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Roman Church
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punishment to be visited upon the bodies and souls of the offenders.
Thus the minds of the people were turned away from God to fallible,
erring, and cruel men, nay more, to the prince of darkness himself,
who exercised his power through them. Sin was disguised in a garb
of sanctity. When the Scriptures are suppressed, and man comes to
regard himself as supreme, we need look only for fraud, deception,
and debasing iniquity. With the elevation of human laws and tradi-
tions was manifest the corruption that ever results from setting aside
the law of God.
Those were days of peril for the church of Christ. The faithful
standard-bearers were few indeed. Though the truth was not left
without witnesses, yet at times it seemed that error and superstition
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would wholly prevail, and true religion would be banished from the
earth. The gospel was lost sight of, but the forms of religion were
multiplied, and the people were burdened with rigorous exactions.
They were taught not only to look to the pope as their mediator,
but to trust to works of their own to atone for sin. Long pilgrimages,
acts of penance, the worship of relics, the erection of churches,
shrines, and altars, the payment of large sums to the church,—these
and many similar acts were enjoined to appease the wrath of God or
to secure his favor; as if God were like men, to be angered at trifles,
or pacified by gifts or acts of penance!
Notwithstanding vice prevailed, even among the leaders of the
Romish Church, her influence seemed steadily to increase. About
the close of the eighth century, papists put forth the claim that in the
first ages of the church the bishops of Rome had possessed the same
spiritual power which they now assumed. To establish this claim,
some means must be employed to give it a show of authority; and
this was readily suggested by the father of lies. Ancient writings
were forged by monks. Decrees of councils before unheard of were
discovered, establishing the universal supremacy of the pope from
the earliest times. And a church that had rejected the truth greedily
accepted these deceptions.
The few faithful builders upon the true foundation were per-
plexed and hindered as the rubbish of false doctrine obstructed the
work. Like the builders upon the wall of Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s
day, some were ready to say, “The strength of the bearers of burdens
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is decayed, and there is much rubbish, so that we are not able to