in another article. To resume the claims of the Protocols: This from the Seventeenth Protocol:
"We have taken good care long ago to discredit the Gentile clergy and thereby to destroy their mission, which at present might hamper us considerably. Their influence over the people diminishes daily.
"Freedom of conscience has been proclaimed everywhere. Consequently it is only a question of time when the complete crash of the Christian religion will occur. It will be easier to handle the other religions, but it is too early to discuss this phase of the subject."
This will be of considerable interest, perhaps, to those clergymen who are laboring with Jewish rabbis to bring about some kind of religious union. Such a union would of necessity dispose of Christ as a well-meaning but wholly mistaken Jewish prophet, and thus distinctive Christianity would cease to exist insofar as the "union" was effective. The principal religious aversion of the Protocols, however, so far as it is expressed, is against the Catholic church in general and the pontifical office in particular.