instruments in the hands of designing, ambitious, and unscrupulous, men and organizations, for mobs, murder and revolution. Take Mexico for a very sad but forcible illustration. Intensely Romanist! Intensely ignorant! Intensely impoverished! Intensely Revolutionary! Now for six years one continual revolution succeeding revolution. Her people destroying each other and destroying the resources of their own country. Internecine slaughter and destruction. Unspeakable miseries of famine, of widows, and orphans. The curse of the Almighty upon ignorance, superstition and vice.

Those fundamentals of the "Bill of Rights" of all humanity may be briefly summed up as the following:

1. Personal Independence of Choice and Action. 2. Personal Responsibility therefor directly to God.

3. No divine Right of Kings or Priests to do wrong or evade Responsibility.

4. Families and Nations often suffer for the sins of their leaders.

5. No man has the Right or Power to evade his own Responsibility or assume another's.

6. The Right to demand individual and final Judgment of the Moral Governor of the Universe.

The Principles and Practices of the Roman Catholic Church are a crime against Manhood and a Rebellion against God.

Rome denounced every one of the above Bill of Rights of our race; and Pope Pius IX in his "Syllabus of Errors" says:

"The Right of every man to choose such religion as he pleases is a damnable heresy".

Logically and necessarily all the others proceed from the individual independence of choice and

action.

Rome denies the right of any one to question her commands, or to think anything different from the teaching of her Church. She deluged Europe and parts of America with blood in the vain endeavors to enforce this human tyranny and monstrous arrogance. Five centuries ago there were not probably five million souls in Christendom independent of her control. These were scattered and hidden away in the mountain fastnesses and caves and in the secluded valleys; and even here by the order of the Pope they were hunted down and butchered as though they were wolves or devils. We even see the Pope and his principal clergy organizing processions and singing te deums in honor of these butcheries. We find the priests and monks rejoicing in, and gloating over, the agonies of their wretched victims broken on the rack, roasting in the flames, and other fiendish tortures and forms of death. These are not Protestant lies, they are the records left us by Popes and other high priests and prominent writers of the Roman Catholic Church. The witnesses are so numerous and the corroborative evidence so accumulative, no intelligent person can escape the conviction of their absolute truth. The Pope denies individual liberty of conscience, the personal right to think and choose, and curses every life, and every limb and function of the body with a

long list of most awful curses of which Beelzebub himself would be ashamed. The smaller imps are even more vindictive than Satan.

The Roman Church assumes to stand between the Soul and God. She orders the assassination of her enemies and pretends to give full absolution for murder and a free passport to heaven to the murderer with a promise of Eternal bliss. The most amazing thing about this is that anybody but an imbecile or a criminal can believe it. Not only so but she commands a people or a nation to extirpate a whole people with fire and sword and claims to assume all responsibility therefor and even to shower benedictions upon the murderers. This is an advance upon the arrogance and tyranny of Ancient Paganism. No wonder the Scriptures describe her, "The great Babylonish Whore-the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the Earth", "Drunken with the blood of the saints", And foretells her utter and awful destruction. "Babylon is fallen, is fallen! and the smoke of her burning ascends to heaven".

The Pope now claims to be not only the representative of Jesus Christ but actually, in a sense, Jesus Christ Himself, and any dishonor to his authority dishonors God. What transcendent Arrogance! What impious and arrogant blasphemy!

When will the intelligence and manhood of the world rebel against this tyranny? How long will they suffer it! How long will this upas tree be allowed to curse and blast all that is best, most noble, and dignified, in human nature? How long, O Lord!

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CHAPTER IX

THE ORIGIN OF A PRIESTLY CASTE

HE book of Genesis tells us the Lord God made

THE

coats of skins and clothed Adam and Eve before they were driven from the Garden of Eden. The skins are supposed to be those of the animals offered in sacrifice or possibly used for food. But we are certainly told that Cain and Abel offered sacrifices. "By faith Abel offered a more excellent offering than Cain", recognizing the fact "that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins". This thought God pressed upon the consciousness of the Antediluvians as well as in all the Centuries, B. C.; because this teaching centered, and found its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the one perfect sacrifice for all sin; and the one and only means of redemption for all sinners. Afterward we find Noah building an altar and offering sacrifices to God when he and his came forth of the Ark after the flood had subsided-This would indicate that the habit of sacrificing had continued through those degenerate centuries before the flood. Later we find Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, building altars and offering sacrifices. We also find Job offering sacrifices for himself and his children; lest in their feasts, merriment, and rejoicing they might have uttered vain or impious words to stir the anger of the most high God— Job's exact place in chronology is unknown, but is supposed to date back very nearly to the time of

Abraham.

This is known as the Patriarchal form of government when the head of the family was, in a large sense, both its King and Priest.

The period from the flood to Abraham was probably much longer than that indicated by Archbishop Ussher. It probably extended over thousands of years instead of hundreds.

As the fore part of the book of Genesis is a very brief synopsis, Genealogical links from Noah to Abraham may not be all the links in the chain but only the principal ones. This does no violence to the interpretation of the Scriptures, but is in entire harmony with the other portions of them. A grandson or other near relative is sometimes called a son as in the case of Belshazzer. Also Christ is called the son of David when there were one thousand years between them. One of the leading scholars of the world, one of the faculty of Princeton University, Professor William Henry Green, gives it as his opinion that the human race has been upon the earth from ten thousand to twenty thousand years.

The tablets unearthed in Babylonia and Egypt certainly indicate at least a period between those two dates. The facts that the span of human life was reduced from 950 years, the age of Noah, to 175 years, age of Abraham, is strong corroborative evidence of the above estimate.

Until Abraham's time we have an abundance of myth and legend but very little reliable history. A large part of that which is reliable comes from tablets recently excavated in Syria, Assyria, Baby