Fifty Years in the Church of Rome

by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

I also dedicate this book.

Americans! You are sleeping on a volcano, and you do not suspect it! You are pressing on your bosom a viper which will bite you to death, and you do not know it.

Read this book, and you will see that Rome is the sworn, the most implacable, the absolutely irreconcilable and deadly enemy of your schools, your institutions, your so dearly bought rights and liberties.

Read this book, and you will not only understand that it is to Rome you owe the rivers of blood and the unspeakable horrors of the last civil war: but you will learn that Romanism and Liberty can not live on the same ground. This has been declared by the Popes, hundreds of times.

Read this book: And you will not only see that Abraham Lincoln was murdered by Rome, but you will learn that Romanism, under the mask of religion, is nothing but a permanent political conspiracy against all the most sacred rights of man and the most holy laws of God.

In those pages you will not learn to hate the Roman Catholics. No! But you will learn to be more than ever watchful in guarding the precious treasures of Freedom bestowed upon you by your fathers. You will learn never to let them fall into the hands of those who, with the sacred name of Liberty on their lips, and the mask of Liberty on their faces, are sworn to destroy all Liberty.

TO ALL THE FAITHFUL MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL,

I also, dedicate this book.

Venerable Ministers of the Gospel! Rome is the great danger ahead for the Church of Christ, and you do not understand it enough.

The atmosphere of light, honesty, truth and holiness in which you are born, and which you have breathed since your infancy, makes it almost impossible for you to realize the dark mysteries of idolatry, immorality, degrading slavery, hatred of the Word of God, concealed behind the walls of that modern Babylon. You are too honest to suspect them; and your precious time is too much taken up by the sacred duties of your ministry, to study the long labyrinth of argumentations which form the bulk of the greater number of controversial books. Besides that, the majority of the books of controversy against Rome are of such a dry character that, though many begin to read them, very few have the courage to go to the end. The consequence is an ignorance of Romanism which becomes more and more deplorable and fatal, every day.