Apostasy
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to terrify the credulous and superstitious multitudes. By this heresy
is affirmed the existence of a place of torment, in which the souls of
such as have not merited eternal damnation are to suffer punishment
for their sins, and from which, when freed from impurity, they are
admitted to Heaven.
Still another fabrication was needed to enable Rome to profit by
the fears and the vices of her adherents. This was supplied by the
doctrine of indulgences. Full remission of sins, past, present, and
future, and release from all the pains and penalties incurred, were
promised to all who would enlist in the pontiff’s wars to extend his
temporal dominion, to punish his enemies, or to exterminate those
who dared deny his spiritual supremacy. The people were also taught
that by the payment of money to the church they might free themselves
from sin, and also release the souls of their deceased friends who were
confined in the tormenting flames. By such means did Rome fill her
coffers, and sustain the magnificence, luxury, and vice of the pretended
representatives of Him who had not where to lay his head.
The scriptural ordinance of the Lord’s supper had been supplanted
by the idolatrous sacrifice of the mass. Papist priests pretended, by
their senseless mummery, to convert the simple bread and wine into
the actual body and blood of Christ. With blasphemous presumption,
they openly claimed the power of “creating God, the Creator of all
things.” All Christians were required, on pain of death, to avow their
faith in this horrible, Heaven-insulting heresy. Multitudes who refused
were given to the flames.
In the thirteenth century was established that most terrible of all
the engines of the papacy,—the Inquisition. The prince of darkness
wrought with the leaders of the papal hierarchy. In their secret councils,
Satan and his angels controlled the minds of evil men, while unseen
in the midst stood an angel of God, taking the fearful record of their
iniquitous decrees, and writing the history of deeds too horrible to
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appear to human eyes. “Babylon the great” was “drunken with the
blood of the saints.” The mangled forms of millions of martyrs cried
to God for vengeance upon that apostate power.
Popery had become the world’s despot. Kings and emperors bowed
to the decrees of the Roman pontiff. The destinies of men, both for
time and for eternity, seemed under his control. For hundreds of years
the doctrines of Rome had been extensively and implicitly received, its