Some hypocrites and seeming mortified men, that held down their heads, were like the little images that they place in the very bowing of the vaults of churches, that look as if they held up the church, but are but puppets.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?
Our own theological Church, as we know, has scorned and vilified the body till it has seemed almost a reproach and a shame to have one, yet at the same time has credited it with power to drag the soul to perdition.
Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.
People have really strong images of what church is, and it's almost certainly not the same as mine.
Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.
The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather, a Church of love; she must not punish. Thus, the awareness that punishment can be an act of love ceased to exist. This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people.
Television preachers extract money from the poor to live in a style and to indulge in shameful acts which equal or outdo the worst of the Renaissance Popes.
I cannot adequately express the horror I feel for a man who can be so base as to veil his hypocrisy under the cloak of religion, and state the base falsehood he has done.
Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.
Christians well know that the much-decorated statue of the Church, as it now stands, is not of pure chiseled marble, but of clay, cemented together by blood and tears and hardened in the fires of hatred and persecution.