Without violating the spirit of charity, and in fealty to the obligation of truth, it must be confessed that the history of the Church of Rome has too often furnished just occasion for its identification with the Babylon of the Apocalypse. Its worldliness, its unscrupulous alliances with kings and princes to carry out its ambitious projects, its disregard of moral obligations in the pursuit of its policy, its ignoring of the demands of justice, honor, truth and mercy, its persistent struggle to achieve and maintain temporal supremacy, its awful claim of present and eternal mastery over the bodies, minds, and souls of men, its luxury and wantonness, its bloody spirit of persecution on the one hand, and, on the other, the duplicity, the false asceticism, the assumption of the appearance of the Lamb while animated by the spirit of the dragon, the substitution of its own codes and edicts and ethics for the word of God, which have specially characterized its religious orders and confraternities, are sufficiently like the adversary of true religion delineated by St. John to excite thought and induce self-examination. But it would be unjust to charge to the account of systems imperfections and errors which spring out of the inherent frailty of human nature. And the spirit of evil against which the apostle warns us has had unhappily a range wider than pagan or papal Rome or any organization yet witnessed on earth. If that Church has too often carried upon her forehead the title, “Mother of harlots,” instead of the motto, “Holiness unto the Lord,” she has many a sister who must sit beside her as of kindred spirit; and, if the one has been “Aholah,” the other has been “Aholibah.” If, among her followers, she has numbered both some of the purest saints who have trodden this earth and some of the vilest sinners, and these, too, in her loftiest places, she is not alone in the distinction.