which he is to bestow, and which is to soothe the mind and allay the horrors of the dying sinner. By such bargains, the Popish association of priests, monks, and nuns, were at one time proprietors of nearly half the land of Scotland, and of a tenth (teind) of the annual produce of the remaining lands of our country.
2. The fraternity affirm that each individual priest has the extraordinary power of actually making or creating God himself. On the repetition, by the priest, of certain Latin words (hoc est corpus meum), a morsel of bread (generally a wafer) is transformed into the Eternal Second Person of the Holy Trinity, both God and man in one person. The priest offers him up as a sacrifice for the sins of any person who will pay for the operation. The table at which the operation is performed, is called the altar. After a wafer has thus been converted (without any apparent change) into the Lord Jesus Christ, soul, body, and divinity, it is raised aloft, and all persons are expected to kneel and worship it, as it is borne along the streets to the house of any sick person who has sent for it and is to pay for it.
Necessarily, the priest who has the power to create the Son of God, or to perform the Mass, must, in the estimation of Papists, be of extreme importance—sacred in his person and awfully privileged.
To all practical purposes, Christ has only died for the profit of the priest, who may grant or refuse at his pleasure all the benefits resulting from the sufferings and intercession of "the Son of the Blessed." God is converted into a sort of slumbering or inactive divinity, who has intrusted all his powers to his prime minister or vicar on earth, the Pope and his subordinates. God and Christ are thus practically dethroned, and so they are usually complimented merely with Latin prayers, while the real business of obtaining safety here and hereafter must be transacted with the ministry.
3. As the fraternity thrive by exciting towards themselves and their operations the sentiments of fear, wonder, and admiration, and by withdrawing the minds of men from rational pursuits and fixing them on objects of superstition, they adorn the persons of the higher priests with costly robes, they build magnificent temples, and support establishments of vocal and instrumental music. They fill their temples with paintings to represent God the Father, and Jesus, and his mother Mary, and especially with innumerable statues of Mary, and saints, and angels, before which the people are admonished to offer up prayers for their intercession with God and Christ. In every shape, the fraternity labour to establish a religion that is to fill the imagination with objects of superstition. They baptise bells to drive the devils from the air—they consecrate barrel-fulls of water wherewith to sprinkle devotees—exhibit bones of saints as objects of veneration encourage pilgrimages to their celebrated temples. Above all, in utter despite of all the prohibitions in the Bible, they fill their temples with consecrated idols. Indeed, with the exception of the sacrifice of animals, there is scarcely a practice of paganism which they do not adopt.
In a recent account of China,[1] the superstitious practices of the priests of Budho are mentioned. A recital of them may supersede the necessity of a farther detail of the Romish superstitions.
- ↑ China, its State and Prospects, by W. H. Medhurst, p. 217.
