No wonder Americans look back to those lights in the dark and bloody wilderness of Popery. It is refreshing to see them. They are green spots in the deserts made barren and desolate, by Popish iniquities; and long may their memories shine in unclouded lustre.
It is pleasant to the historian, who is wearied and disgusted with contemplating the past and present horrors of Popery, to turn for a moment from the frightful spectacle, and rest in devout contemplation on the lives of those comparatively excellent men. How mistaken are those would-be philanthropists, who, at the present time, teach Americans to infer, that, because those were good and holy men, possessing a pious and forgiving spirit, it follows that the Papist church, her bishops and priests, entertain a similar spirit. This is equivalent to telling them that all history, past and present, is false, a mere romance, the dream of madmen. It is equivalent to telling them that the very history and records of the lives of Fenelon, and Massillon, &c., were entitled to no credit. Who can read, and not see that Rome has spilt oceans of blood to enforce her cruel creed! Who can read, and not see that she has squandered treasures enough to relieve the poor of civilized Europe, in establishing and keeping up a despotism inimical to man and hateful to God!
The Papists, even in this country, do not deny that they intend to eradicate heresy, and to use every means which their church considers legitimate to effect that purpose. This the priests preach from their pulpits; this they tell you to your beards. They admit their determination to bring these United States, if possible, under the spiritual control of the court of Rome. They use the word spiritual, in utter contempt of your understanding, to deceive you, and while using it, they laugh at your credulity. Popish spiritual control, spiritual allegiance! It is almost incredible that any body of men should have the impudence to come forward, in the nineteenth century, and talk of spiritual allegiance to his royal holiness the King of Rome.
They admit their determination to possess this country, and have the modesty to ask you to give them lands and churches, and means to accomplish their object, and effectuate your destruction. Their next step will be to quarter upon you an army of friars, Jesuits, or monks, who will carry at the point of the bayonet what is left undone by duplicity, treachery, and intrigue. This has been the fate of every country where Popery has found a resting place, and America is the only nation which, for the last three centuries, has given them such a footing. They tried what they could do in China. They succeeded in establishing several bishoprics, Jesuit convents, nunneries, monk-houses and churches, among the peaceable and quiet Chinese; but happening to differ among themselves on the subject of their respective temporal rights, they, as in duty bound, referred their differences to the Pope. This movement came to the ears of the emperor of China, whom they had so long and so successfully deceived by the cant words, spiritual allegiance to the Pope. The parties were summoned before his commissioner to ascertain what was meant by spiritual allegiance. They tried to explain it, but all their ingenuity, all their subtilty, could not satisfy the commissioner that spiritual allegiance meant anything else than what it fairly expressed, and as soon as he found that it meant, in the eyes of the Pope and the Romish church, things real and tangible, such as real estate, the conveying it from the rightful owner under the laws of the land, to another under the laws of the Pope, who lived in Rome, he satisfied himself, that the spiritual supremacy of the Pope meant, among other things, the power to govern the kingdoms of the earth; to give away, and take them away, to whom and from whom, his royal holiness pleased. The emperor instantly issued an order, directing that every Roman Catholic bishop, priest, friar, Jesuit, monk, and nun, within his empire, should quit, within a given time, on pain of losing their heads. Many of them disobeyed the order and were executed, and their churches levelled to the ground.
The Chinese had no objection to Papists worshipping God, according to the dictates of their own conscience; but as soon as it was discovered that they owed spiritual allegiance to a foreign power, they deemed it prudent to remove them from the country. But the Chinese are barbarians, and it seems reserved for this new world of ours, to interpret properly the meaning of spiritual allegiance, and in all differences, between our citizens and the agents of the Pope, as to the temporalities of the Romish church, to lay the subject before his royal holiness, and be governed by his decision.
Witness the difference between Bishop Hughes of New York, and the trustees of a Roman Catholic church in Buffalo, only a few weeks ago. Witness that in New Orleans, between the bishop and the trustees of the Roman Catholic church. All these were referred to the Pope, who decided the matter, without any respect or regard to the laws of this government. Call you this spiritual allegiance? Call you this an exercise of spiritual power, on the part of his royal holiness the Pope? Yes, you do; and it would not much surprise me, if the Papists of this very city of Boston should recommend to its legislature, to lay the difficulties between themselves and the state of South Carolina, before the Pope of Rome for adjudication.
Should the day ever arrive, when the Papists have a majority in your legislature, and a difference should occur between these states, the Pope will be called in to decide it. I am at a loss to know how, even in these days of transcendentalism, any other meaning can be given to spiritual allegiance, than that which the Roman Catholic gives it in practice. They consider the Pope, as the spiritual head of the church, has, a fortiori, a divine right to be the head and sovereign of the world. This is the sense in which Catholics understand and act upon it, and swear to support the Pope, as the supreme arbiter of the destinies of the world. The Chinese understood this. The emperor of Russia understands it at the present day; and though a Catholic himself, no priest or bishop, within his vast dominions, dare avow any allegiance, spiritual or temporal, to the king or Pope of Rome.
The holy synod of St. Petersburg, Russia, have notified the Catholic missionaries, who have incited rebellion, and interfered with the civil authorities in Georgia, to renounce their intercourse with the see of Rome, or quit the country. But Americans, in the alembic of their fertile brains, have manufactured a definition for spiritual allegiance, peculiarly their own, for which the Papists are so much obliged to them, that whenever an opportunity of knocking out the aforesaid brains occurs, they will do so. Witness in the Philadelphia riots, &c, &c, strong proofs of the spirituality of that allegiance which Catholics owe to the Pope.
Permit me to give you another evidence of the nature of that allegiance to the Pope of Rome, to which I have heretofore alluded. It is to be found in the massacre of the Huguenots, by Roman Catholics. There is no event in the history of France, with which the world is more familiar, than this. Several historians have related it with great minuteness and much elegance. To these I can add nothing of my own, and the reader is more indebted to them, for the following statement, than to myself.
MASSACRE OF THE HUGUENOTS.