Page:One Link in the Chain of Apostolic Succesion; or, The Crimes of Alexander Borgia (1854).djvu/19

X hence I have taken one name, one career, from the list, for the material of this story,—that of the notorious and infamous robber, assassin, seducer, incestuous libertine, —Alexander Borgia!

From his career of crime and infamy it is my purpose to show what corruption and pollution lies festering at the heart of the Catholic church. Alexander Borgia is boasted, by "all good Catholics," as one of those it is their delight to consider noble leaders of their church; but never was earth polluted by the existence of a more depraved and crime-stained monster in the shape of man. His name was written imperishably on the age in which he lived, in characters of blood. History has set him down as a mark for the execration and loathing of all mankind; and yet we are told, by the most sapient disciples of the church of Rome, that this man ranks as one of the apostolic successors of St. Peter!

The chief object of this work will be to show his claims to that honor, and to reveal the general evils that were then, and are now, incorporated in the religion (??) of which he was, and is, a loudly-vaunted representative! If the reader finds him painted, not as a man, but as a fiend in human semblance, breeding vice and crime in a half-benighted world, they will remember that this feature is a matter of history!