Napoleon III and the Papacy [pp. 686-702]

Napoleon III. and the Papacy.
settled on any terms which will allow him to remain in
Rome.
So complete is the prostration of that once mighty office.
And it falls not by a tempest of foreign force, but by its own
natural decay. Its root has died in the soil of humanity. It
belonged to the childhood of the church, and is now put away
as a childish thing. It belonged to a forming period of the
Christian nations; and now as fast as the nations attain to
manly intelligence and freedom, they cast off the Papacy.
There never was on earth a temporary institution, not even the
feudalism of Europe, or the divinely appointed system of Moses,
that was more manifestly preliminary and provisional, intended
to prepare the way for something better; none that has more
evidently had its day, and become more thoroughly obsolete,
than the institution of the Papacy. The fall is a sign of the
steady and sure progress of the kingdom of Christ. So must
also everything decline which belongs only to her training
through the successive stages of her growth; everything which
does not belong to her perfection as the body of Christ, and is
not an organ and ornament of her glorious manhood.
The changes now in progress in the populations of Europe
and Asia, to say nothing of other parts of the world, are more
suggestive than any which the history of those countries has
recorded before. Great events are taking place, and greater
still are approaching. The Turkish empire seems virtually at
an end; waiting only for the political system of Europe to
digest and secrete the material. It has been already compelled,
in its weakness, to tolerate Christian missionaries, until thousands of its Mohammedans have had their attention invited to
the Holy Scriptures. We refer not to the Catholic Christians
of Syria, who are now suffering so dreadfully from the barbarities of the Druses, but to those in Turkey, reached by the
labours of Protestant missionaries. Millions in Italy are now
accessible to Protestant influence, who never have been before.
Even the Catholic portion of the church is leaving the Papacy
behind, in many quarters, and pressing forward to that which
is before. The kingdoms of the world are becoming the kingdom of Christ. They are everywhere preparing to protect his
people in their privileges and their duties as Christians. They
1860.]
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