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Show HAS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CHANGED? A Salt Lake Preacher Perverts History anil Tradition Catholicity Before, During and After Constantine's Reign. The writer has read and sometimes heard the charge made that the Catholic church apostatized apos-tatized from the primitive faith by introducing new doctrines. The object of this communication is a friendly challenge in the columns of your valuable val-uable paper for a proof of this charge as to the doctrine or doctrines of the Savior of the world on which the Catholic apostitized, and the month and year in which the anostacy occurred. The writer also wishes to brand the statement recently uttered in Salt Lake Citv, "that the Roman Catholic church abandoned the ideas of Jesus when it became the state religion under Constantino," as utterly false without any substantiation in authentic history and tradition. As the Roman Catholic church was in existence in other portions of the world not under Constantine's jurisdiction before, during and after his reign, the assertion that it became the state religion under him is untrue in fact and detail. de-tail. It is a glaring display of historical ignorance to affirm, because national persecutions ceased at Constantine's accession and subsequent conversion that he swallowed the Universal church and assimilated assim-ilated it, as the Irish did the Danish invaders, and gave to the Catholic church his-own dogmas and Ideas. In fact it won't do at all. . It is a little too rank, altogether. What! Did Constantine give us Christmas day, Easter Sunday, Good Friday, baptism, confession con-fession and all the other Catholic practices of pious devotion? Wonderful man! If he had lived before Christ the pagens would surely have made him a god! Probably he wrote the Bible! Things more wonderful than that we have read in fairy stories by non-Catholics before this year of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Poor, benighted and ignorajat Catholics, they never can keep abreast of the times. One year the world tells them that the Protestant religion was necessary because they, poor Romish papists, never change, and the next year they are accused of always changing even as far back as Emperor Constantine's reign! From these contradictions good Lord deliver us. We w-ould have to be mentally and religiously acrobats to keep time with the ever-changing and revolving accusations leveled against us. Poor Constantine, with all his terrible crimes, is accused by a great many people of committing the horrible, heinous and fearful sin of forming the Roman Catholic church. How these good people peo-ple reach this absurd conclusion and lay the blame on Constantine when Christ, the son of God, is the real culprit, we cannot fathom. The mother of the Roman Emperor in question was a Christian while her son w-as yet a nagan, yet we are told he instituted insti-tuted the church of which his mother was a member mem-ber when her son had no religion tthat concerned Christ in anyway. Again we read in history that there were bishops in Rome in those days of the first, second and third centuries dying for the same doctrines that St. Patrick preached in Ireland Ire-land in 432, St. Augustine in England in 596, and St. Boniface in Germany about 720! How darning darn-ing history is to predisposed falsifiers and blind followers of the blind. We have Christ's solomn word that he established a church which would endure en-dure until the end of time, and against which the gates of hell would strive, but strive vainly. Where is this church? If it is not the Roman Catholic church, that can prove its existence in every "year and age since Pentecost and the only one that can do so, in God's name what church is it ? The persons per-sons who make statements derogatory to the Catholic Cath-olic church should prove them conclusively. They are in duty bound to explain away in a sensible-manner sensible-manner the conversion of all Christian nations by Roman Catholic evangelists in vital communication communica-tion with the Roman pontiffs. In fact they should in the language of the gambler, put up or shut up. RICARDO. |