ROMISH IDOLATRY DEFINED.

            ‘The images of Christ, and of the Virgin Mother of God, and of other Saints,’ saith the Council of Trent, ‘are to be kept and continued in temples especially, and due honour and homage paid to them. Not that it should be believed there is any divinity or virtue in them for which they should be worshipped, or that any thing is to be sought from them, or that trust is to be placed in them, as was formerly done by the pagans who put their hope in idols; but because the honour shown them is referred to the prototypes whom they represent: so that we adore Christ through the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head and kneel, and pay homage to the Saints whose similitude they bear.’

            Such is the way in which the Council endeavours to relieve Papists of the charge of idolatry. But they may refine as much as they please about the distinction that exists between their views and the ideas of Pagans in the adoration of images, the acts still remain. Papists and Pagans, brethren of the same great synagogue, namely Satan’s, both ‘kiss,’ ‘uncover the head, and kneel’ to idols. These are acts of adoration before the senseless stocks they hallow; and by these acts they constitute themselves idolaters—payers of honour and homage to ‘statues of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood; which can neither see, nor hear, nor walk,’ which are due to God alone. The law which convicts them of idolatry is,

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.’

Papists do all this. They have ‘other gods,’ they make graven images; and they make likenesses of Christ, of the Virgin, and of ‘Saints,’ whose ghosts they say are in heaven above. They bow down to them, and serve them in divers ways, celebrating days to their honour, making votive offerings on the shrines, and ‘saying prayers’ to them: and more besotted and stupid than the old pagans themselves, they do honour and homage to worm-eaten skull bones and shins of the dead! The ghosts of their deceased patrons are the ‘other gods before Jehovah’ whom they honour with worshipful fanaticism far above him.

            Such is the idolatry, the soul-debasing superstition, blasphemously styled Christianity, against which a word is forbidden to be published by the Jesuitical friends of ‘Order and Religion,’ as it is called, in the dark places of the earth! Even ‘enlightened protestant Britain’ endows Maynooth, a hot-bed of papal treason against its institutions and the freedom of its people, for the inculcation of its diabolism! And in the United States, the ugly monster that crushed the Protestantism of Hungary, is flattered by intriguers of all parties for the sake of its votes. But we rejoice to know that ‘Jehovah is a jealous God;’ and that for the honour of his own name he will not permit such an outrage on truth and reason to curse the earth with its presence a single day beyond the appointed time of its destruction.

EDITOR.

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            It is not after all an unwholesome discipline which forces the supporters of new facts and opinions, in proportion as they are startling, to put forth their energies to battle against stubborn opposition, and to demonstrate repeatedly, and under all possible disadvantages, the truth of the things which they believe. Argue the matter as we may, in proportion to the strangeness of a set of statements will always be the incredulity with which they are received.

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