BUT what was to be done? What was all this about? We are ashamed, for humanity’s sake, to tell. It was to see a bishop pow-wow over a corner stone, bless it and lay it for a Romish meeting house! That was what all this was about! What was there in that? No more than any other pagan ceremony. No more than to see any other Irishman laying any other stone or brick in any other building, aside from tradition and superstition. This is the procedure of the Anti-christ, the Man of Sin, the power gone out to deceive the whole world with sorceries; a compound of Judaism, Paganism and Christianity, but described in the book of God as the Apostasy. It has corrupted the four quarters of the earth with its abominations and idolatries. It has two hundred millions of the human race under its domination. It has caused the blood of fifty millions of martyrs to flow. But the tide is receding. The wheel is turning back. His secular power has departed. He does not have Victor Emmanuel to bow down and kiss his great toe, nor to come and crave favors of him. But he goes to Victor Emmanuel to know what favors he can have. This puts the shoe on the other foot. Prince Bismarck banishing the Jesuits from Germany, is another turn in the same direction. The revolution in Mexico is in the same direction. The Pope gets no favors in all these moves. He is strengthening his hands in the United States a little just now, but this is only temporary, and, we trust, will only serve to open the eyes of the people in this country. Our people need a few demonstrations to rouse them from their slumbers. They need to be made sensible who they are that want their drinking saloons, and want them open on Sundays, that intend to parade our streets with bands of music and long processions on the Lord’s day, who they are that are trying to undermine our common schools and ruin them, who they are that publish in our faces that our marriages are all null and void—that we are all living in adultery because we were not married by priests! We need a little more of this impudence in our faces to rouse us up and cause us to see the viper we have taken into our bosoms, and see what claim this Mystery of Iniquity has on our charities.
It refuses to allow its adherents to become members of the Masonic order, because it is a secret Order. The trouble is that it is a secret Order itself, with its sworn members and bound priests, its prowling Jesuits, nuns and friars, the most dangerous and complete and perfect—the consummation of all secret Orders, from the hired girl in the kitchen, and the hired man on the farm, up through every position held, every situation in life, and every office held by a Papist, to communicate intelligence to a set of men bound up in this Order of secrecy, who are not even citizens in our Government, that they may report to the Holy See in Rome! It is a secret, Pagan and Jewish mixture with Christianity; an intriguing, insidious and stealthy scheme, prying into the secrets of every nook and corner of every land, and every move of every civil government on earth, and a friend to no civil government on the face of the earth, only so far as it can be made subservient to the purposes of the Pope.
The new Cardinal in this country is a minion of the Pope, and, without being a citizen of the United States, when he pleases to do so, will control the vote of some six millions of our population; and this all done by the secret workings of the Papacy, without any man seeing the secret wires that are pulled to do it. These priests, bound all over by religious vows or oaths, in a secret conclave, plan schools to be taught by nuns, all in the secret Order, and gather up vagrant children, while many of their own children are beggars, to make Romanists of them, and shut them out from the light of the common schools and colleges of this country.
Then how do these priests propose to gain power? Do they propose to come out in open day; publicly teach the people and enlighten them? Not a word of it. Do they propose to discuss their claims? Not a bit of it. How then are they doing this work? Insidiously. It is all in the dark, except an occasional demonstration like that we had here on the first Lord’s day in July. What were the people taught on that day? Did any one hear any instruction? Thousands of dollars were expended. Thousands of people were weary and exhausted, but no one was enlightened. No one was taught even Romanism, except those, who from the word of God have learned the power of the grand delusion, the mystery of iniquity that now works. They can understand the power of the sorceries practiced to deceive and allure unwary souls.
[UNIVERSALISM UNBELIEF.]
THE mission of unbelief, in this direction, is—