Alaska—Safe return, goods found.
Arizona—Two recoveries, suitable boarding place, illness averted, safe delivery.
British Honduras—Successful operation.
California—Seventeen recoveries, six situations, two successful examinations, house rented, stocks sold, raise in salary, return to religious duties, sight regained, medal won, Baptism, preservation from disease, contract obtained, success in business, hearing restored, Easter duty made, happy death, automobile sold, mind restored, house found, house rented, successful journey, business sold, quarrel averted, return of friends, two successful operations.
And for all these miraculous performances the Catholic machine is harvesting the price day by day—harvesting with that ancient fervor which the Latin poet described as "auri sacra fames". As Christopher Columbus wrote from Jamaica in 1503: "Gold is a wonderful thing. By means of gold we can even get souls into Paradise."
The Holy Roman Empire
The system thus self-revealed you admit is appalling [116] in its squalor; but you say that at least it is milder and less perilous than the Church which burned Giordano Bruno and John Huss. But the very essence of the Catholic Church is that it does not change; semper eadem is its motto: the same yesterday, today and forever—the same in Washington as in Rome or Madrid—the same in a modern democracy as in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church is not primarily a religious organization; it is a political organization, and proclaims the fact, and defies those who would shut it up in the religious field. The Rev. S.B. Smith, a Catholic doctor of divinity, explains in his "Elements of Ecclesiastical Law":
Protestants contend that the entire power of the Church consists in the right to teach and exhort, but not in the right to command, rule, or govern; whence they infer that she is not a perfect society or sovereign state. This theory is false; for the Church, as was seen, is vested Jure divino with power, (1) to make laws; (2) to define and apply them (potestas judicialis); (3) to punish those who violate her laws (potestas coercitiva).
And this is not one scholar's theory, but the formal and repeated proclamation of infallible popes. Here is the "Syllabus of Errors", issued by Pope Pius IX, Dec. 8th, 1864, declaring in substance that
The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he shall deem true.