More than ever arrogant, stubborn, and despotic, now that she has been nearly upset by modern research, not daring to interfere with the powerful champions of science, the Latin Church revenges herself upon the unpopular phenomena. A despot without a victim, is a word void of sense; a power which neglects to assert itself through outward, well-calculated effects, risks being doubted in the end. The Church has no intention to fall into the oblivion of the ancient myths, or to suffer her authority to be too closely questioned. Hence she pursues, as well as the times permit, her traditional policy. Lamenting the enforced extinction of her ally, the Holy Inquisition, she makes a virtue of necessity. The only victims now within reach are the Spiritists of France. Recent events have shown that the meek spouse of Christ never disdains to retaliate on helpless victims.

Having successfully performed her part of Deus-ex-Machina from behind the French Bench, which has not scrupled to disgrace itself for her, the Church of Rome sets to work and shows in the year 1876 what she can do. From the whirling tables and dancing pencils of profane Spiritualism, the Christian world is warned to turn to the divine “miracles” of Lourdes. Meanwhile, the ecclesiastical authorities utilize their time in arranging for other more easy triumphs, calculated to scare the superstitious out of their senses. So, acting under orders, the clergy hurl dramatic, if not very impressive anathemas from every Catholic diocese; threaten right and left; excommunicate and curse. Per-

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ceiving, finally, that her thunderbolts directed even against crowned heads fall about as harmlessly as the Jupiterean lightnings of Offenbach’s Calchas, Rome turns about in powerless fury against the victimized proteges of the Emperor of Russia — the unfortunate Bulgarians and Servians. Undisturbed by evidence and sarcasm, unbaffled by proof, “the lamb of the Vatican” impartially divides his wrath between the liberals of Italy, “the impious whose breath has the stench of the sepulchre,” the “schismatic Russian Sarmates,” and the heretics and spiritualists, “who worship at the bottomless pit where the great Dragon lies in wait.”

Mr. Gladstone went to the trouble of making a catalogue of what he terms the “flowers of speech,” disseminated through these Papal discourses. Let us cull a few of the chosen terms used by this vicegerent of Him who said that, “whosoever shall say Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire.” They are selected from authentic discourses. Those who oppose the Pope are “wolves, Pharisees, thieves, liars, hypocrites, dropsical children of Satan, sons of perdition, of sin, and corruption, satellites of Satan in human flesh, monsters of hell, demons incarnate, stinking corpses, men issued from the pits of hell, traitors and Judases led by the spirit of hell; children of the deepest pits of hell,” etc., etc.; the whole piously collected and published by Don Pasquale di Franciscis, whom Gladstone has, with perfect propriety, termed, “an accomplished professor of flunkeyism in things spiritual.”

Since his Holiness the Pope has such a rich vocabulary of invectives at his command, why wonder that the Bishop of Toulouse did not scruple to utter the most undignified falsehoods about the Protestants

and Spiritualists of America — people doubly odious to a Catholic — in his address to his diocese: “Nothing,” he remarks, “is more common in an era of unbelief than to see a false revelation substitute itself for the true one, and minds neglect the teachings of the Holy Church, to devote themselves to the study of divination and the occult sciences.” With a fine episcopal contempt for statistics, and strangely confounding in his memory the audiences of the revivalists, Moody and Sankey, and the patrons of darkened seance-rooms, he utters the unwarranted and fallacious assertion that “it has been proven that Spiritualism, in the United States, has caused one-sixth of all the cases of suicide and insanity.” He says that it is not possible that the spirits “teach either an exact science, because they are lying demons, or a useful science, because the

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of the word of Satan, like Satan himself, is sterile.” He warns his dear collaborateurs, that “the writings in favor of Spiritualism are under the ban”; and he advises them to let it be known that “to frequent spiritual circles with the intention of accepting the doctrine, is to apostatize from the Holy Church, and assume the risk of excommunication”; finally, says he, “Publish the fact that the teaching of no spirit should prevail against that of the pulpit of Peter, which is the teaching of the Spirit of God Himself”!!

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