Wearing Out the Saints of the Most High

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. (Revelation 13:7)

Has the Papacy employed physical force against dissenters? Let Professor Baudrillart, rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris and later a cardinal, reply.

"The Catholic Church . . . loudly proclaims that she has, a ‘horror of blood.’ Nevertheless when confronted by heresy she . . . has recourse to force, to corporal punishment, to torture. She creates tribunals like those of the Inquisition . . . encourages a crusade, or a religious war . . . Especially did she act thus in the sixteenth century with regard to Protestants. . . . She lit in Italy, in the Low Countries and above all in Spain the funeral piles of the Inquisition. In France . . . and in England . . . she tortured the heretics whilst both in France and Germany . . . she encouraged and actively aided, the religious wars. No one will deny that we have here a great scandal to our contemporaries . . .

"Indeed, even among our friends and our brothers we find those who dare not look this problem in the face. They ask permission from the Church to ignore or even deny all those acts and institutions in the past which have made orthodoxy compulsory." [Professor Alfred Baudrillart, The Catholic Church, the Renaissance and Protestantism, London, 1908, pages 182—184]

This book bears the sanction of the Roman Catholic authorities, and of their "censor."

Dr. J. Dowling says:

"From the birth of Popery in 606, to the present time, it is estimated by careful and credible historians, that more than fifty millions of the human family, have been slaughtered for the crime of heresy by popish persecutors, an average of more than forty thousand religious murders for every year of the existence of Popery." [History of Romanism, pages 541, 542]

W.E.H. Lecky says:

"That the Church of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution that has ever existed among mankind, will be questioned by no Protestant who has a competent knowledge of history. The memorials, indeed, of many of her persecutions are now so scanty, that it is impossible to form a complete conception of the multitude of her victims, and it is quite certain that no power of imagination can adequately realize their sufferings." [History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, Volume II, p. 32]

The Anglican Scholar, Dr. H. Grattan Guiness, says:

"It has been calculated that the Popes of Rome have directly or indirectly slain . . . fifty millions of men and women who refused to be parties to Romish idolatries, who held to the Bible as the Word of God." [The Approaching End of the Age, p. 212]

These distasteful accounts of history abundantly confirm that the Papacy fulfills this tenth specification of the Antichrist.

With regard to heretics . . . on their own side there is sin, by which they deserve not only to be separated from the church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death. ( Part II of second part, Question 11, Article 3, Volume 2, page 440)

Whoever denies a truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or who calls into doubt or who totally repudiates the Christian faith, and does not retract after having been legitimately warned, is to be punished as a heretic.

When she [the Roman Catholic Church] thinks it good to use physical force, she will use it. . . . But will the Catholic Church give bond that she will not persecute at all. . . . The Catholic Church gives no bonds for her good behaviour.