Hills is ruling an orbis terrarum Romanus, a Roman world-empire.  The rule extends through nearly a thousand years.  How deftly do cunning priests manipulate every means at their command to increase their power!  Learning, wealth, beauty, art, piety,—­everything is used as an asset in the ambitious game for absolute supremacy which the mitered vicegerent of Christ is playing against the world.  Rome’s ancient pontifex maximus —­the pagan high priest of the Rome before Christ—­had been a tool of the consuls and the Caesars; the new pontiff makes the Caesars his tools.  Princes kiss his feet and hold the stirrup for him as he mounts his bedizened palfrey.  An emperor stands barefoot in the snow of the Pope’s courtyard suing pardon for having dared to govern without the Pope’s sanction.—­The forests of Germany are reverberating with the blows of axes which Rome’s missionaries wield against Donar’s Oaks.  The sanctuaries of pagan Germany are razed.  Out of the wood of idols crucifixes are erected along the highways.  Chapels and abbeys and cathedrals rise where the aurochs was hunted.  Sturdy barbarians bend the knee at the shrines of saints.  Hosts set out to see the land where the Lord had walked and suffered, and brave all dangers and hardships to wrest its possession from infidel hands.  But at the place where all these activities center, and whence they are being fed, a shocking abomination is seen:  Venus is worshiped, and Bacchus, and Mercurius, and Mars, while white-robed choirs chant praises to the mother of God, and clouds of incense are wafted skyward.  Here is a mystery—­a mystery of iniquity:  the son of perdition in the temple of God!  Proud, haughty Rome, wealthy, wicked and wanton, is filling up her measure of wrath against the day of retribution.—­We are now so far removed from these scenes that they seem unreal; in Luther’s days they were decidedly real.  Rome’s aggressiveness has been perceptibly checked during the last four centuries; in Luther’s days papal pretensions were a more formidable proposition.

Human arrogance may be said to have reached its limit in the papacy.  The Pope is practically a God on earth.  “Sitting in the temple of God as God, he is showing himself that he is God” (2 Thess. 2, 4).  He has been addressed by his followers in terms of the Deity.  “When the Pope thinks, it is God thinking,” wrote the papal organ of Rome, the Civilta Cattolica, in 1869.  He has asserted the right to make laws for Christians, and to dispense with the laws of the Almighty.  Although this seemed a superfluous proceeding, he declared himself infallible on July 18, 1870.  Under a glowering sky, as if Heaven frowned angrily at the Pope’s attempt, Plus IX had entered St. Peter’s.  As a “second Moses” he mounted the papal throne to read the Constitution “Aeternus Pater,” the document in which he made the following claims:  Canon III:  “If any one says that the Roman Pontiff has only authority to inspect and direct, but not plenary