Whatever trouble has been wrought by apostate clergy, or otherwise indifferent power blocks in the Church today, the prophecies concerning the infiltrations of Christ’s Mystical Body, as the climax of history approaches, makes it clear that Catholic Christians are to be vigilant. Macaulay urged us, not to forget that all branches are cut off from an unparalleled apostolic lineage, which can be fearfully shaken, but never destroyed. St. John the apostle knew that Christian apostasy may have started with Judas, but it didn’t end there. Only the Parousia, the Second Coming of the Lord, will put a decisive end to it at the end of history
“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us.”—-1 Jn 2:19 / SH
Thomas Babington Macaulay, unusual for an Evangelical, became fascinated by the Church of Rome in which he found many things to admire, and in his essay on Ranke’s History of the Pope’s in the 1840 Edinburgh Review he both argued that it had proved itself the most successful and long-lived of all Western institutions and it had done so because — and this would certainly have been a point particularly surprising to Victorian Protestants — it handled dissent far more positively than had those who broke away from it. — George P. Landow
“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.
The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age.
Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all.
She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay
Ranke, Leopold. The Ecclesiastical and political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
— Love letter to the Church. Carlo Carreto.
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