Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/194

 Last Judgment in the spiritual world, which is the cause from which the other is an effect, has been performed? The Roman Catholic religion, so far as it consists in the holding of certain doctrines and practicing certain forms of worship, may probably continue for ages; just as the Jewish religion, though the Jewish church has long since undergone its judgment, both in the spiritual and the natural worlds, continues to this day; but the Romish religion as to that essential part of it which procures for it in the divine Word the name of Babylon;—that is, considered as a system for tyrannizing over men's minds by the prostitution of sacred things for that purpose, has received its final judgment, and never can become formidable any more."

"We have seen the Pope himself dragged from his throne and degraded into a mere tool of the ambition of Napoleon: and though he was afterwards restored by the allied sovereigns from motives of policy, yet is he shorn of his beams; his influence is annihilated; and he now sits in St. Peter's Chair (as they call it) more as a puppet than a prince. His desires may perhaps be as capricious as ever; and to promote their aims he has restored the order of the Jesuits, formerly the right hand of the papal power; but never can he restore the causes from which that order derived its efficacy. The spirit and soul of Jesuitism are gone, in the removal from their immediate connexion with the human race of those who constituted Babylon in the spiritual world; and hence, however good may be the will of the Pope's new myrmidons, being no longer supported by the same influence from the world of causes, they never can revive much more of the old Jesuits than the name."

"Evident tokens are every where springing up, evincing, that the pretension on the part of any fallible man to the power of opening and shutting heaven at pleasure, which has been the grand engine by the use of which the Roman pontiffs attained such extraordinary influence, will soon be scouted as ridiculous through every country of Christendom, and that men will soon every where wonder by what strange infatuation their fathers could have submitted to such palpable arrogance and blasphemy. The cause of that infatuation, according to our views, was, that multitudes of those who, in this world, had promoted the Romish eclesiastical corruptions,—of priests and monks and their adherents, had established themselves in the intermediate region of the spiritual world, acting as clouds by which the light that is ever in the effort of flowing from heaven into the human mind was in great part intercepted, and instead of it were