THE general Government is not alone in making appropriations for religious education and religious instruction. Among the items in an appropriation bill recently introduced into the Maine legislature, is, “For Priest’s Salary, $200.” Another bill appropriates $1,000 for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and $3,000 for the Sisters of Charity in Lewiston. The fact that State governments are also involved in this iniquity does not make it any better. It simply shows the extent of the evil and the urgent necessity for educating the people upon the correct principles of the separation of Church and State.
THE Western Watchman, a Roman Catholic paper of St. Louis, Mo., contained the following editorial in its issue of February 14:—
The Protestant papers are indignant at the pope for expressing a hope that the United States might one day become Catholic. They declare that in such event liberty would be no more. Tut-tut men. You are mad. If the United States were to become Catholic to-morrow it would take all the sensible Catholics in the land all they could do to prevent the converts from making the profession of any other than the Catholic faith a penal offense.
The Watchman is entirely correct in its conclusions, and the reason for the correctness of its deductions can be found in the Word of the Lord. When men who have known the truth, reject it and turn from light to darkness, the Saviour says to them: “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” Again, speaking of the tyrannical ecclesiastical system of his time, the prototype of the papacy, he said of its converts: “Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, ye make him two-fold more the child of hell than yourselves.” Yes, an apostate Protestantism is more to be dreaded than the papacy itself.
THE Roman Catholic paper, the Western Watchman, thus defends the pope’s shrewd method of addressing the American people under pretense of addressing the Roman Catholic bishops of America:—
Bishop Paret, of Maryland, is highly indignant because Leo XIII., in his late letter, addresses himself to the American people. He thinks he should confine his counsel to Catholics. The pope is the spiritual head of the Church; and the Church claims the spiritual allegiance of all those who are baptized.
So the pope claims the spiritual allegiance of even the editors of the AMERICAN SENTINEL and addressed his late encyclical to them. Well, we have received it, and have made several comments on it. The pope will find some of them on the first and second pages of this paper.