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From Here to Forever
The Lord’s supper had been supplanted by the idolatrous sacrifice
of the mass. Papal priests pretended 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. Christians were required, on pain of death, to
avow their faith in this Heaven-insulting heresy.
In the thirteenth century was established that most terrible engine
of the papacy—the Inquisition. In their secret councils Satan and
his angels controlled the minds of evil men. 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 appear to
human eyes. “Babylon the great” was “drunken with the blood of
the saints.” See
Revelation 17:5, 6
. 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. For hundreds of years
the doctrines of Rome were implicitly received. Its clergy were
honored and liberally sustained. Never since has the Roman Church
attained to greater dignity, magnificence, or power.
But “the noon of the papacy was the midnight of the world.
The Scriptures were almost unknown. The papal leaders hated the
light which would reveal their sins. God’s law, the standard of
righteousness, having been removed, they practiced vice without
restraint. The palaces of popes and prelates were scenes of vile
debauchery. Some of the pontiffs were guilty of crimes so revolting
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that secular rulers endeavored to depose them as monsters too vile
to be tolerated. For centuries Europe made no progress in learning,
arts, or civilization. A moral and intellectual paralysis had fallen
upon Christendom.
Such were the results of banishing the Word of God!
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1
Cardinal Wiseman’s Lectures on “The Real Presence,” lecture 8, sec. 3, par. 26.
2
Wylie, History of Protestantism, book 1, chap. 4.