Engineer Corps of Hell; or, Rome's Sappers and Miners. Containing the Tactics of the Militia ofthe Pope, or the Secret Manual of the Jesuits, and Other Matter Intensely Interesting, Especially to the Freemason and Other Lovers of Civil and Religious Liberty
[San Francisco]: 1883.
Sold by Private Subscription. 12mo, 320 pp, in original cloth boards stamped in gilt. A very good copy with some uneven sun fading to front board, remnant of paper once affixed to rear endpaper. Sherman was a veteran of the Mexican War and California pioneer who worked as mineral surveyor until 1877, when he settled in Oakland and spent the rest of his career as a mining consultant, writer, and historian. Also a prominent member of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in California, he was firmly convinced that loyalty to the Pope and the corrupt practices of the Catholic Church and its priests threatened the very foundations of American democracy and freedom. The first part of this book consists of Sherman's translations of purported secret Jesuit documents, including the "Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus," which includes chapters on how to gain influence over the wealthy and powerful and how to convince rich widows to enter the religious life and turn over their money to the order. In the remainder of the book, Sherman expounds at length on his theory of the role of the Church in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (apparently Lincoln once told an off-color joke about French priests and that sealed his fate), and reprints anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit texts from a variety of sources. He exhorts his fellow citizens to beware of a "system which is a nursery of every sort of pollution, of lust and of crime" and a "vile tape-worm that is consuming the vitals of our nation" and must be "expelled from the body politic and utterly destroyed."
Item #18045
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