Does this divine prediction agree with the facts of history?  It is altogether impossible to compute correctly the number of those who were in different ways put to death for opposing the corruption of the Church of Rome.  A million Waldenses perished in France.  Nine hundred thousand Christians were slain within thirty years after the institution of the Jesuits.  The Duke of Alva boasted that he had put to death 36,000 in the Netherlands by the hands of the common executioner.  The Inquisition destroyed 150,000 within thirty years.  If it be asserted that this was accomplished by the secular arm, I reply that sentence of death was pronounced upon so-called heretics by the church and that the secular power was simply a tool for carrying the barbarous sentence into execution.  We can not forget that the pope applauded Charles IX of France and his infamous mother, Catherine de Medici, for their part in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and ordered a medal struck in honor of the event; that following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when 300,000 were cruelly butchered during the reign of Louis XIV, Pope Innocent XI extolled the king by special letter, as follows:  “The Catholic Church shall most assuredly record in her sacred annals a work of such devotion toward her and CELEBRATE YOUR NAME WITH NEVER-DYING PRAISES ... for this most excellent undertaking.”

Popery has for ages claimed the right to exterminate by death those who were heretics.  Numerous provincial and national councils have issued cruel and bloody laws for the extermination of the Waldenses and other so-called heretics.  Besides these, at least six of their General Councils, the highest judicial assemblies of the Roman Church, with the popes themselves sometimes present in person, have by their decrees pronounced the punishment of death for heresy:  1.  The Second General Council of Lateran (1139) in its twenty-third canon. 2.  The Third General Council of Lateran (1179), under Pope Alexander III. 3.  The Fourth General Council of Lateran (1215), under Pope Innocent III. 4.  The Sixteenth General Council, held at Constance in 1414.  This council, with Pope Martin present in person, condemned the reformers Huss and Jerome to be burned at the stake, and then prevailed on the Emperor Sigismund to violate the safe conduct which he had given Huss and signed by his own hand and in which he had guaranteed the reformer a safe return to Bohemia; and this inhuman sentence against Huss was then carried out. 5.  The Council of Sienna (1423), which was afterwards continued at Basil. 6.  The Fifth General Council of Lateran (1514).

That such teachings and practises were an integral part of Romanism is easily shown.  St. Aquinas, the “angelic doctor,” argued that heretics might justly be killed.  Cardinal Bellarmine, in a Latin work, De Laicis, still extant, entered into a regular argument to prove that the church has the right of punishing heretics with death and should exercise that right.  Bellarmine was a nephew of one pope and a close friend and associate of others, a champion of Romanism, and a defender of its doctrines.  In the work above referred to be declares that “heretics were often burned BY THE CHURCH.”  “The Donatists, Manicheans, and Albigenses were routed and annihilated by arms.”