The Footprints of the JesuitsThompson, Richard W. (Richard Wigginton)
History
The Footprints of the Jesuits
Thompson, Richard W. (Richard Wigginton)
Jesuits -- Controversial Literature; Jesuits -- History
We must do nothing, either now or hereafter, forbidden by our national
character, or by the liberalism we prize so highly. Our Constitution
amply protects the rights of free speech, free thought, and a free
press, all of which must be held inviolable; but violence is manifestly
done to the spirit of patriotism which guarantees this protection
when it is demanded of any portion of our population that they shall
participate in the work of undoing, in any degree whatsoever, what the
founders of the Government considered fundamental. We are prohibited
from submitting to anything that shall tend, even by possibility, to
subject the people to any sovereignty, either spiritual or temporal,
higher than themselves, in such matters as involve their own happiness
and welfare. It would be well, consequently, for those who are seeking
to accomplish this, to learn that the world is large enough for them
and us; that there are other fields wherein better grounds of hope are
furnished for re-welding the fragments of shattered monarchies; and
that, when they avail themselves of the tolerance of our institutions
to assail their foundations, they become intruders into a peaceful and
harmonious circle, where, but for them, universal peace and quiet would
prevail.
In his conflict with the Italian people for the re-possession of the
temporal power, by overthrowing the Constitutional Government they
have established, the pope could not find another ally so formidable
as the Jesuits, nor one with such implacable hatred of liberalism
and popular government. Their society is so united and compact that
its ranks can not be broken. They are everywhere the same, moved
by a common impulse, under the dictation of their general in Rome.
They are the deadly enemies of civil and religious liberty. Nothing
that stands in their way can become so sacred as to escape their
vengeance. Protestantism has borne no fruits to which they have ever
been reconciled. They consider the Reformation which gave birth to it
to have been criminal resistance to the only rightful authority upon
earth--that which proceeds from Church and State combined. They believe
that the condition of mankind during the Middle Ages, staggering under
the weight of feudal oppression, was preferable to modern progress
and enlightenment; that human happiness would be promoted by the
return to that period; that the political right of self-government
by the people can not be set up against the higher right of papal
and monarchical power; that the progress of the advancing nations is
delusive and unsubstantial; and that institutions which guarantee civil
and religious freedom, if not arrested by some coercive power strong
enough to put an end to them, will lead, through heresy, to social ruin
and desolation. If, at the period of the Reformation, this society had
not been established for the express purpose of counteracting its
influence, a knowledge of the difference between primitive Christianity
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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