present day might be called _churches of the
world_, with more propriety than churches of Christ. The churches have
so far gone from primitive Christianity that they need a fresh
regeneration--a new kind of religion."

Said T. DeWitt Talmage: "I simply state a fact when I say that in many
places the church is surrendering, and the world is conquering.... There
is a mighty host in the Christian church, positively professing
Christianity, who do not believe the Bible, out and out and in and
in.... Oh! we have magnificient church machinery in this country; we
have sixty thousand American ministers; we have costly music; we have
great Sunday-schools; and yet I give you the appalling statistics that
in the last twenty-five years, laying aside last year, the statistics of
which I have not yet seen,--within the last twenty-five years the
churches of God in this country have averaged _less than two conversions
a year_ each! There has been an average of four or five deaths in the
churches. How soon, at that rate, will this world be brought to God? We
gain two; we lose four. Eternal God! what will this come to?"

Bishop Roberts said: "The popular religion of this country is not the
religion of the New Testament. It has some of its features but not all.
It is lacking in grand fundamental elements. It answers many good
purposes--restrains, refines, elevates, and gives to society a high
grade of civilization; but fails to secure the great end which
Christianity is designed to accomplish--the salvation of the soul. It
dazzles but to blind, it promises but to deceive; it allures by worldly
considerations to a heaven of purity, which no worldling can enter; it
gives to its votaries, who long to eat of forbidden fruit, the assurance
of impunity from the threatened evils, and leads them on by siren
strains from the Paradise of purity into the broad road which ends at
last in the blackness of the darkness of an eternal night of despair!"

Says the Golden Rule: "The Protestants are outdoing the Popes in
splendid, extravagant folly in church building. Thousands on thousands
are expended in gay and costly ornaments to gratify pride and a wicked
ambition, that might and should go to redeem the perishing millions!
Does the evil, the folly, and the madness of these proud, formal,
fashionable worshiper, stop here? These splendid monuments of Popish
pride, upon which millions are squandered in our cities, virtually
exclude the poor for whom Ch