by Rev. John MacLeod M.A., Stornoway
The Royal wedding, which attracted so much world attention, is now over and it is to be hoped that the Divine blessing will rest upon the Heir to the British Protestant Throne and his spouse in their married state. Despite protests, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster took part in the service reading a short prayer and so drawing the attention, not only of the vast congregation present in St Paul’s Cathedral to the fact that he was there, but also, through the medium of television, of an estimated 700 million people throughout the world. The fact that it was but a minor role that he played should not, however, blind us to the significance of the fact that he was accorded a place of honour within the precincts of a Protestant place of worship and on an occasion when the British Monarch was present. In these circumstances we regard his presence in St Paul’s to have been in breach of the spirit and letter of the Bill of Rights and a precedent being established we now fear that the future will see the Roman Catholic Church dignitaries being given an ever-increasing role on state occasions.
The Cardinal stood near the high altar in the Cathedral and the thought of his presence on that spot brings also to mind an account given by the late Rev. J.P. MacQueen of a remarkable answer to prayer. It is to be found in the October, 1959, issue of the Young People’s Magazine and written about two years before that man of God’s lamented death. After a prolonged introduction in which the absolute sovereignty of God as the giver and answerer of prayer is emphasised and lest, as Mr MacQueen puts it, “the first personal pronoun should get unmerited credit and be thought of more highly than one ought to think” we find the following paragraph among others: “The next most outstandingly terrible incident was the burning of the immediate vicinity of St Paul’s Cathedral with German liquid fire-bombs, the obvious, and afterwards confessed, object being the ruin of The City (the area within ear-shot of Bow Bells), and especially the Cathedral itself, the pride of British, and especially of English ecclesiastical architecture. The fire was to light the way for the planned sweep of bombers carrying land-mines. At 12 o’clock mid-night, that Sabbath night, the whole of London was almost as brilliantly lit as if it was the mid-day sun, by the fires, while smoke of various colours, red, yellow, black, and blue, ascended skywards, in billowing air waves — a real awe-inspiring spectacle. Knowing London was receiving its most terrible visitation of the war, and worse designed to follow, the present writer prayed as follows: “O gracious and most blessed One, there was a day in the history of my native land when Thy faithful servant, Alexander Peden, pursued by the ruthless dragoons of ‘the bloody Claverhouse’, prayed ‘Lord cast Thy skirt around poor old Sandy’, and the dense rapidly-descending fog frustrated the evil designs of, and discomfited, the vile dragoons, so now do Thou cause such dense fog to descend upon the German aerodromes in Holland, Belgium, and France, as will prevent the German bombers from getting in and out, and also to prevent fiendish joy this night in the heart of the devil, the Pope of Rome, Hitler, Mussolini, Goering, Goebels, and all Jesuitized Romanists, preserve Thou St Paul’s Cathedral, as it was built for Protestant worship, but permit one bomb to get through the roof to destroy the Heaven-provoking, idolatrous, Anglo-Catholic altar. All this was answered immediately to the letter, and while newspapers and booklets have recorded the fact that German bombers over London got orders to return at once, as dense fog had descended on the aerodromes, my part in it is narrated now for the first time. The land-mines never came, and bombers force-landed and crashed. Unfortunately, such is the incorrigible idolatry of the vile human heart, since then another costlier Heaven-provoking altar has been rebuilt by these modern sons of Belial — the Anglo-Catholic Jesuits! These facts are related now under the omniscient eye of the Supreme Judge at Whose solemn Tribunal I shall soon have to render my account. The unbeliever and the atheist will say that, admittedly, these are strange coincidences, and very wonderful, but we reply that when so called coincidences multiply in succession over a period of years they become miracles — Divine miracles, in answer to the poor prayers of a feeble, frail, believing sinner of Adam’s fallen race, but only by the grace of God.” The fact that St Paul’s Cathedral was preserved in the midst of devastation is something that men marvelled at both at the time and since. Were Mr MacQueen alive today, we feel sure that he would regard the presence of the scarlet-robed Cardinal within its precincts as a gross betrayal of Protestantism and an event that would fill him with righteous indignation.
On the 29th day of July, 1588 — 396 years to the day that the Prince of Wales was married in St Paul’s — the Spanish Armada arrived to be eventually “blown apart by English naval guns just across the Channel at Gravelines and scattered to its final doom in the storms of the North Sea”. “The Armada,” Wylie writes, “was the mightiest effort in the shape of armed force ever put forth by the Popish powers against Protestantism, and it proved the turning-point in the great war between Rome and the Reformation.” The intention of Sixtus V, the Roman Pontiff of the day, was clear — the subjugation of England and the extirpation of Protestantism root and branch in a land where the Gospel had by now been greatly blessed and where much blood had been shed in its defence. It was not to be. “Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass when the Lord commandeth it not?” His predecessor’s bull excommunicating Elizabeth I, the Queen of England, had been launched in February, 1570, and named Regnans in excelsis from its opening words. We take it that since Rome claims to be always the same that John Paul II claims for himself the same power and authority as Pius V, the author of the forementioned bull, and that Queen Elizabeth II is in the same heretical position in Papal eyes as her predecessor. “He that reigneth on high”, the Bull states, “to whom is ascribed all power both in heaven and earth, hath committed the absolute government of His one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church (out of which there is no salvation) to only one upon earth, namely, to Peter, the chief of the Apostles, and to Peter’s successor, the Bishop of Rome. Him alone has He made Prince over all nations and kingdoms, to pluck up, destroy, scatter, consume, plant and build”. The Protestant Dictionary tells us that in the same lofty style the document proceeds to speak of “the pretended Queen of England abandoned to all wickedness”, as having usurped the supremacy over the whole Church of England, and reduced that kingdom, “lately reclaimed to the Catholic faith”, to a miserable apostasy; as having abolished the sacrifice of the mass, prayers, fastings, the choice of meats, celibacy, and the rites of the Catholic Church; as having presumed to eject bishops, rectors, and other Catholic priests out of their churches and benefices, and to determine ecclesiastical causes: “We therefore, by virtue of our Apostolic power, declare Elizabeth a heretic, to have incurred the sentence of excommunication, to be deprived of her pretended title to the said kingdom; and the nobility, subjects, and people, of the said kingdom absolved from their oaths of allegiance”.
Lest any think that we are rather 400 years out of date in condemning Romanism on the basis of what this Bull contains, attention is again drawn to the recent book “The Representatives“, published with Papal approval and in which the right of the Pope to exercise “a full, supreme, universal, ordinary and immediate” authority over the church is arrogantly re-affirmed. Rome has not yielded an inch of ground as far as her claim to universal and supreme authority is concerned. Cardinal Hume was thus, in our view, present in St Paul’s on the 29th July under false pretences, and if the truth were told his view, consistent with that of Rome, would have been, and still is, that our Queen is a heretic and moreover, despite the expedient Ne Temere decree*, that the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Lady Diana Spencer was invalid on the grounds that it was not given sacramental status and not performed by a Roman Catholic priest. We believe Loraine Boettner states the position very clearly: “That the Roman Church in Protestant countries today does not interfere directly with marriage when only Protestants are concerned is due only to the fact that she does not have the power, not because she willingly and freely makes that concession. Let it never be doubted that if Rome gains the power she will again enforce her claim over all marriage as she did before the Reformation. She would like nothing better than to return to that period, which even yet she refers to nostalgically as ‘the age of faith’.”
When Her Majesty The Queen arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral on the occasion of the marriage of her son the Pearl Sword was presented to her by the Lord Mayor of the City of London. This is apparently the traditional way in which homage is done to the Sovereign on such occasions and goes back to the time when the first Elizabeth presented the sword to the City. It was carried by the Lord Mayor at the head of The Queen’s procession when she entered the Cathedral. The same ceremony was observed, we understand, in 1588 when Elizabeth I arrived at the old St Paul’s to attend, as we shall see, a service of public thanksgiving for the victory so marvellously obtained over the Armada. In Rome there was no rejoicing. From the kingdom of Spain when the extent of the loss became known there arose, Wylie tells us, a cry of woe and lamentations. “To add to the griefs of Philip II, he was wounded from a quarter whence he had looked for sympathy and help. Pope Sixtus had promised a contribution of a million crowns towards the expenses of the Armada, but when he saw to what end it had come, he refused to pay a single ducat. In vain Philip urged that the Pope had instigated him to the attempt, that the expedition had been undertaken in the sacred cause of the Church, and that the loss ought to be borne mutually. Sixtus was deaf; he was almost satirical. He could not be expected, he said, to give a million of money for an Armada which had accomplished nothing, and was now at the bottom of the sea.”
*This was issued by Pius X in 1908 and conceded the validity of Protestant marriage. The Pope, however, still claims the right to annul any Protestant or Civil marriage.
Wylie’s account of the Spanish Armada may well be read by us with great interest in 1981 and particularly his concluding paragraphs which are quoted almost in full below. Rome’s aim remains unchanged — the recovery of “Mary’s Dowry” — only her tactics have altered. Our Protestantism is now being undermined more by secret agents of the Papacy rather than open, readily identifiable enemies but we believe the Jesuits to be as deeply involved as they were in the Babington Plot to overthrow the throne of the first Elizabeth. The God who came to our rescue in the Sixteenth Century is able to do the same for us in the Twentieth and His divine intervention is to be earnestly sought by us. “Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered.”
“The tragedy of the Armada”, Wylie wrote, ‘was a great sermon preached to the Popish and Protestant nations. The text of that sermon was that England had been saved by a Divine Hand. All acknowledged the skill and daring of the English admirals, and the patriotism and bravery of the English sailors and soldiers, but all at the same time confessed that these alone could not have saved the throne of Elizabeth. The Almighty Arm had been stretched out, and a work so stupendous had been wrought, as to be worthy of a place by the side of the wonders of old time. There was a consecutiveness and a progression in the acts, a unity in the drama, and a sublimity in the terrible but righteous catastrophe in which it issued, that told the least reflective that the Armada’s overthrow was not fortuitous, but the result of arrangement and plan. Even the Spaniards themselves confessed that the Divine Hand was upon them; that One looked forth at times from the storm-cloud that pursued them, and troubled them. Christendom was at large solemnised: the ordinary course of events had been interrupted; the heavens had been bowed, and the Great Judge had descended on the scene. While dismay reigned within the Popish kingdoms, the Protestant states joined in a chorus of thanksgiving. In England by the command of Her Majesty, and in the United Provinces by order of the States-General a day of festival was appointed, whereon all were commanded to repair to church, and “render thanks to God”. “The aforesaid solemnity,” says the Dutch historian, “was observed on the 29th of November, which day was wholly spent in fasting, prayer, and giving of thanks.” On that day Queen Elizabeth, royally attired, and followed by the estates and dignitaries of the realm, visited London, and rode through the streets of the City to the Cathedral of St Paul’s, in a triumphal chariot drawn by four white horses. The houses were hung with blue cloth; the citizens in their holiday dress lined the streets, ranged in companies, and displaying the ensigns and symbols of their various guilds and crafts. Eleven banners and flags which had been taken from the Spaniards hung displayed in front of St Paul’s. The Queen with her clergy and nobles, having offered public thanks in the church, thereafter retired to Paul’s Cross, where a sermon was preached from the same stone pulpit from which Ridley’s and Latimer’s voices had often been heard; and after the sermon the Queen rose and addressed her assembled subjects, exhorting them to unite with her in extolling that merciful Power which had scattered her foes, and shielded from overthrow her throne and realm.
But the deliverance was a common one to the Protestant kingdoms. All shared in it with England, and each in turn took up this song of triumph . . . It seemed as if the days of Miriam, with their judgments and songs of triumph, had returned, and that the Hebrew prophetess had lent her timbrel to England, that she might sing upon it the destruction of a mightier host than that of Egypt, and the overthrow of a greater tyrant than he who lay drowned in the Red Sea. England began the song, as was meet, for around her isle had the Armada been led, a spectacle of doom; but soon, from beyond the German Ocean, from the foot of the Alps, from the shores of Scotland, other voices were heard swelling the anthem, and saying, “Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea. The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. Thou didst blow with Thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead in the mighty waters”.