He tempted her with the same temptation he had offered her Lord: The rulership of the world.
If she would turn aside from a heaven-ordained bridegroom and a king whose face she could not see, she might win the world as her kingdom and rule it in spite of the cross.
The offer of world rulership sounded pleasant in her ears.
She yielded.
She fell into the arms of the world.
The world became her paramour.
She became the world"s mistress.
Out of that unG.o.dly and sensual alliance was born the illegitimate child, that woful ecclesiastical offspring, we call the Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church became the Holy Roman Empire.
The Empire was the Church.
For long and dismal ages the Roman Church exhibited to perfection the evil, the folly and fatality of that false and deceptive proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth.
Then came the Reformation. It so smote the Catholic Church that men imagined the tiara to be broken, crushed and scattered to the winds forever.
They were mistaken.
It came from underneath that blow almost as if it had risen from the dead.
To-day it is more populous than ever, having a membership of at least two hundred millions. It has a more intensely emphasized solidarity. It is filled with enthusiasm, with ever-increasing arrogance and persistent aggression.
It is the religious incubus of the hour, the spiritual paralysis of nations and their most dangerous political menace.
With brazen effrontery and calculating boldness it has its clutch upon the throat of this Republic, controls its government from the Presidential office down through army and navy, has open ma.s.s in the shipyards of the latter, in camp and barracks its priests are masters and its wily knights of Columbus have obtained governmental favours and consideration the Young Men"s Christian a.s.sociation would not dare to claim.
It rules your cities, holds the balance of political power and can, when it will, elect a President, and will promptly do so when the candidate for that high office shall be willing, as already it has been done by the present occupant of that office, to visit the Vatican or officially recognize the civil as well as religious authority of the Pope or receive the Apostolic delegate of the Papal See.
The clutch of Romanism with its strangle hold is on the throat of what remains of Protestantism.
Protestantism is the after birth of the Reformation.
Protestantism repudiated all the temporalities of Rome but held on to the proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth.
Protestantism is to-day broken up into multiplying fragments. If there be any unity remaining in it it is the unity that comes from the compromising denial of the convictions that led to the original break into fragments; a unity that hopes to maintain itself by cla.s.sifying many of its former convictions as "non-essentials" and thus const.i.tutes a combination that must become more and more colourless and inefficient in respect to doctrine.
Some of its theological inst.i.tutions are nothing better than clearing houses of infidelity and the curricula made up of Jericho theology. It has universities in which many of the professors have been graduated in Germany, having pa.s.sed through the poison gas factory of the Berlin university, and under the camouflage department of "sacred literature" are sending out the mentally and spiritually asphyxiating poison of German rationalism, inoculating every fresh lot of newly made ministers and would-be missionaries with rank unbelief and Bible repudiation, distributing the poison into the back counties as well as munic.i.p.al centers until there are scores of men who once stood for a whole Gospel and a certified Word of G.o.d who now stand first on one foot then on the other debating with themselves whether this Scripture that was once considered holy and sufficient is after all a revelation from G.o.d or an invention of man.
A large number of men who are at the front in the teaching, the management, the organization and control of the churches of the different denominations repudiate practically every fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith.
They deny the Virgin birth.
The denial of the Virgin birth puts a stain upon the mother of Jesus as of a woman who has broken wedlock and sends her son forth as a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, an illegitimate who had no legal right to come into the world; and then illogically, if not hypocritically, those who deny it bid us take this son and make Him the exemplar of righteousness, forgetting or ignoring the self-evident fact that if, indeed, He had but a human and natural father then was He bred in sin and unfit to be set up as the supreme standard of righteousness and holiness among men.
There are those who deny the sacrificial character of the death of the cross.
They repudiate atonement by the shedding of blood.
When we tell them it is written without shedding of blood there is no remission and it is the blood of Jesus Christ, G.o.d"s Son, that alone cleanseth from all sin they fling up their hands in protest, tell us we are to be numbered among the figures of the past and that the theology we seek to maintain is the theology of the butcher shop, the barbarous doctrine of the shambles and the shadow of old -time tribal G.o.ds whose vengefulness and wrath could be appeased only by the murder of a victim.
They repudiate the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the Lord.
His body has long ago mingled with the dust of Palestine and been blown afar by careless winds. If He rose at all it was as the principle of righteousness and truth, whatever such a resurrection may mean. They will no longer tolerate the insistent need of regeneration. It has been said that "if a man is well born the first time he does not need to be born the second time."
In the nature of the case such teaching rejects our Lord"s bodily ascension to heaven and His session as a glorified man who is very G.o.d at the right hand of the Father.
Above all, and as a further consequent of such an att.i.tude, teachers of this cla.s.s repudiate with an almost hysterical outcry, not only the thought that the Lord will come a second time to this world, but that those who love Him and yearn to see Him will ever behold Him coming in visible glory so that they may stand face to face with Him and get the very touch of His hands upon them in the vital benediction for which they are longing.
These advanced teachers repudiate the Bible as the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of G.o.d,
The Pentateuch, the writings of Moses, is a bundle of folk lore, Moses himself a fiction no more substantial than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The historic books of the Old Testament are unreliable and therefore not history at all. The book of the prophet Isaiah instead of one author has many, each in turn contradicting the other. The book of Ezekiel from its incomprehensible wheels as they flash by the banks of the river Chebar to the impossible temple and its animal offerings with the ever-deepening river flowing out of it, is as mystic as the amazing cherubim which the prophet seeks, but apparently fails, to describe. The prophecies of Daniel were written long after the events they pretend to foretell. From Genesis to Malachi the Old Testament is in reality the mixed history of a tribal people with a national G.o.d whose attributes and demands are no more authentic and authoritative than those of the G.o.ds of Greece and Rome.
The New Testament while a degree of advance on the Old by reason of the progress of the times and the more cultivated environment of its origin is not a whit more divinely inspired. The three Synoptic Gospels are witnesses summoned to court where their success is the contradiction and confusion of the story they attempt to tell. The book of Acts is a combination pamphlet put together by the followers of Peter and Paul as an attempt to compromise between the one who was the Apostle to the Circ.u.mcision and the other who was the Apostle to the Gentiles.
The epistles of Paul are filled with the pernicious influence of apocalyptic, Jewish fictions and the cra.s.s concept the Apostle had of the kingdom of Christ. Page after page is filled with proof that he expected the Lord to come in his day and was sorely mistaken, making that confession at the close of his writings and turning his attention to death and the grave, no longer having expectation of the Coming of the Lord as the daily hope of the Church.
It is these palpable errors of Paul, his honest, but undoubted mistakes that are wholly responsible for that strange thing (so the Post-millennialists think it) known as Pre-millennialism, a system of teaching which stands for a whole Bible, a Gospel of redeeming blood, a risen and actually coming Saviour, coming again in the flesh, and seeks with an insistent and constant "thus saith the Lord" to win the souls of men to a grace-given and grace-dealing Saviour. (And I may say in pa.s.sing that Paul, under G.o.d, is undoubtedly responsible for this doctrine so persistent and aggressive, this doctrine of Premillennialism.)
To the advanced theological professor Revelation is a piece of crazy quilt patchwork, so full of symbols that have no intelligent meaning, symbols that can be interpreted by twenty different expositors in twenty different ways, is so full of monsters and nightmare doings that only an unbalanced mind could have written it and one equally unbalanced would alone attempt to decipher it.
To these teachers and leaders who count themselves as progressive followers of the Christ of G.o.d, who practically set aside the matter of miracles as no more worthy of credence than the stories of Alice in Wonderland, the final place of the deposit of authority is in the individual and subconscious mind.
These professors, teachers and leaders to a large degree are an expression of Protestantism.
Protestantism to-day stands for everything in general and nothing in particular, except its protest against being definite and particular.
It has thrown eschatology overboard.
It no longer has any interest in hereafter things.
There may be a holy city in heaven; it does not know, it will not affirm for nor against; but it does know there are unholy cities on earth.
The streets of the upper city may be paved with gold; it will not enter into controversy about it; but it is certain the streets down here are paved with poor asphalt and trodden by footsore and weary men.
Heaven may be more desirable than earth. The condition there may be a great advance on this. Advanced thinkers in Protestantism will neither affirm nor deny that; but they are convinced the conditions down here should be made much better and if possible even that of heaven on earth.
The truth is, both heaven and h.e.l.l, like angelology, have fallen out of modern theology. Heaven is too high and h.e.l.l too deep. No telescope has ever revealed the one and modern sweetness, gentleness and light repudiate the cruelty and sufferings of the other.
The Gospel for the individual soul, the soul the Son of G.o.d once outweighed against a whole world in all that the world might stand for of wealth and riches and power and attained ambitions, saying the profit in the gain of a whole world would not equal the loss of one soul, has been set aside.
Instead we have that modern and amazing evangel known as the "Social Gospel."