"France, which has often made the most rapid progress toward reform, has also been the most successful leader of modern reaction. Its revolutions have set in motion all other nations, but have failed to purify itself. It is enslaved by a single church and ruled by Roman superstition. At the recent assembly at Paris, of all the hierarchy of France, of Jesuits, Dominicans, Monks and prelates, it was resolved that all the strength of the papal party should be given to an effort to grasp the control of the higher education of the people, and make every college and seminary the teacher of the worship of the Sacred Heart; to confine instruction within the limits of Roman theology, and shut out more strictly than ever before the light of modern progress. At a great and powerful meeting of all the Roman Catholic editors of France, a similar policy was resolved upon. By a strange revulsion of sentiment the press was made to advocate its own restriction or repression. The papal editors apparently sigh for a return of the mediaeval practices when Francis I. burned ardent printers in Paris, and the Sorbonne would have banished the printing press from France forever. The Roman Catholic papers invoke the restoration of the Bourbons and of the temporal power of the Pope, and in the ardor of a new spirit of martyrdom offered themselves up to a spiritual bondage that must end in their own slow destruction and the death of the national intellect They would enforce anew that policy if isolation which has filled France with impurity, and left it the prey of emperors and marshals, princes and priests.
"France has thus displayed, since its first revolution, a most remarkable contest. The spirit of freedom has more than once placed its people in front of human progress, and ever again the spirit of reaction has dragged them back into the abyss of mental and moral decay. Its priests have invariably triumphed over its reformers. The Roman church has always held a supremacy above the law. Of all the national institutions, it has alone preserved its freedom of action unimpaired. It receives an enormous subsidy from the state. While all other associations are held under a strict subjection, while political meetings are scarcely allowed, while the press is silenced, while Protestant churches can hold no assemblies or synods except by the connivance of the government, while Protestant churches are forbidden to have either bell or steeple, the Roman priesthood hold their councils and assemblies unrestrained, and cover the land with their sodalities, their societies, their processions, and their pilgrimages. The church is the only well-organized political party. Its agents are active in every commune. Its severe discipline produces order through all its hosts of Jesuits, monks and priests. Its confessors rule in the palaces of the wealthy and the hovels of the peasants. It forbids education, it stifles thought, it inculcates a pitiless severity against Protestants and reformers; and with natural indignation the leading Republicans point to the dominant church as the chief source of all the woes of France, as sacrificing the morals, integrity and mental elevation of the nation to the single purpose of maintaining the ascendency of a foreign Pope. The French Republicans have been forced to see that the Papal church is the necessary foe of freedom. It would be well if our own people could learn from their experience, and guard with strict vigilance their institutions from the secret and open assaults of a foreign priesthood.
"There is no doubt, at least in the minds of the French Republicans, that to the intrigues of the Papal faction is due the disordered and hopeless condition of the nation. Gambetta's paper, La Republique, assures its readers that the assembly is ruled by a party devoted wholly to the ecclesiastical interests; that they labor only to reduce the whole country to an abject submission to Rome, and are ready to accomplish their aims by measures fatal to the peace of France. It asserts that the priesthood forms a league as rigorous as that over which the Guises ruled and against which the Huguenots struggled; that the church has its myriads of societies, committees, agents, an overflowing treasury, the favor of the government, a single aim—an infallible ruler. It calls upon the people, if they would be free, to strike down the hydra that preys upon the state. The policy of Bismarck, indeed, finds its best defense in the condition of France. If the interference of the papal faction proves so disastrous to the welfare of the French people, it is plainly the interest of Germany to crush it forever by all the resources of statesmanship. If the rule of papal Rome be so intolerable to its friends, what might it not accomplish in the dominions of its opponents? France may yet learn from its neighbors over the Rhine the only path to freedom. What it seems most to need is a Bismarck."
If in 1874, Mr. Lawrence, after making a thorough study of the conditions of France, could so accurately prophecy what would happen thirty years hence, the conditions at that time must have been indeed very palpable, but no more so than they are in America to-day, as Roman Catholicism within the past ten years has made greater strides in strangling American liberties than she ever has in any twenty-five years, before, as this creed of abominations has been losing its hold upon not only the throats of France, but of Italy as well. As she has made the effort of her life to plant the seeds of anarchy and revolution in the bosom of her followers in the United States, in order that she may at the proper time, and as soon as she believes she is numerically strong enough to overcome by physical force, to strike a blow that will paralyze every ambition of Protestantism in this country.
Hundreds of the best and wisest men this country has ever known have been for years warning the United States of her dangers from Romanism, but it seems as though we will not heed the warning, but bear in mind that unless this country does heed this warning and halt the Czar of Darkness, we will live to see the time when we will have to resort to arms to protect our Protestant interests.
The nation of France has swung out from the power of the Vatican, and is to-day defying the Pope of Rome and daring him to do his worst, and France is a nation that has always been a Catholic nation and controlled by her abominations, but she has woke up to the fact that unless this hellish doctrine is stamped out from her shores that she will become a nation of mental pygmies and nonentities, as she has long since learned that Catholicism is nothing more nor less than a poisonous breath that withers intellect and causes nations to decay and sink to the level of Romish degeneracy.
It seems as though the Vatican will not learn that the world moves, as the Vatican is determined that Italy shall not appear above the horizon of papal abhorrence.
It is hard for the Vatican to learn that the world moves and that Italy moves with it. In its final resolution, the quarrel between the Pope and the French government is based on the recognition of the king of Italy as the sole sovereign in Rome, but the Pope is as determined that him and his reign of darkness shall be the only acknowledged ruler of Italy.
President Loubet of France, the executive of this Catholic nation, gave great offense to the Vatican, by visiting the king of Italy, who is in the eyes of the church a usurper.
According to the Vatican's standards, the kingdom of Italy is not an accomplished fact, as the Vatican refuses to recognize any government in Italy save that which he chooses to establish and build up out of the filth and abominations of Roman Catholicism.