This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II. POPERY THE ENEMY OF CIVIL LIBERTY. HAT the Romish Church is nothing less than a conspiracy against liberty, personal and national, civil and religious, we firmly believe. Being the twin sister of despotism, she ever has been, and is now, most bitterly hostile to freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, education of the masses, distribution of the Bible, in fact to everything which Republicans are accustomed to regard as the basis and the safeguard of popular government. Accordingly she is industriously engaged, even now, and in this Republic, in undermining, insidiously but surely, the beauteous temple of liberty, whose foundations were laid in the blood of persecuted Protestants. Her system, in accordance with its time-honored principles, is producing hostility to our free institutions. The Papal Church is the foe of our system of common schools. This scheme of popular education, the most successful agency ever devised for inculcating those moral principles which are indispensable to the continuance of self government, is the object of enmity as unrelenting as it is universal. Every available agency is employed to shake the confidence of our people in its equity, wisdom and efficiency. First, it was said, the public schools are sectarian. The Protestant Bible is used. That their hostility is not so much against our version as against the Bible itself, the basis of public morality, the most essential part of true education, the palladium of civil liberty, is conclusively proved by their unwillingness to circulate even their own version, the Douay Bible. Popery has always maintained that "the Bible is not a book to be in the hands of the people." "Who will not say," exclaims a recent advocate of Romanism, "that the...