For long and dismal ages the Roman Church exhibited to perfection the evil, the folly and fatality of that false and deceptive proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth. Then came the Reformation. It so smote the Catholic Church that men imagined the tiara to be broken, crushed and scattered to the winds forever. They were mistaken. It came from underneath that blow almost as if it had risen from the dead. To-day it is more populous than ever, having a membership of at least two hundred millions. It has a more intensely emphasized solidarity. It is filled with enthusiasm, with ever-increasing arrogance and persistent aggression. It is the religious incubus of the hour, the spiritual paralysis of nations and their most dangerous political menace. With brazen effrontery and calculating boldness it has its clutch upon the throat of this Republic, controls its government from the Presidential office down through army and navy, has open mass in the shipyards of the latter, in camp and barracks its priests are masters and its wily knights of Columbus have obtained governmental favours and consideration the Young Men's Christian Association would not dare to claim. It rules your cities, holds the balance of political power and can, when it will, elect a President, and will promptly do so when the candidate for that high office shall be willing, as already it has been done by the present occupant of that office, to visit the Vatican or officially recognize the civil as well as religious authority of the Pope or receive the Apostolic delegate of the Papal See. The clutch of Romanism with its strangle hold is on the throat of what remains of Protestantism. Protestantism is the after birth of the Reformation. Protestantism repudiated all the temporalities of Rome but held on to the proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth. Protestantism is to-day broken up into multiplying fragments. If there be any unity remaining in it it is the unity that comes from the compromising denial of the convictions that led to the original break into fragments; a unity that hopes to maintain itself by classifying many of its former convictions as "non-essentials" and thus constitutes a combination that must become more and more colourless and inefficient in respect to doctrine.