ral development of the religious consciousness among a peculiarly
sensitive race of people. Protestantism certainly has placed the Bible
on the dissecting table and dismembered it in a manner wholly unknown
before. While Protestants will not for a moment allow the blessed Book
to be hidden out of sight--put "into graves"--still they will not grant
it that place it should occupy as the sole discipline of faith, so it is
a dead letter to them. That all-glorious doctrine of Bible _unity_,
which fills the whole New Testament, strikes a deathblow to all the
carnal divisions and institutions of sectarianism; and so with one
accord they unite in _fighting it_. "Oh, the good old blessed Bible! we
could not do without it," say they; yet, as everybody knows, they are
governed by the discipline and laws that they or their representatives
have formulated. Thus, the Word and Spirit of God are brought under the
public gaze, only to be treated with such indignity in God's sight, and
killed; while infidels look on, and tauntingly remark, "Either the
religion of to-day is no Christianity, or the Word of God is a lie."

In the beginning of this dispensation the church of God not only
consisted of all those who were spiritual, but constituted a visible,
organic body as well, made up of numerous local congregations that were
separate in the management of their internal affairs, yet interrelated
with each other, and were directed by humble pastors, who were, in
reference to each other, _equal_. The Word of God was their only
discipline, and the Spirit of God, their great Teacher and Guide. Thus,
the two witnesses were active in their official position, in the public
view, as the Vicars or Governors of the church of God on earth. When,
however, men usurped the place of these Vicars by ignoring the Spirit
and rejecting the Word and making their own rules of faith, the effect
was a national hierarchy--the church of Rome, which for twelve hundred
and sixty years stood in the public view. Yet the two witnesses were
still alive, though driven into obscurity and "clothed in sackcloth";
for they still acted in their official position in the congregations of
the medieval Christians already referred to, who resisted the doctrines
of men and clung tenaciously to the simple, primitive form of church
government and allowed the Spirit and Word authority supreme.

But during the Protestant era Christians the world over became
identified with the various s