An Ex-Priest Turns a Packed Seattle Hall Against the Jesuits

Jesuit in politics afforded ex-Priest J. B. Daly a subject for an exhaustive discourse before the A.P.A. at Ranke's Hall yesterday afternoon. Long before the time for speaking had arrived the hall was full to overflowing, and a number of persons unable to get admission tickets were turned away. A short musical programme was rendered, to which Mrs. Daly contributed 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' and Carrie M. Fleming a piano solo.

Mr. Daly's appearance before his audience was a signal for a burst of applause. He is a man of middle age, rather above medium height, well made, smooth-faced, dark-complected and of good address. He is calm and collected, and speaks, without bitterness, prejudice or vindictiveness, in language fairly bristling with rugged eloquence. He possesses a fund of anecdote, and at times convulses his audience with a story or an illustration borrowed from his own experience in the Catholic church. Along towards the close of his address he caught up a small American flag, threw it gracefully about his neck and shoulders, and, calling on his auditors to rise, instructed them in what he termed the 'American doxology'—that is, three cheers for the stars and stripes, which were given with a heartiness indicating that the speaker had the good will and support of all who had heard him.

The address opened with a statement that the speaker was an American, rather than a Protestant, proud of the land of his birth and glorying in her free institutions. He quoted the words of an American Christian poetess, that 'The time has come when men with hearts and brains must rise and take the misdirected reins of government,' and he then proceeded to the subject. The Jesuit he declared to be the right hand of popery, whose teachings, through cunning and malign influence, had so permeated the Church of Rome that it had become a huge religio-political machine. He traced the fight of the reformers for an open Bible and the step taken by Loyola to organize the society 'destined to occupy the blackest page in the political history of the world.'

'The Jesuit does his work in the dark,' Daly said. 'Like the bat, he shuns the sunlight. In the school he is the cultured scholar, in the church the enthusiastic priest, and in the state he is the secret, cunning and treacherous politician.' He warned that the Jesuit carried 'the dagger of bigotry and intolerance that stabs to the heart religious and civil liberty,' and claimed that the church controlled the United States Senate, manipulated the larger cities, threatened the public schools and sought to exempt church property from taxation.

'I am now a Methodist preacher,' he concluded, 'but I am also an American citizen. I have come to oppose the Catholic church. Now, I want to ask you Protestants, honestly, are you willing that any priest should run the government or the politics of this country?' Cries of 'No, no,' answered him. He closed by warning of what he called 'foreign ecclesiasticism' on the edge of a political cyclone.