IT IS TIME the CHURCH , the BODY OF CHRIST …AWAKES FROM ITS SLUMBER….you have been asleep far too long…WAKE!!!
….Even the Romanists themselves shame you in their clear-sighted comprehension of the issues of this question. Cardinal Manning says: “The Catholic Church is either the masterpiece of Satan or the Kingdom of the Son of God.”
Cardinal Newman says: “A sacerdotal order is historically the essence of the Church of Rome; if not divinely appointed, it is doctrinally the essence of antichrist.”
In both these statements the issue is clear, and it is the same. Rome herself admits, openly admits, that if she is not the very kingdom of Christ, she is that of antichrist.
Rome declares she is one or the other. She herself propounds and urges this solemn alternative.
You shrink from it, do you? I accept it.
Conscience constrains me. History compels me. The past, the awful past rises before me.
I see THE GREAT APOSTASY, I see the desolation of Christendom, I see the smoking ruins, I see the reign of monsters; I see those vicegods, that Gregory VIII, that Innocent III, that Boniface VIII, that Alexander VI, that Gregory XIII, that Pius IX; I see their long succession, I see their abominable lives;
I see them worshipped by blinded generations, bestowing hollow benedictions, bartering lying indulgences, creating a paganized Christianity;I see their liveried slaves, their shaven priests, their celibate confessors; I see the infamous confessional, the ruined women, the murdered innocents;
I hear the lying absolutions, the dying groans; I hear the cries of the victims; I hear the anathemas, the curses, the thunders of the interdicts;
I see the racks, the dungeons, the stakes; I see that inhuman Inquisition, those fires of Smithfield, those butcheries of St. Bartholomew, that Spanish Armada, those unspeakable massacres.
I see it all, and in the name of the ruin it has wrought in the Church and in the world, in the name of the truth it has denied, the temple it has defiled, the God it has blasphemed, the souls it has destroyed; in the name of the millions it has deluded, the millions it has slaughtered, the millions it has damned; with holy confessors, with noble reformers, with innumerable martyrs, with the saints of ages, I denounce it as the masterpiece of Satan as the body and soul and essence of antichrist.
DR. H. G. GUINNESS
The great Revival Preacher of 1859