The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-12-24

WneJneT We De OhbuOllCs or ITOIeSJhnJS. IL
is in vain for us to shut our eyes to the fact
that it is the Papacy which is next to stand
on trial. and that Pope Plus himself has
brought it to the bar.
The adherents of the Roman Church were
the first to see that she had utterly lost her old
position. The world had fulfilled Galileos
threat to her, and moved, leaving her be-
hind. Robe and chasuble we're the same,
and she kept about her the old hazy SHIN
mer of incense and colored light. But inside
of that
Not only has temporal power dropped from
her hand, but since the beginning of this
century she has notably been puppet in the
hands of France and Austria, moved to suit
their political ends The wires have been
bare, to be seen of all men.
Three centuries ago, whatever learning or
research was to be found in Christendom be-
longed to the Roman Church. Since that,
there is not science or an art which has
lightened the modern world that has not
forced its way against the feeble, clogging
hindrance of that Church. The great truths
of the ordinary knowledges common to us all
she is forced to slur over in her schools, lest
they confute her history or the spirit which
gives her name and identity. Her colleges
and seminaries, even in this country, are
avowedly simply schools for instruction in
the languages, in manners and accomplish
ments. This antagonism to the live, earnest
progress of humanity the shrewdest of her
disciples have been busted in concealing
The Pope has dragged it to light
with a vengeance. Finding his sylla-
bus Gin which he arraigned the science,
culture, and progress of the age as
among the ''eighty damnable heresies') }
fall dead, he summons the Gcumenical
Council to sustain him in his attack 1t is
not Pere Hyacinthe alone who thinks him un-
wise in ''thus proclaiming divorce as i'm
pious as senseless between the Church and
the society of the nineteenth century"
The Pantist brothers, with Hecker at their
head in this country, and the keen-witted
liberal fathers in Germany, would have been
| glad if this divorce could have been hidden
from sight until they had engineered some
unnatural marriage between them. They
were striving hard to perform the operation
of viyisection on the poor old Church; to in-
fuse new blood into her veins, give her the
reputation of German breadth of thought,
| Yankee acuteness, and Christian liberality.
They persuaded us that the Church, whose
| fundamental doctrine is the denial of the
right of private judgment, now implored
''every man to believe himself created to do
his own thinking" They laughed at the idea
that ''any one man, Pope or prelate, had the
power of making his own opinion binding on
of fold hot tha fpr
merly only burned innovators from the kind
wish to conceal from the world its own igno-
rance, but that it now desired to lead the van
of liberal teachers. They came very near
success, probably because the world concerned
itself very little about their ancient mother.
But why, meanwhile, did they put no
| guard upon the Pope? How was he allowed
to drag the Church. with her Oldest
rags of superstition tight about her,
upon a platform-to call upon this prac-
tical, newspaper-reading world to kneel
and give her allegiance as in days when
kings were her servants He had not even
sense of the ludicrous enough to see the diff
ference between Innocent, whose mere word
| drove John from the throne, and the fdgety
old gentleman who so fears squabble with a
Scotch clergyman that he makes haste to
answer letter before it is written.
He cannot blame men busy with the vital
concerns of their age if they use their clearest
glasses to look into the Church which claims
absolute authority over them here and here
after; if they examine her history, andinquire
what she has done for the world, before they
surrender their own freedom of thought, and
accept this well-meaning but weak old gentle
man as he so urgently requests them to do,
as an infallible dictator in thought, the re-
preventative of God upon earth.
1t would certainly have been better for this
Church if Pope Plus could have been longer
''hushed up among his friends" But for the
cause of truth it is better that the Church
itself, with its prestige of obsolete power and
its amazing assumption of present authority,
should be fairly brought to final trial and
fully assayed, whether it be good or whether
| it be evil.
FIRE AND BURGLAR PROOF SAFE