembly, the Reverend Mr. Reid, D.D., one of the hundreds of stones which wounded me, with a part of the handkerchief reddened with the blood of Mr. Zotique Lefebvre, B.C.L., who received six wounds on his face, when heroically standing by me in that hour of supreme danger for my life. Please look at that stone, look at that blood also; they will teach you a lesson which it is quite time for you and all the priests to learn. They will tell you that your Church of Rome is the same today as she was when she slaughtered the hundreds of thousands of Piedmontese with the sword of France; that stone and that blood will tell you what every one knows, among the disciples of the gospel: that your church of today is the very same church which planned the Massacres of St. Bartholomew, the Gunpowder Plot, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the deaths of more than half a million French Hugenots on their way to exile. That stone and that blood will tell you that your church today, is the same as she was when she lighted the five thousand auto-da-fés, where ten million martyrs lost their lives in all the great cities of Europe, before God raised the German giant who gave it the deadly blow you know.

Please, my lord, put that stone and that blood in one of the most conspicuous places of your palace, that you may look at them when the devil will come again to throw you into some ignominious and inextricable slough as the one into which you fell in your courageous but vain attempt to refute me. When that father of lies will try again to make use of your pen to deny the bloody deeds of your church, you will tell him, “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written in our most approved book of theology, St. Thomas, that ‘we must exterminate all the heretics.’ Get thee hence, Satan; for you will not any more to induce me to call old Chiniquy insane, for saying that our church is as bloody as ever; for it is written in the Council of Lateran that those who arm themselves for the extermination of heretics, are as blessed by God as those who went formerly to the rescue of the Holy Land.”

Yes, my lord; keep that stone and that blood before your eyes, and when I or somebody else will again warn the disciples of the Gospel against the dangers ahead from Rome, you will not compromise yourself any more by writing things which are not only against all the records of history, but against the public teachings of all your popes, your councils and your theologians.

With that blood before your eyes, the devil will lose much of his power over you and be forced to give up his old tactics of making you deny, deny, deny, the most evident facts, and the most unimpeachable records of history.

My dear Bishop Lynch, before taking leave of you this day, allow me to ask a favor from your lordship. If you grant it, I will retract what I have said of the anti-social and anti-Christian laws and practices of your Church.

Let your lordship say anathemas to the Councils of Constance and Lateran for the decrees of banishment and death they passed over all those who differed in religion from them. Tell us in plain and good English, that you condemn those Councils for the burning of John Huss, and the blood they caused to be shed all over Europe, under the pretext of religion; tell us that those Councils were the greatest enemies of the Gospel, that instead of being guided by the spirit of God, they were guided by the spirit of Satan, when they caused so many millions of men, women, and children to be slaughtered for refusing to obey the Pope.

And when you will have condemned the action of the depraved men who composed those Councils, you will honestly and bravely declare that your Thomas Aquinas, instead of being a saint, was a bloody monster, when he wrote that the Church of Christ is to deliver the heretics to the secular powers to be exterminated!

Tell us also, that the present Pope, Leo XIII., ought to be the object of the execration of the whole world for having lately ordered that the bloody monster’s theology should be taught in all the colleges, academies, seminaries, and universities of the Church of Rome all over the world, as the best, truest, and most reliable exponent of the doctrines of the Church of Christ.

If you grant me the favor I ask, we will believe that your lordship was honest when you denied what I said of the savage, cruel and diabolical laws and practices of the Church of Rome towards the heretics. But if you refuse to grant my request, we will believe that you are still, in heart and will, submitted to those laws and practices, and that you tried to deceive, after having deceived yourself, when you presented your bloodthirsty church with the rose colors we find in your letter to the General Assembly.

In my next, I will give you the proofs of what I said about the idolatry of your church, and with the help of God, I will refute what you said to defend her practices.

     Truly yours,

      C. CHINIQUY.

Digital Version

Restored, Corrected and Reset

by

Central Highlands Congregation of God

26th December, 2020

Revised 1 March 2023

Published by

Central Highlands Christian Publications

PO Box 236 Creswick Vic 3363  Australia

info@chcpublications.net

chcpublications.net

Some Other Resources Available from https://chcpublications.net/

Publications

The Holy Bible - CHCoG Version - This translation from the original Hebrew and Aramaic is accurate and readable, giving you a clear understanding of how the New and Old Covenants are interlocked and God’s message to you.

Everlasting Life is God’s Gift - Does the Bible teach that you have everlasting life?  If not, how can you receive God’s gift of immortality as His child?

Fifty Years in the Church of Rome - Charles Chiniquy’s classic exposure of the corruptions of the Roman church, and how he found God’s Gift of Salvation.

The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional - Chiniquy’s indepth expose of the Roman Church’s corrupt Auricular Confessional system, which destroys the priests, their penitents and their families.

Books of Moses - Fact or Fiction Series - Are the miracles recorded in Genesis and Exodus our true history?  Do the facts support Special Creation or the Big Bang & Evolution scenarios?  What about the Flood, Babel and the Exodus?

Spirit, Soul and Body - What does the Bible teach about the nature of human beings?  Do we have a soul?  What is our spirit?  What happens when we die?

Eastern Meditation and Jeshua the Messiah - Recounts the experiences of a CHCoG member who became a Christian while practising Eastern Meditation.

The Ten Commandments - What are God’s Ten Commandments? How do they guide us in our relationships with God, our family and our neighbours?  Shows how obedience to Jehovah’s Instructions would result in true civilization.

What is God’s Name? - How can we know what God’s Name is and how to Pronounce it?  Does the Bible teach us to use God’s Name?

The Sabbath in Scripture - Has God’s Seventh-day Sabbath been ‘done away with’?  What does the Sabbath mean, and does God want us to keep it?

Rome’s Challenge: Why do Protestants Keep Sunday? - This Roman Catholic article proves there is no scriptural basis for changing the seventh-day Sabbath to Sunday, and shows that the Roman Catholic church made the change.

Sex, God and Families - Article exposing the dangers of sexual immorality and outlining the benefits of following God’s sexual principles.

The Catholic Chronicles - Keith Green explores the meanings of the Roman Catholic Mass, transubstantiation, their concept of forgiveness of sin and salvation and what—if anything—Vatican II changed.

God’s Calendar and the Sign of Jonah - Shows how God’s Calendar reveals that Jeshua truly kept the Sign of Jonah, His ultimate proof that He is the Messiah.

Free to Obey God – God’s Son Jeshua sets us free!  But what does he set us free from, and how does He expect us to live our new life?

Software

Calculated Biblical Calendar - Calculates dates of Annual Holy Days, Crucifixion, Flood, Creation: allows you to test the new moon visibility locally.

Radiocarbon Dating - Calculates the effects that changes in the geomagnetic field and radiocarbon/carbon ratios, etc, on radioactive dating.

Endnotes

1 Monseigneur Lynch died recently.

2 [CHCoG - This book, plus Chiniquy’s The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional are available on our website at chcpublications.net.]