The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

512 NEAV CATHOLIC LEAGUE.swept off to prison, or sent into exile. Felons only are atlargo, who celebrate the saturnalia of license under the archfelonof the Vatican. The fisherman''s net is of steel, asits victims know. The keys are no mere symbol now, seeingPeter''s successor has become a jailor. Rome, full ofdungeons and desolate hearths, and cinctured with freshgraves, sits cowering beneath the baleful shadow of pontificaldespotism. The Word of God dare not enter thosegates within which the vicar of God sits enthroned. Anedition of Diodati's Bible, amounting to some thousands,which was commenced by the American mission under theRoman Republic, lies locked up in the vaults of the Quirinal.The incarcerated Bibles and the incarcerated Romanstell the same tale . they proclaim the unchanged andunchangeable hostility of Rome to religious and civil freedom.At Naples the same object is pursued by precisely thesame methods. Whatever coercion, mental and physical,can do to make a people swallow down the doctrine thatkings are divine and popes infallible, is now being done atNaples. The government is conducted by priests, police,and soldiers ; the capital is full of spies ; the confessional isworked to discover opinion, and the police to extirpate it.There, too, as in Rome, light, and, above all, Protestantlight, is the object of profoundest dread. The press islocked, the Bible is prohibited, and the Jesuit labours in hisspecial vocation as a propagator of ignorance, or of somethingworse. The few schools taught by British Protestantshave all been closed, and the whole youth of the country areunder Jesuit tuition.On Naples the gaze of the civilized world has been fixed,by the astounding disclosures of a British statesman.Letus look narrowly at this model kingdom, and its model king,for such Papists account Ferdinand. Here we behold aspecimen of what all kings would be were the jurisdictionand teaching of the Roman Church universal.The acts ofFerdinand, which have filled the world with horror, are but