Papal Authority In The Bygone.—The Infidel's Amusing Attitude.
The doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to this: that the decisions of the Pope on faith and morals, being divinely inspired and infallible, are, when placed upon record, so much more holy Scripture. This infallibility dogma has been a great source of mischief and of unbelief. It has accomplished no good, but a great deal of harm. Some Roman theologians claim that the Popes have only once, up to the present time, spoken with the formalities necessary to make their utterances “ex cathedra” and infallibly binding, and that was when Pius the Ninth, on December 8, 1854, decreed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary; which, if true, belongs to the realm of unpractical speculation. It was denied as heresy by orthodox Catholics, including fourteen Popes, for a thousand years, and is contrary to the well-nigh “unanimous consent of the fathers.” See Dr. Pusey, Letter 1, to Newman, pp. 72-286. To use such an engine but once in all the centuries, and then to accomplish so little, aside from furnishing infidels with something to say, is much like constructing a vessel of twenty thousand tons capacity to carry one man across the Atlantic. There is such a thing as Parthenogenesis known in nature. The Vatican decrees declare that the Christian religion came perfect from God's hands; that it is not like a human science, such as medicine or mechanics, which can be improved or altered by the skill of man. In view of [pg 222] this conceded fact we have no kind of use for the decree of Pius the Ninth upon the “miraculous conception”—“Pope Pius decreed it.” Well, well, if Christianity really stood in need of such a decree it would not have been left off until December 8, 1854. It has been a bone for infidels to contend over from that time to the present. The New Testament is not responsible for it.
Men of sense, who are not already traditionized nor Christianized, find facts enough in the line of papal bulls and decrees to disgust them so thoroughly as to drive them at once to reject religion entirely. Sixtus the V., in 1590, declared, by a perpetual decree, an edition of the Vulgate, just then out, the sole authentic and standard text, to be received as such under pain of excommunication. He also decreed that future editions not conformed to it should have no credit nor authority. But its errors were so numerous that it was immediately called in, and a new Vulgate was published by Clement VIII., in 1592, differing, in several thousand places, from the one of 1590. This last publication was also issued under penalty of excommunication for any departure from it. So Roman Catholic faith rests very largely upon the assumed authority of the Pope, and this authority has often been exercised in the wrong, they themselves being witnesses. This authority, opposed to human progress, has been and is one of the greatest feeders to Atheism and infidelity. Mr. Draper, in his work entitled “Conflict between Religion and Science,” wishes his readers to understand that he uses the term Christianity in the sense of Roman Catholicism. The entire work is one grand scientific effort against popecraft and priestcraft. His work is well worth a reading; but it is to be remembered by all who would do Mr. Draper justice that his great antagonist is the Roman Catholic Church. Will she defend herself against the charge of being in conflict with science? Is she in the way of human progress? How does she compare with Protestants in morality and virtue?
Let us give you a few figures, by the way of negative evidence, upon the question of comparative morality, remembering [pg 223] that it is a sad necessity of our nature to have to determine which of us has the least of moral miseries in order that we may know which has the most of virtue. Let this be as it may, these moral miseries show themselves under two principal phases, acts of profligacy and acts of violence; corrupt manners and assassinations. Here is what we read in Jonnes:
Assassinations And Attempts To Assassinate In Europe.
| Protestant—Scotland, 1835, | 1 for 270,000 |
| Protestant—England, | 1 for 178,000 |
| Protestant—Low Countries, 1824, | 1 for 163,000 |
| Protestant—Prussia, 1824, | 1 for 100,000 |
| Catholic States—Austria, 1809, | 1 for 57,000 |
| Catholic—Spain, 1826, | 1 for 4,113 |
| Catholic—Naples, | 1 for 2,750 |
| Catholic—Roman States, | 1 for 750 |
Jonnes, vol. 2, p. 257.
Now, if we take the average, we have one assassination, or one attempt to assassinate, for 180,222 inhabitants in the aggregate of the four Protestant nations; and one assassination, or one attempt to assassinate, for 16,153 inhabitants in the four Catholic nations; in other words, eleven times more of these crimes among the Roman Catholic nations. The contrast between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Spain is so very striking, and is painted by a writer in such lively colors that one is tempted to believe that the picture was intended to serve as a demonstration.
“Spain is a dispossessed queen. For two hundred years and more diamonds have been falling from her glittering crown. The source of her wealth, well or ill-gotten, is exhausted forever. Her treasures are lost, her colonies are gone; she is deprived of the prestige of that external opulence which veiled, or, at least dissembled her real and utter poverty. The nation is exhausted to such a degree, and has been so long unhappy, that each individual feels but his own misery. His country has ceased to exist for him. Even those time are gone when the guerillas called the citizens to arms for the sole and generous purpose of vindicating the national honor. The [pg 224] despondency and apathy of the nation are visible even in the battles fought by the Spaniards among themselves in their civil dissensions. They fight from habit, and discharge their muskets at their countrymen because they can do nothing else, and because every shot from their guns may bring them a piece of bread. A nation reduced to such a state is low indeed; the chilliness of death is very near seizing upon its extremities. What a length of time it will require to heal the wounds of these populations, so brave and so devoted! How much gold, how much blood have been lavished during the last seven years without an object, without any conceived plan!
“What would Charles the Fifth say, if, rising from his grave he saw his great and glorious Spain struggling thus miserably in dread uncertainty of her future destinies? ‘Where are my colonies? Where are my Batavian provinces? Where is my gigantic power, and the glory of Spain, which resounded from one hemisphere to the other? What have you done with my inheritance, ye cowardly and unskillful men? Where are my treasures; where the victorious fleets that crossed the ocean to bring back in profusion to my empire the gold and gems of the New World?’ The question naturally arises, what can be the cause of so many evils? of such utter misery, such extreme ignorance, such disgusting sloth?
“Tyranny, says the politician.
“Catholicism, says the Protestant.
“The Inquisition, adds the historian.
“But these three replies form but one; they are the three sides of a prism, which, united, give the entire ray of truth. In truth, Catholicism is the father, the Inquisition and tyranny the daughters. We are not the first to pen these words; we only repeat what we have read in the lines we are now going to submit to the perusal of our readers. It is sufficient for us to have pointed out the connection of the different causes which will be assigned by our authorities.
“That Catholicism produced the Inquisition, a tribunal of priests, judging heretics, it is unnecessary to demonstrate, for the very nature of the institution renders it evident. The ruling idea of Catholicism, the principle of authority, was the germ of the Inquisition. It was impossible that the Romish Church should not extend its principle to its penal code; it does not doubt in matters of faith, neither does it doubt in criminal matters. This is the reason why, in the church, the accused and the guilty have but one and the same appellation. Whoever is arraigned at her tribunal has heaven and earth against him; the interrogatory is already a species of torture. When the church accuses, she seems already convinced; all her efforts tend to extort the confession of the crime, which, in virtue of her infallibility, she discovers in darkness; from this anticipated conviction of the guilt of the accused are produced all those ambushes and snares laid for the purpose of obtaining, by surprise, the confession of the accused. The names of the witnesses are concealed or falsified. Everywhere, in the most trifling details, it is strikingly evident that, truth is on one side, and the demon on the other.” [See Tardiff, pp. 139, 140.]
In the second place, that Catholicism has produced the Spanish absolutism of the Catholic kings is sufficiently shown by the very name given to these kings.
“Another no less deplorable consequence of the position of the clergy in Spain and Portugal is, that they have no sooner confounded the cause of religion with that of despotism, than this error, producing its consequences, leads to a monstrous abuse of the word of God. Political fury has invaded the pulpit and stained it with abject and sacrilegious adulation.... The lips, whose mission is to speak peace, charity and mutual love, have spoken the language of hatred and vengeance; horrible vows, abominable threats in the presence of the tabernacles in which abides the Son of Man, who sacrificed his life for the salvation of his brethren.” [Affairs de Rome, pp. 250 to 254.]
“Spain, since Phillip II., has remained closed and uninfluenced by the ordinary progress of the human mind elsewhere. The monkish and despotic spirit has long preserved itself in the midst of ignorance, without, indeed, acquiring strength from abroad, but at the same time without permitting the intelligence of the nation to borrow foreign arms against it.” [Idem, p. 53.]
We shall now see this Spanish Catholicism at work; for three centuries, assisted by its worthy offspring, absolutism and the Inquisition, and at every ruin, at every crime you meet with, if you ask who has done this, the reply will assuredly be: the church of the Pope, the tyranny of the Catholic kings, the Inquisition of the priests. To convince yourselves of the fact, you need only put your questions and listen to the records of history, written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long enjoyed unquestionable authority.
The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the Catholic Inquisition. “Spain,” says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, “exterminated them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. The Jews and the Moors left it in turn, carrying with them, the former trade, the latter agriculture, from this disinherited land, to which the New World, to repair so many losses, vainly bequeathed her sterile treasures. And let it not be said that Spain, in thus depriving herself of her most active citizens, was not aware of the extent of her loss. All her historians concur in the statement that in acting thus she sacrificed her temporal interests to her religious convictions, and all are at a loss for words to extol such a glorious sacrifice.
“In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently; her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war [pg 227] with those ideas; but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career in which she can never stop.” [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]
“It required,” says M. Sismondi, “about one generation to accustom the Spaniards to the sanguinary proceedings of the Inquisition, and to fanaticise the people. This work, dictated by an infernal policy, was scarcely accomplished, when Charles the Fifth began his reign. It was probably the fatal spectacle of the auto-dä-fe that imparted to the Spanish soldiers their ferocity, so remarkable during the whole of that period, which before that time was so foreign to the national character.” [Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated Spain? The Inquisition. “To calculate,” says Liorente, secretary to the Holy office, “the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of the Jews, the conquered Moors and the baptized Moorish, we add about 500,000 families entirely destroyed by the executions of the Holy (?) office, it will be proved beyond a doubt that had it not been for this tribunal, and the influence of its maxims, Spain would possess 12,000,000 souls above her present population, supposed to amount to 11,000,000.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 242.]
“The Inquisition ruined and branded with infamy more than 340,000 persons, whose disgrace was reflected on their families, and who bequeathed only opprobrium and misery to their children. Add to these more than 100,000 families who emigrated in order to escape from the blood-thirsty tribunal, and it will be seen that the Inquisition has been the most active instrument of the ruin of Spain. But the most disastrous of all the acts which it occasioned was the expulsion of the Moors. If we add to those who were banished from Spain the countless numbers who perished in the insurrection of the sixteenth century, and the 800,000 Jews who left the kingdom, it will be seen that the country lost in the [pg 228] course of a hundred and twenty years about three millions of its most industrious inhabitants.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 60, 61.]
“The advisors of Phillip III. said to him with affright: The houses are falling in ruins, and none rebuild them; the inhabitants flee from the country; villages are abandoned, fields left uncultivated, and churches deserted. The Cortes in their turn said to him: if the evil is not remedied, there will soon be no peasants left to till the ground, no pilots to steer the ships; none will marry. The kingdom can not subsist another century if a wholesome remedy be not found.”
What was the cause of the ignorance so general and so profound in Spain? The Catholic Inquisition. “The commissaries of the Holy office received orders to oppose the introduction of books written by the partisans of modern philosophy, as reprobated by Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and ordered information to be given against persons known to be attached to the principles of the insurrection.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 99.] “Theological censures attacked even works on politics, and on natural, civil and international law. The consequence is, that those appointed to examine publications condemn and proscribe all works necessary for the diffusion of knowledge among the Spaniards. The books that have been published on mathematics, astronomy, natural philosophy and several other branches of science connected with those, are not treated with more favor.” [Liorente, vol. 4, p. 420.] “The Inquisition is, perhaps, the most active cause of that intellectual death that visited Spain at the close of the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests, their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy.” [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to 321.] “Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the answer is still, Catholic superstition!” [Napoleon Roussell.]
Infidels, who are noted leaders in “Free Thought,” as it is termed, are invariably men whose religious education [pg 229] was in the religious literature of the old creeds of centuries gone by, or otherwise in the religious literature of Roman Catholicism. They live in thought upon religious matters centuries behind the times, but, in scientific thought, are too well informed to adhere to their religious training. Such is the philosophy of infidel making. Let a man be trained in the obsolete religions of an hundred years or more ago, and otherwise well educated, and he is, at once, an infidel. No man is to blame for setting his face like a flint against old-fashioned Roman Catholicism, and high-toned Calvinism, nor for repudiating Papal and clerical authority known in the Spanish Inquisition with all its horrible, unscriptural and ungodly barbarities. But why it is that the infidel's religious foot should set away back yonder in the smoke of the dark ages, and his scientific foot away down here with the railroad and telegraph, is rather difficult of solution. It is rather amusing, since all well-educated American Catholics condemn the Inquisition along with all the abominable cruelties of the dark ages. And, as for Calvinism, there is not enough left for seed if it was properly distributed—it is old and thin.