o her
double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled, fill to
her double." It is evident that the "torment and sorrow" which God's
people give Babylon after their departure is not a temporal
retaliation--for they never indulge in such, and the Word of God forbids
it--but is altogether of a spiritual nature; hence the fierce judgment
they inflict is executing the Word of truth, which brings to light all
the wickedness and abominations contained therein. "Death, and mourning,
and famine" only remain. This symbolizes that all spiritual life has
departed, while famine and mourning are left. That such is the actual
fact is shown by the following lamentation of the late Bishop R.S.
Foster concerning his own sect, the Methodist Episcopal:

"The ball, the theatre, nude and lewd art, social luxuries, with all
their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of
the church; and as a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians
are making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday, and church
ornamentations. It is the old trick of Satan. The Jewish church struck
on that rock; the Romish church was wrecked on the same; and the
Protestant church is fast reaching the same doom.

"Our great dangers as we see them, are assimilation to the world,
neglect of the poor, substitution of the form for the fact of godliness,
abandonment of discipline, a hireling ministry, an impure gospel, which
summed up is a fashionable church. That Methodists should be liable to
such an outcome, and that there should be signs of it in a hundred years
from the 'sail-loft,' seems almost the miracle of history; but who that
looks about him to-day can fail to see the fact?

"Do not Methodists, in violation of God's Word and their own discipline,
dress as extravagantly and as fashionably as any other class? Do not the
ladies, and even the wives and daughters of the ministry, put on 'gold
and pearls and costly array'? Would not the plain dress insisted upon by
John Wesley and Bishop Asbury, and worn by Hester Ann Rodgers, Lady
Huntington, and many others equally distinguished, be now regarded in
Methodist circles as fanaticism? Can any one going into the Methodist
church in any of our chief cities distinguish the attire of the
communicants from that of the theater and ball-goers? Is not worldliness
seen in the music? Elaborately dressed and ornamented choirs, who in
many cases make no profession of religion and are