During Spurgeon's lifetime there were three popes, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, and Leo XIII. Pius IX was the last absolute theocratic monarch of the papal states, an area of Italy that was ruled by the popes for over one thousand years. Like the Byzantine Empire and World War I, the Papal States is one of those fascinating bits of world history that are ignored in American schools for some unknown reason.
Spurgeon really didn't like the popes and everything the popes stood for. I'm sure that the popes being theocratic monarchs of a sizeable chunk of european real estate that covered a good portion of Italy and even a chunk of France (Avignon ) didn't help much either.
The political climate of Europe at the time was tumultuous, one could safely say that there was a state of warfare in europe from the start of the French revolution (1789) until the end of WWII. In 1848 Pope Pius IX actually fled Rome in disguise (some said in a woman's dress) and requested political asylum in England while the Italian Army reclaimed Rome and the Papal states. He returned to Rome in 1850. The Italian government made peaceful overtures to Pius IX but Pius responded with anger and insults. I'm sure none of that escaped Spurgeon's notice.
“The Protestantism of England is the pay-master of the Pope. I am ashamed that sons of the Reformers… should bow themselves before the beast, and give so much as a single farthing to the shrine of the devil’s firstborn son. Take heed to yourselves, ye Protestants, lest ye be partakers of her plagues; touch her not, lest ye be defiled. Give a drachm to her, or a grain of incense to her censors, ye shall be partakers of her adulteries and partakers of her plagues. Every time you pass the house of Popery let a curse light upon her head: Thus saith the Lord:—‘Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities...
"And yet again, it is the Christian's duty always to have war with war. To have bitterness in our hearts against any man that lives is to serve Satan. We must speak very hardly and sternly against error, and against sin; but against men we have not a word to say, though it were the Pope himself: I have no enmity in my heart against him as a man, but as anti-Christ.(Sermon 250, “War, War, War”).
"Essence of lies, and quintessence of blasphemy, as the religion of Rome is, it nevertheless fascinates a certain order of Protestants, of whom we fear it may be truly said that "they have received a strong delusion to believe a lie, that they may be damned." Seeing that it is so, it becomes all who would preserve their fellow-immortals from destruction to be plain and earnest in their warnings. Not in a party-spirit, but for truth's sake, our Protestantism must protest perpetually.
"Dignitaries of the papal confederacy are just now very prominent in benevolent movements, and we may be sure that they have ends to serve other than those which strike the public eye. A priest lives only for his church; he may profess to have other objects, but this is a mere blind. Our ancient enemies have small belief in our common sense if they imagine that we shall ever be able to trust them, after having so often beheld the depths of Jesuitical cunning and duplicity. The sooner we let certain Archbishops and Cardinals know that we are aware of their designs, and will in nothing co-operate with them, the better for us and our country. Of course, we shall be howled at as bigots, but we can afford to smile at that cry, when it comes from the church which invented the Inquisition. "No peace with Rome" is the motto of reason as well as of religion." (January 1873 Sword and Trowel)
“We are not praying against Babylon, we are not praying against the Man of Sin, we are not praying against the real foe of Britain: it is time we started to pray again. It is the bounden duty of every Christian to pray against Antichrist, and as to what Antichrist is, no sane man ought to raise an objection. If it be not popery in the Church of Rome, there is nothing in the world that can be called by that name. If there were to be issued a hue and cry for Antichrist, we would certainly take up the Roman Church on suspicion, and it would certainly not be let loose again, for it so exactly answers the description. Popery is contrary to Christ’s Gospel. It is the Antichrist.
"We ought to pray against it. It should be the daily prayer of every believer that Antichrist might be hurled like a millstone into the flood, and for Christ, because it wounds Christ, it robs Christ of His glory, it puts sacramental efficacy in the place of His atonement, it lifts a piece of bread into the place of the Saviour, and a few drops of water into the place of the Holy Ghost, and puts a mere fallible man like ourselves up as the Vicar of Christ on earth. If we pray against it, because it is against God, we shall love the persons though we hate their errors; we shall love their souls though we hate and detest their dogmas; and so the breath of our prayers will be sweetened because we turn our faces to Christ to pray this prayer.”
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