CHAPTER VI
RELIGIOUS ORDERS
THE gift of the ministry is one of the greatest gifts which Christ
has bestowed upon the world. In is in reference to this that the
Psalmist, predicting the ascension of Christ, thus loftily speaks of its
blessed results: "Thou hast ascended up on high; Thou hast led
captivity captive; Thou hast received gifts for men, even for the
rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell among them" (Eph.
iv. 8-11). The Church of Rome, at its first planting, had the divinely
bestowed gift of a Scriptural ministry and government; and then "its
faith was spoken of throughout the whole world;" its works of
righteousness were both rich and abundant. But, in an evil hour, the
Babylonian element was admitted into its ministry, and thenceforth, that
which had been intended as a blessing, was converted into a curse. Since
then, instead of sanctifying men, it has only been the means of
demoralising them, and making them "twofold more the children
of hell" than they would have been had they been left simply
to themselves.
If there be any who imagine that there is some occult and mysterious
virtue in an apostolic succession that comes through the Papacy, let
them seriously consider the real character of the Pope's own orders, and
of those of his bishops and clergy. From the Pope downwards, all can be
shown to be now radically Babylonian. The College of Cardinals, with the
Pope at its head, is just the counterpart of the Pagan College of
Pontiffs, with its "Pontifex Maximus," or "Sovereign
Pontiff," which had existed in Rome from the earliest times,
and which is known to have been framed on the model of the grand
original Council of Pontiffs at Babylon. The Pope now pretends to
supremacy in the Church as the successor of Peter, to whom it is alleged
that our Lord exclusively committed the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
But here is the important fact that, till the Pope was invested with the
title, which for a thousand years had had attached to it the power of
the keys of Janus and Cybele, * no such claim to pre-eminence, or
anything approaching to it, was ever publicly made on his part, on the
ground of his being the possessor of the keys bestowed on Peter. Very
early, indeed, did the bishops of Rome show a proud and ambitious
spirit; but, for the first three centuries, their claim for superior
honour was founded simply on the dignity of their see, as being that of
the imperial city, the capital of the Roman world. When, however, the
seat of empire was removed to the East, and Constantinople threatened to
eclipse Rome, some new ground for maintaining the dignity of the Bishop
of Rome must be sought. That new ground was found when, about 378, the
Pope fell heir to the keys that were the symbols of two well-known Pagan
divinities at Rome. Janus bore a key, * and Cybele bore a key; * and
these are the two keys that the Pope emblazons on his arms as the
ensigns of his spiritual authority. How the Pope came to be regarded as
wielding the power of these keys will appear in the sequel; but that he
did, in the popular apprehension, become entitled to that power at the
period referred to is certain. Now, when he had come, in the estimation
of the Pagans, to occupy the place of the representatives of Janus and
Cybele, and therefore to be entitled to bear their keys, the Pope saw
that if he could only get it believed among the Christians that Peter
alone had the power of the keys, and that he was Peter's successor, then
the sight of these keys would keep up the delusion, and thus, though the
temporal dignity of Rome as a city should decay, his own dignity as the
Bishop of Rome would be more firmly established than ever. On this
policy it is evident he acted. Some time was allowed to pass away, and
then, when the secret working of the Mystery of iniquity had prepared
the way for it, for the first time did the Pope publicly assert his
preeminence, as founded on the keys given to Peter. About 378 was he
raised to the position which gave him, in Pagan estimation, the power of
the keys referred to. In 431, and not before, did he publicly lay claim
to the possession of Peter's keys. * This, surely, is a striking
coincidence. Does the reader ask how it was possible that men could give
credit to such a baseless assumption? The words of Scripture, in regard
to this very subject, give a very solemn but satisfactory answer (2
Thess. ii. 10,11): "Because they received not the love of the
truth, that they might be saved.....For this cause God shall send them
strong delusion, that they should believe a lie." Few lies
could be more gross; but, in course of time, it came to be widely
believed; and now, as the statue of Jupiter is worshipped at Rome as the
veritable image of Peter, so the keys of Janus and Cybele have for ages
been devoutly believed to represent the keys of the same apostle.
While nothing but judicial infatuation can account for the credulity
of the Christians in regarding these keys as emblems of an exclusive
power given by Christ to the Pope through Peter, it is not difficult to
see how the Pagans would rally round the Pope all the more readily when
they heard him found his power on the possession of Peter's Keys. The
keys that the Pope bore were the Keys of a "Peter"
well known to the Pagans initiated in the Chaldean Mysteries. That Peter
the apostle was ever Bishop of Rome has been proved again and again to
be an arrant fable. That he ever even set foot in Rome is at the best
highly doubtful. His visit to that city rests on no better authority
than that of a writer at the end of the second century or beginning of
the third--viz., the author of the work called The Clementines, * who
gravely tells us that on the occasion of his visit, finding Simon Magus
there, the apostle challenged him to give proof of his miraculous or
magical powers, whereupon the sorcerer flew up into the air, and Peter
brought him down in such haste that his leg was broken. * All historians
of repute have at once rejected this story of the apostolic encounter
with the magician as being destitute of all contemporary evidence; but
as the visit of Peter to Rome rests on the same authority, it must stand
or fall along with it, or, at least, it must be admitted to be extremely
doubtful. But, while this is the case with Peter the Christian, it can
be shown to be by no means doubtful that before the Christian era, and
downwards, there was a "Peter" at Rome, who occupied
the highest place in the Pagan priesthood. The priest who explained the
Mysteries to the initiated was sometimes called by a Greek term, the
Hierophant; but in primitive Chaldee, the real language of the
Mysteries, his title, as pronounced without the points, was "Peter"--i.e.,
"the interpreter." * As the revealer of that which
was hidden, nothing was more natural than that, while opening up the
esoteric doctrine of the Mysteries, he should be decorated with the keys
of the two divinities whose mysteries he unfolded. * Thus we may see how
the keys of Janus and Cybele would come to be known as the keys of
Peter, the "interpreter" of the Mysteries. Yea, we have the
strongest evidence that, in countries far removed from one another, and
far distant from Rome, these keys were known by initiated Pagans not
merely as the "keys of Peter," but as the keys of a
Peter identified with Rome. In the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, when
the candidates for initiation were instructed in the secret doctrine of
Paganism, the explanation of that doctrine was read to them out of a
book called by ordinary writers the "Book Petroma;" that
is, as we are told, a book formed of stone. * But this is evidently just
a play upon words, according to the usual spirit of Paganism, intended
to amuse the vulgar. The nature of the case, and the history of the
Mysteries, alike show that this book could be none other than the "Book
Pet-Rome;" that is, the "Book of the Grand
Interpreter," in other words, of Hermes Trismegistus, the
great "Interpreter of the Gods." In Egypt, from which
Athens derived its religion, the books of Hermes were regarded as the
divine fountain of all true knowledge of the Mysteries. * In Egypt,
therefore, Hermes was looked up to in this very character of Grand
Interpreter, or "Peter-Roma." In Athens, Hermes, as
is well known, occupied precisely the same place, * and, of course, in
the sacred language, must have been known by the same title. The priest,
therefore, that in the name of Hermes explained the Mysteries, must have
been decked not only with the keys of Peter, but with the keys of "Peter-Roma."
* Here, then, the famous "Book of Stone" begins to
appear in a new light, and not only so, but to shed new light on one of
the darkest and most puzzling passages of Papal history. It has always
been a matter of amazement to candid historical inquirers how it could
ever have come to pass that the name of Peter should be associated with
Rome in the way in which it is found form the fourth century
downwards--how so many in different countries had been led to believe
that Peter, who was an "apostle of the circumcision," had
apostatised from his Divine commission, and become bishop of a Gentile
Church, and that he should be the spiritual ruler in Rome, when no
satisfactory evidence could be found for his ever having been in Rome at
all. But the book of "Peter-Roma" accounts for what
otherwise is entirely inexplicable. The existence of such a title was
too valuable to be overlooked by the Papacy; and, according to its usual
policy, it was sure, if it had the opportunity, to turn it to the
account of its own aggrandisement. And that opportunity it had. When the
Pope came, as he did, into intimate connection with the Pagan
priesthood; when they came at last, as we shall see they did, under his
control, what more natural than to seek not only to reconcile Paganism
and Christianity, but to make it appear that the Pagan "Peter-Roma,"
with his keys, meant "Peter of Rome," and that that "Peter
of Rome" was the very apostle to whom the Lord Jesus Christ
gave the "keys of the kingdom of heaven"? Hence, from
the mere jingle of words, persons and things essentially different were
confounded; and Paganism and Christianity jumbled together, that the
towering ambition of a wicked priest might be gratified; and so, to the
blinded Christians of the apostacy, the Pope was the representative of
Peter the apostle, while to the initiated Pagans, he was only the
representative of Peter, the interpreter of their well-known Mysteries.
* Thus was the Pope the express counterpart of "Janus, the
double-faced." Oh! what an emphasis of meaning in the
Scriptural expression, as applied to the Papacy, "The Mystery
of Iniquity"!
The reader will now be prepared to understand how it is that the
Pope's Grand Council of State, which assists him in the government of
the Church, comes to be called the College of Cardinals. The term
Cardinal is derived from Cardo, a hinge. Janus, * whose key the Pope
bears, was the god of doors and hinges, and was called Patulcius, and
Culsius "the opener and the shutter." * This had a
blasphemous meaning, for he was worshipped at Rome as the grand
mediator. Whatever important business was in hand, whatever deity was to
be invoked, an invocation first of all must be addressed to Janus, who
was recognised as the "God of gods," * in whose
mysterious divinity the characters of father and son were combined, *
and without that no prayer could be heard--the "door of
heaven" could not be opened. * It was this same god whose
worship prevailed so exceedingly in Asia Minor at the time when our Lord
sent, by his servant John, the seven Apocalyptic message to the churches
established in that region. And, therefore, in one of these messages we
find Him tacitly rebuking the profane ascription of His own peculiar
dignity to that divinity, and asserting His exclusive claim to the
prerogative usually attributed to His rival. Thus, Rev. iii.7:
"And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: These things
saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David,
he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth."
Now, to this Janus, as Mediator, worshipped in Asia Minor, and
equally, from very early times, in Rome, belonged the government of the
world; and, "all power in heaven, in earth, and the sea," according
to Pagan ideas, was vested in him. * In this character he was said to
have "jus vertendi cardinis"--the "power of
turning the hinge"--of opening the doors of heaven, or of
opening or shutting the gates of peace or war upon earth. The Pope,
therefore, when he set up as the High-priest of Janus, assumed also the
"jus vertendi cardinis," "the power of turning the
hinge,"--of opening and shutting in the blasphemous Pagan
sense. Slowly and cautiously at first was this power asserted; but the
foundation being laid, steadily, century after century, was the grand
superstructure of priestly power erected upon it. The Pagans, who saw
what strides, under Papal directions, Christianity, as professed in
Rome, was making towards Paganism, were more than content to recognise
the Pope as possessing this power; they gladly encouraged him to rise,
step by step, to the full height of the blasphemous pretensions
befitting the representative of Janus--pretensions which, as all men
know, are now, by the unanimous consent of Western Apostate Christendom,
recognised as inherent in the office of the Bishop of Rome. To enable
the Pope, however, to rise to the full plenitude of power which he now
asserts, the co-operation of others was needed. When his power
increased, when his dominion extended, and especially after he became a
temporal sovereign, the key of Janus became too heavy for his single
hand--he needed some to share with him the power of the "hinge."
Hence his privy councillors, his high functionaries of state, who were
associated with him in the government of the Church and the world, got
the now well-known title of "Cardinals"--the priests
of the "hinge." This title had been previously borne
by the high officials of the Roman Emperor, who, as "Pontifex
Maximus," had been himself the representative of Janus, and
who delegated his powers to servants of his own. Even in the reign of
Theodosius, the Christian Emperor of Rome, the title of Cardinal was
borne by his Prime Minister. * But now both the name and the power
implied in the name have long since disappeared from all civil
functionaries of temporal sovereigns; and those only who aid the Pope in
wielding the key of Janus--in opening and shutting--are known by the
title of Cardinals, or priests of the "hinge."
I have said that the Pope became the representative of Janus, who, it
is evident, was none other than the Babylonian Messiah. If the reader
only considers the blasphemous assumptions of the Papacy, he will see
how exactly it has copied from its original. In the countries where the
Babylonian system was most thoroughly developed, we find the Sovereign
Pontiff of the Babylonian god invested with the very attributes now
ascribed to the Pope. Is the Pope called "God upon earth,"
the "Vice-God," and "Vicar of Jesus
Christ"? The King in Egypt, who was Sovereign-Pontiff, * was,
says Wilkinson, regarded with the highest reverence as "THE
REPRESENTATIVE OF THE DIVINITY ON EARTH." * Is the Pope "Infallible,"
and does the Church of Rome, in consequence, boast that it has always
been "unchanged and unchangeable"? The same was the
case with the Chaldean Pontiff, and the system over which he presided.
The Sovereign Pontiff, says the writer just quoted, was believed to be "INCAPABLE
OF ERROR," * and, in consequence, there was "the
greatest respect for the sanctity of old edicts;" and hence,
no doubt, also the origin of the custom that "the laws of the
Medes and Persians could not be altered." Does the Pope
receive the adorations of the Cardinals? The king of Babylon, as
Sovereign Pontiff, was adored in like manner. * Are kings and
ambassadors required to kiss the Pope's slipper? This, too, is copied
from the same pattern; for, says Professor Gaussen, quoting Strabo and
Herodotus, "the kings of Chaldea wore on their feet slippers
which the kings they conquered used to kiss." * In fine, is
the Pope addressed by the title of "Your Holiness"?
So also was the Pagan Pontiff of Rome. The title seems to have been
common to all the pontiffs. Symmachus, the last Pagan representative of
the Roman Emperor, as Sovereign Pontiff, addressing one of his
colleagues or fellow-pontiffs, on a step of promotion he was about to
obtain, says, "I hear that YOUR HOLINESS (sanctitatem tuam) is
to be called out by the sacred letters." *
Peter's keys have now been restored to their rightful owner. Peter's
chair must also go along with them. That far-famed chair came from the
very same quarter as the cross-keys. The very same reason that led the
Pope to assume the Chaldean keys naturally led him also to take
possession of the vacant chair of the Pagan Pontifex Maximus. As the
Pontifex, by virtue of his office, had been the Hierophant, or
Interpreter of the Mysteries, his chair of office was as well entitled
to be called "Peter's" chair as the Pagan keys to be
called "the keys of Peter;" and so it was called
accordingly. The real pedigree of the far-famed chair of Peter will
appear from the following fact: "The Romans had,"
says Bower, "as they thought, till the year 1662, a pregnant
proof, not only of Peter's erecting their chair, but of his sitting in
it himself; for, till that year, the very chair on which they believed,
or would make others believe, he had sat, was shown and exposed to
public adoration on the 18th of January, the festival of the said chair.
But while it was cleaning, in order to set it up in some conspicuous
place of the Vatican, the twelve labours of Hercules unluckily appeared
on it!" * and so it had to be laid aside. The partisans of the
Papacy were not a little disconcerted by this discovery; but they tried
to put the best face on the matter they could. "Our
worship," said Giacomo Bartolini, in his Sacred Antiquities of
Rome, while relating the circumstances of the discovery, "Our
worship, however, was not misplaced, since it was not to the wood we
paid it, but to the prince of the apostles, St. Peter," that
had been supposed to sit in it. * Whatever the reader may think of this
apology for chair-worship, he will surely at least perceive, taking this
in connection with what we have already seen, that the hoary fable of
Peter's chair is fairly exploded. In modern times, Rome seems to have
been rather unfortunate in regard to Peter's chair; for, even after that
which bore the twelve labours of Hercules had been condemned and cast
aside, as unfit to bear the light that the Reformation had poured upon
the darkness of the Holy See, that which was chosen to replace it was
destined to reveal still more ludicrously the barefaced impostures of
the Papacy. The former chair was borrowed from the Pagans; the next
appears to have been purloined from the Mussulmans; for when the French
soldiers under General Bonaparte took possession of Rome in 1795, they
found on the back of it, in Arabic, this well-known sentence of the
Koran, "There is no God but God, and Mahomet is His
Prophet." *
The Pope has not merely a chair to sit in; but he has a chair to be
carried in, in pomp and state, on men's shoulders, when he pays a visit
to St. Peter's, or any of the churches of Rome. Thus does an eye-witness
describe such a pageant on the Lord's Day, in the headquarters of Papal
idolatry: "The drums were heard beating without. The guns of
the soldiers rung on the stone pavement of the house of God, as, at the
bidding of their officer, they grounded, shouldered, and presented arms.
How unlike the Sabbath--how unlike religion--how unlike the suitable
preparation to receive a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus! Now,
moving slowly up, between the two armed lines of soldiers, appeared a
long procession of ecclesiastics, bishops, canons, and cardinals,
preceding the Roman pontiff, who was borne on a gilded chair, clad in
vestments resplendent as the sun. His bearers were twelve men clad in
crimson, being immediately preceded by several persons carrying a cross,
his mitre, his triple crown, and other insignia of his office. As he was
borne along on the shoulders of men, amid the gaping crowds, his head
was shaded or canopied by two immense fans, made of peacocks' feathers,
which were borne by two attendants." * Thus it is with the
Sovereign Pontiff of Rome at this day; only that, frequently, over and
above being shaded by the fan, which is just the "Mystic fan of
Bacchus," his chair of state is also covered with a regular
canopy. Now, look back through the vista of three thousand years, and
see how the Sovereign Pontiff of Egypt used to pay a visit to the temple
of his god. "Having reached the precincts of the temple," says
Wilkinson, "the guards and royal attendants selected to be the
representatives of the whole army entered the courts.....Military bands
played the favourite airs of the country; and the numerous standard of
the different regiments, the banners floating on the wind, the bright
lustre of arms, the immense concourse of people, and the imposing
majesty of the lofty towers of the propylaea, decked with their bright-coloured
flags, streaming above the cornice, presented a scene seldom, we may
say, equalled on any occasion, in any country. The most striking feature
of this pompous ceremony was the brilliant cortege of the monarch, who
was either borne in his chair of state by the principal officers of
state, under a rich canopy, or walked on foot, overshadowed with rich
flabella and fans of waving plumes." * We give, as a woodcut,
from Wilkinson , * the central portion of one of his plates devoted to
such an Egyptian procession, that the reader may see with his own eyes
how exactly the Pagan agrees with the well-known account of the Papal
ceremonial.
So much for Peter's chair and Peter's keys. Now Janus, whose key the
Pope usurped with that of his wife or mother Cybele, was also Dagon.
Janus, the two-headed god, "who had lived in two worlds,"
was the Babylonian divinity as in incarnation of Noah. Dagon, the
fish-god, represented that deity as a manifestation of the same
patriarch who had lived so long in the waters of the deluge. As the Pope
bears the key of Janus, so he wears the mitre of Dagon. The excavations
of Nineveh have put this beyond all possibility of doubt. The Papal
mitre is entirely different from the mitre of Aaron and the Jewish high
priests. That mitre was a turban. The two-horned mitre, which the Pope
wears, when he sits on the high altar at Rome and receives the adoration
of the Cardinals, is the very mitre worn by Dagon, the fish-god of the
Philistines and Babylonians. There were two ways in which Dagon was
anciently represented. The one was when he was depicted as half-man
half-fish; the upper part being entirely human, the under part ending in
the tail of a fish. The other was, when, to use the words of Layard, "the
head of the fish formed a mitre above that of the man, while its scaly,
fan-like tail fell as a cloak behind, leaving the human limbs and feet
exposed." * Of Dagon in this form Layard gives a
representation in his last work, which is here represented to the reader
; and no one who examines his mitre, and compares it with the Pope's as
given in Elliot's Horae, * can doubt for a moment that from that, and no
other source, has the pontifical mitre been derived. The gaping jaws of
the fish surmounting the head of the man at Nineveh are the unmistakable
counterpart of the horns of the Pope's mitre at Rome. Thus was it in the
East, at least five hundred years before the Christian era. The same
seems to have been the case also in Egypt; for Wilkinson, speaking of a
fish of the species of Siluris, says "that one of the Genii of
the Egyptian Pantheon appears under a human form, with the head of this
fish." * In the West, at a later period, we have evidence that
the Pagans had detached the fish-head mitre from the body of the fish,
and used that mitre alone to adorn the head of the great Mediatorial
god; for on several Maltese Pagan coins that god, with the well-known
attributes of Osiris, is represented with nothing of the fish save the
mitre on his head (Fig. 49); * very nearly in the same form as the mitre
on the Pope, or of a Papal bishop at this day. Even in China, the same
practice of wearing the fish-head mitre had evidently once prevailed;
for the very counterpart of the Papal mitre, as worn by the Chinese
Emperor, has subsisted to modern times. "Is it known,"
asks a well-read author of the present day, in a private communication
to me, "that the Emperor of China, in all ages, even to the
present year, as high priest of the nation, once a-year prays for the
blesses the whole nation, having his priestly robes on and his mitre on
his head, the same, the very same, as that worn by the Roman Pontiff for
near 1200 years? Such is the fact." * In proof of this
statement the accompanying figure of the Imperial mitre * is
produced--which is the very facsimile of the Popish Episcopal Mitre, in
a front view. The reader must bear in mind, that even in Japan, still
farther distant from Babel than China itself, one of the divinities is
represented with the same symbol of might as prevailed in Assyria--even
the bull's horns, and is called "The ox-headed Prince of
Heaven." * If the symbol of Nimrod, as Kronos, "The Horned
one," is thus found in Japan, it cannot be surprising that the
symbol of Dagon should be found in China.
But there is another symbol of the Pope's power which must not be
overlooked, and that is the pontifical crosier. Whence came the crosier?
The answer to this, in the first place, is, that the Pope stole it from
the Roman augur. The classical reader may remember, that when the Roman
augurs consulted the heavens, or took prognostics from the aspect of the
sky, there was a certain instrument with which it was indispensable that
they should be equipped. That instrument with which they described the
portion of the heavens on which their observations were to be made, was
curved at the one end, and was called "lituus." Now,
so manifestly was the "lituus," or crooked rod of the
Roman augurs, identical with the pontifical crosier, that Roman Catholic
writers themselves, writing in the Dark Ages, at a time when disguise
was thought unnecessary, did not hesitate to use the term "lituus"
as a synonym for the crosier. * Thus a Papal writer describes a
certain Pope or Papal bishop as "mitra lituoque decorus,"
adorned with the mitre and the augur's rod, meaning thereby that he was "adorned
with the mitre and the crosier." but this lituus, or
divining-rod, of the Roman augurs, was, as is well known, borrowed from
the Etruscans, who, again, had derived it, along with their religion,
from the Assyrians. As the Roman augur was distinguished by his crooked
rod, so the Chaldean soothsayers and priests, in the performance of
their magic rites, were generally equipped with a crook or crosier. This
magic crook can be traced up directly to the first king of Babylon, that
is, Nimrod, who, as stated by Berosus, was the first that bore the title
of a Shepherd-king. * In Hebrew, or the Chaldee of the days of Abraham, "Nimrod
the Shepherd," is just Nimrod "He-Roe"; and
from this title of the "mighty hunter before the Lord,"
have no doubt been derived, both the name of Hero itself, and all that
Hero-worship which has since overspread the world. Certain it is that
Nimrod's deified successors have generally been represented with the
crook or crosier. This was the case in Babylon and Nineveh, as the
extant monuments show. The accompanying figure * from Babylon shows the
crosier in its ruder guise.
In Layard, it may be seen in a more ornate form, and nearly
resembling the papal crosier as borne at this day. * This was the case
in Egypt, after the Babylonian power was established there, as the
statues of Osiris with his crosier bear witness, * Osiris himself being
frequently represented as a crosier with an eye above it. * This is the
case among the negroes of Africa, whose god, called the Fetiche, is
represented in the form of a crosier, as is evident from the following
words of Hurd: "They place Fetiches before their doors, and
these titular deities are made in the form of grapples or hooks, which
we generally make use of to shake our fruit trees." * This is
the case at this hour in Thibet, where the Lamas or Theros bear, as
stated by the Jesuit Huc, a crosier, as the ensign of their office. This
is the case even in the far-distant Japan, where, in a description of
the idols of the great temple of Miaco, the spiritual capital, we find
this statement: "Their heads are adorned with rays of glory,
and some of them have shepherds' crooks in their hands, pointing out
that they are the guardians of mankind against all the machinations of
evil spirits." * The crosier of the Pope, then, which he bears
as an emblem of his office, as the great shepherd of the sheep, is
neither more nor less than the augur's crooked staff, or magic rod of
the priests of Nimrod.
Now, what say the worshippers of the apostolic succession to all
this? What think they now of their vaunted orders as derived from Peter
of Rome? Surely they have much reason to be proud of them. But what, I
further ask, would even the old Pagan priests say who left the stage of
time while the martyrs were still battling against their gods, and,
rather than symbolise with them, "loved not their lives unto
the death," if they were to see the present aspect of the
so-called Church of European Christendom? What would Belshazzar himself
say, if it were possible for him to "revisit the glimpses of
the moon," and enter St. Peter's at Rome, and see the Pope in
his pontificals, in all his pomp and glory? Surely he would conclude
that he had only entered one of his own well-known temples, and that all
things continued as they were at Babylon, on that memorable night, when
he saw with astonished eyes the handwriting on the wall: "Mene,
mene tekel, Upharsin."
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