"This you have commenced already," said the Legate,—"it was in Mexico, that I heard of Philadelphia last summer—of Philadelphia on the verge of civil war with Protestants and Catholics flooding the gutters with their blood, while the flames of burning churches lit up the midnight sky."
"The outbreak was rather premature," calmly continued the Prelate, "but it has done us good. It has invested us with the light of martyrdom, the glory of persecution. It has drawn to us the sympathies of tens of thousands of Protestants, who, honestly disliking the assaults of the mere 'No-Popery' lecturers upon our church, as honestly entertain the amusing notion, that the Rulers of our church, look upon 'Toleration, Liberty of Conscience,' and so forth, with any feeling, but profound contempt."
"Ah!" ejaculated the Legate, and a smile crossed his face, "deriving strength from the illimitable bitterness of the Native American and Foreign political parties, we already hold in many portions of the Union, the ballot box in our grasp. We can dictate terms to both political parties. Their leaders court us. Editors who know that we rooted Protestantism out of Spain, by the red hand of the Inquisition,—that for our faith we made the Netherlands rich in gibbets and graves,—that we gave the word, which started from its scabbard the dagger of St. Bartholomew,—grave editors, who know all this and more, talk of us as the friends of Liberty and Toleration—"
"But there was Calvert, the founder of Maryland, and Carroll the signer of the Declaration of Independence, these were Catholics, were they not, Catholics and friends of Liberty?"
"They were laymen, not rulers, you will remember," said the Prelate, significantly: "at best they belonged to a sort of Catholics, which, in the Old World, we have done our best to root out of the church. But here, however, we can use their names and their memories, as a cloak for our purposes of ultimate dominion. But to resume: both political parties court us. Their leaders, who loathe us, are forced to kneel to us. Things we can do freely and without blame, which damn any Protestant sect but to utter. The very 'No-Popery' lecturers aid us: they attack doctrinal points in our church, which are no more assailable than the doctrinal points of any one of their ten thousand sects: they would be dangerous, indeed, were they to confine their assaults to the simple fact, that ours is not so much a church as an EMPIRE, having for its object, the temporal dominion of the whole human race, to be accomplished under the vail of spiritualism. An EMPIRE built upon the very sepulcher of Jesus Christ,—an empire which holds Religion, the Cross, the Bible, as valuable just so far as they aid its efforts for the temporal subjection of the world,—an empire which, using all means and holding all means alike lawful, for the spread of its dominion, has chosen the American Continent as the scene of its loftiest triumph, the theater of its final and most glorious victories!"
As he spoke the Atheist Prelate started from his chair.
Far different from those loving Apostles, who through long ages, have in the Catholic Church, repeated in their deeds, the fullness of Love, which filled the breast of the Apostle John,—far different from the Fenelons and Paschals of the church,—this Prelate was a cold-blooded and practical Atheist. Love of women, love of wine, swayed him not. Lust of power was his spring of action—his soul. He may have at times, assented to Religion, but that he believed in it as an awful verity, as a Truth worth all the physical power and physical enjoyment in the universe,—the Prelate never had a thought like this. An ambitious atheist, a Borgia without his lust, a Richelieu with all of Richelieu's cunning, and not half of Richelieu's intellect, a cold-blooded, practical schemer for his own elevation at any cost,—such was the Prelate. Talk to him of Christ as a consoler, as a link between crippled humanity and a better world, as of a friend who meets you on the dark highway of life, and takes you from sleet and cold, into the light of a dear, holy home,—talk to him of the love which imbues and makes alive every word from the lips of Christ,—ha! ha! Your atheistical Prelate would laugh at the thought. He was a worldling. Risen from the very depths of poverty, he despised the poor from whom he sprung. For years a loud and even brawling advocate of justice for Ireland,—an ecclesiastical stump orator; a gatherer of the pennies earned by the hard hand of Irish labor,—he was the man to blaspheme her cause and vilify its honest advocates, when her dawn of Revolution darkened into night again. He was the pugilist of the Pulpit, the gladiator of controversy, always itching for a fight, never so happy as when he set honest men to clutching each other by the throat. Secure in his worldly possessions, rich from the princely revenues derived from the poor—the hard working poor of his church,—a tyrant to the parish priests who were so unfortunate as to be subjected to his sway, by turns the Demagogue of Irish freedom and the Mouchard of Austrian despotism, he was a vain, bad, cunning, but practical man, this Atheist Prelate of the Roman Church.
"Now, what think you of our plans and our prospects?" said the Prelate, triumphantly—"can we not, using New York as the center of our operations, the Ballot Box, social dissension and sectarian warfare as the means, can we not, mould the New World to our views, and make it Rome, Rome, in every inch of its soil?"
The Legate responded quietly:
"I see but one obstacle—"