ystem, where
Jesuitism finds home and inspiration, where the end justifies the
means, and any diabolism passes for saintliness if done for the
advancement of the "true faith." Yet here, as always, we must be on
guard, supposing this to be a fruit of religion; rather is it selfish
human nature, taking an ecclesiastical system to do business in, thus
availing itself of the religious impulse in the soul to work out a
purely earthly interest. Early Christianity, as all pure Christianity,
presses Christ's method of making appeal to the individual, impressing
him with a sense of his sin and his lost estate; of the necessity of
repentance; of salvation from sin by faith in a Divine Christ. When
Christianity came to the throne with Constantine, when ultimately
masses of people were baptized on compulsion, Christianity took on the
pomp and paraphernalia of heathenism, so as to make appeal to the
sensuous element in heathen nature; in a word, Christianity became as
much or more heathen than Christian, and this mongrel of Christianity
and heathenism is Roman Catholicism. Root, stem, and branch, it is
hostile to the Word of God, and, as every such system must do, darkened
the consciences of men. We may not forget, however, its essential
religious and scholastic services in earlier years, nor that it has
nurtured some of the saints among the centuries. Catholicism has a
basis of Christianity, and, could the excrescences be hewn away, and
this foundation be again discovered, then for Roman Catholicism would
dawn a new and greater era. But as the system stands, it affected
temporal sovereignty, it humbled kings, and gave away empires. Pope
Leo X was not a bad man, being so far superior to Alexander XII as to
preclude comparison. Many popes had been so vile as to have shocked
even the moral indifference of those times; but Leo X, son of Lorenzo
the Magnificent, heir of the traditions in companionship and the
humanities which had made Florence illustrious,--Leo, cultivated,
brilliant, clean in his personal life, had assembled around him men
reasonably good. His aesthetic inclinations were running him deeply in
debt, and to fill the bankrupt treasury, His Holiness commissioned
Tetzel to sell indulgences--a practice repugnant to moral instinct, to
the dignity of the Church, and the honor of our God, and yet a practice
continued by Romanism in our own day and under our own eyes. To
suppose that Romanism has reformed is current wi