But what was to be done? What was all this about? We are ashamed, for
humanity’s sake, to tell. It was to see a bishop _pow-wow_ over a
corner stone, _bless it_ and _lay it_ for a Romish meeting house! That
was what all this was about! What was there in that? No more than any
other pagan ceremony. No more than to see any other Irishman laying
any other stone or brick in any other building, aside from tradition
and superstition. This is the procedure of the Anti-christ, the Man of
Sin, the power gone out to deceive the whole world with sorceries; a
compound of Judaism, Paganism and Christianity, but described in the
book of God as the Apostasy. It has corrupted the four quarters of the
earth with its abominations and idolatries. It has two hundred millions
of the human race under its domination. It has caused the blood of
fifty millions of martyrs to flow. But the tide is receding. The wheel
is turning back. His secular power has departed. He does not have
Victor Emmanuel to bow down and kiss his great toe, nor to come and
crave favors of him. But he goes to Victor Emmanuel to know what favors
he can have. This puts the shoe on the other foot. Prince Bismarck
banishing the Jesuits from Germany, is another turn in the same
direction. The revolution in Mexico is in the same direction. The
Pope gets no favors in all these moves. He is strengthening his hands
in the United States a little just now, but this is only temporary,
and, we trust, will only serve to open the eyes of the people in this
country. Our people need a few demonstrations to rouse them from their
slumbers. They need to be made sensible who they are that want their
drinking saloons, and want them open on Sundays, that intend to parade
our streets with bands of music and long processions on the Lord’s day,
who they are that are trying to undermine our common schools and ruin
them, who they are that publish in our faces that our marriages are
all null and void—that we are all living in adultery because we were
not married by priests! We need a little more of this impudence in our
faces to rouse us up and cause us to see the viper we have taken into
our bosoms, and see what claim this Mystery of Iniquity has on our
charities.
It refuses to allow its adherents to become members of the Masonic
order, because it is a _secret Order_. The trouble is that it is a
_secret Order_ itself, with its _sworn members_ and _bound priests_,
its prowling Jesuits, nuns and friars, the most dangerous and complete
and perfect—the consummation of all secret Orders, from the hired
girl in the kitchen, and the hired man on the farm, up through every
position held, every situation in life, and every office held by a
Papist, to communicate intelligence to a set of men bound up in this
_Order of secrecy_, who are not even citizens in our Government, that
they may report to the Holy See in Rome! It is a secret, Pagan and
Jewish mixture with Christianity; an intriguing, insidious and stealthy
scheme, prying into the secrets of every nook and corner of every land,
and every move of every civil government on earth, and a friend to no
civil government on the face of the earth, only so far as it can be
made subservient to the purposes of the Pope.
The new Cardinal in this country is a minion of the Pope, and, without
being a citizen of the United States, when he pleases to do so, will
control the vote of some six millions of our population; and this all
done by the _secret workings_ of the Papacy, without any man seeing
the secret wires that are pulled to do it. These priests, bound all
over by religious _vows or oaths_, in a _secret conclave_, plan
schools to be taught by nuns, all in the _secret Order_, and gather
up vagrant children, while many of their own children are beggars, to
make Romanists of them, and shut them out from the light of the common
schools and colleges of this country.
Then how do these priests propose to gain power? Do they propose to
come out in open day; publicly teach the people and enlighten them?
Not a word of it. Do they propose to discuss their claims? Not a bit
of it. How then are they doing this work? _Insidiously._ It is all in
the dark, except an occasional demonstration like that we had here
on the first Lord’s day in July. What were the people taught on that
day? Did any one hear any instruction? Thousands of dollars were
expended. Thousands of people were weary and exhausted, but no one
was enlightened. No one was taught even Romanism, except those, who
from the word of God have learned the power of the grand delusion, the
mystery of iniquity that now works. They can understand the power of
the sorceries practiced to deceive and allure unwary souls.