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Eev. Charles A. Blanchard 101
pent of our sins, and ask God to forgive us, He does it right then and
there." I said, "Then you are not a Catholic, you must be a Protestant,
for Catholics do not believe that." Now it is a terrible thing to have
a nation of two hundred million pneople brought up in a ritualistic
church where the truth which they really have is buried under forms
and ceremonies and is corrupted by the priesthood. It is a fright-
ful thing; and if we pity anybody we ought to pity people of that
sort.
300 Years Under Romanoifs.
In the second place, I was going to speak of the government, which
is and has been for three hundred years and more, as you know, in
the hands of the Romanoffs. The life and property, the liberty and
freedom, of all those people have been absolutely in the hand of that
one man, the Czar. If he chose to send a man to exile, he sent him,
and nobody could say anything or do anything. If he chose to send
a man to prison, to prison he went; and so it is one of the great cen-
ters, that is, it has been, one of the great centers of autocracy. It is
one of the marvels of the world that you and I have lived to see that
great military power which has been standing now for a thousand
years and more, this single house occupying the throne for over three
hundred years, since 1613,—it is a marvelous thing that you and I
have seen that thing tumble and fall, as it were, in a day. -This seems
to be the result of a great many things that we do not know anything
about, although we do know about some few of them. But when we
have added those things together, we must leave a large margin for
the special providence of God. Take, for example, that flood which
has checked the central powers in their rush toward the south, and
has given the Italian army, hard pressed, such a wonderful victory as
we find in our papers today. Who is to attribute that to men? Who
is to say that that is the result of man’s doings? Undoubtedly those
Italian soldiers have done their duty as well as they could, but God
controls the clouds, and He caused the floods in the river, and He
swept away those twelve or fourteen bridges, and He penned up those
Austrian troops on the south bank of that river, and He it is that has
given this victory to our armies; and if we do not recognize this, we
shall sin against Him, and we will imperil our future and put off the
time of victory which we are hoping for.
Now the religious life of these people has been, as you know, strictly
Greek Catholic, and it has been Greek Catholic in this way. Men came
into the Greek Catholic religion not by conversion or adoption but by
birth. A man was born a Greek Catholic, if he was born a Russian.
He had no right to choose any other religion. He was under obligation
to stay a Greek Catholic, and if he undertook to leave the Greek
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