The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 60
and from which, when freed from impurity, they are admitted to heaven.
(See Appendix.)
Still another fabrication was needed to enable Rome to profit by the
fears and the vices of her adherents. This was supplied by the doctrine of
indulgences. Full remission of sins, past, present, and future, and release
from all the pains and penalties incurred, were promised to all who
would enlist in the pontiff’s wars to extend his temporal dominion, to
punish his enemies, or to exterminate those who dared deny his spiritual
supremacy. The people were also taught that by the payment of money to
the church they might free themselves from sin, and also release the souls
of their deceased friends who were confined in the tormenting flames.
By such means did Rome fill her coffers and sustain the magnificence,
luxury, and vice of the pretended representatives of Him who had not
where to lay His head. (See Appendix.)
The Scriptural ordinance of the Lord’s Supper had been supplanted
by the idolatrous sacrifice of the mass. Papal priests pretended, by their
senseless mummery, to convert the simple bread and wine into the actual
“body and blood of Christ.”—Cardinal Wiseman, The Real Presence of
the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Eucharist,
Proved From Scripture, lecture 8, sec. 3, par. 26. With blasphemous
presumption, they openly claimed the power of creating God, the Creator
of all things. Christians were required, on pain of death, to avow their
faith in this horrible, Heaven-insulting heresy. Multitudes who refused
were given to the flames. (See Appendix.)
In the thirteenth century was established that most terrible of all the
engines of the papacy—the Inquisition. The prince of darkness wrought
with the leaders of the papal hierarchy. In their secret councils Satan
and his angels controlled the minds of evil men, while unseen in the
midst stood an angel of God, taking the fearful record of their iniquitous
decrees and writing the history of deeds too horrible to appear to human
eyes. “Babylon the great” was “drunken with the blood of the saints.”
The mangled forms of millions of
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