ROME AND REFORMATION

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 15, 1881

ROME AND REFORMATION.

"You will permit the Italians to be evangelized by Italians. They prefer to be Christianized not Germanly, or Scotchly, or Americanly, but Italianly. It is a mistake to call us reformers. We are not; we don't reform anything in Italy, and we don't reform anything because there is nothing to be reformed. We have learned from young America not to lose time and labor for anything; and to try to reform, and not reform, is to lose time and labor. And as the church of Rome is unreformable, it would be losing time to try to reform the church of Rome. Reform in the church of Rome must come from the laity, and the pope can never accept anything from them, because it would be a bad example for any pope to submit to the wishes of his own children. All the reform is to come from the pope; so we shall have to wait a long time, because the pope is not such a fool as to suicide himself to please anybody.

When I was with Garibaldi, in the military hospitals, I learned many extraordinary facts. A man has a small wound, say, on the smallest finger on his hand, so small that it is almost imperceptible; but owing to the bad blood, or the foul atmosphere, or some other cause, the finger becomes gangrened. The surgeon loses no time, but takes out his knife, and cuts the finger off. He cuts off the hand, again, to save the arm; or, being a young and courageous man, fond of experiment, he severs the arm to save the body. But if the whole man is gangrened, no surgeon will cut the patient into one hundred parts to save nothing in him. That commits the patient to the undertaker. This is the case with the church of Rome. Now, after its multifarious councils, and especially after the last sacrilegious and blasphemous council held under Pius IX., the church is in error from beginning to end, from head to foot. What will you reform? Nothing! nothing! nothing! The only thing is to commit the church of Rome to the public undertaker, and the sooner he undertakes her burial the better. Oh, the stench! That's the reason why we don't try to reform the church."—Gavazzi.