ctable people
engaging in these chance enterprises, and easing their consciences with
the reflection that the money is to go to a good object, it is not strange
that the youth of the State should so often fall into the habits which the
excitement of games of hazard is almost certain to engender."

The spirit of worldly conformity is invading the churches throughout
Christendom. Robert Atkins, in a sermon preached in London, draws a dark
picture of the spiritual declension that prevails in England: "The truly
righteous are diminished from the earth, and no man layeth it to heart.
The professors of religion of the present day, in every church, are lovers
of the world, conformers to the world, lovers of creature comfort, and
aspirers after respectability. They are called to suffer with Christ, but
they shrink from even reproach.... _apostasy, apostasy, apostasy_, is
engraven on the very front of every church; and did they know it, and did
they feel it, there might be hope; but, alas! they cry, 'We are rich, and
increased in goods, and stand in need of nothing.' "(640)

The great sin charged against Babylon is, that she "made all nations drink
of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." This cup of intoxication
which she presents to the world, represents the false doctrines that she
has accepted as the result of her unlawful connection with the great ones
of the earth. Friendship with the world corrupts her faith, and in her
turn she exerts a corrupting influence upon the world by teaching
doctrines which are opposed to the plainest statements of Holy Writ.

Rome withheld the Bible from the people, and required all men to accept
her teachings in its place. It was the work of the Reformation to restore
to men the word of God; but is it not too true that in the churches of our
time men are taught to rest their faith upon their creed and the teachings
of their church rather than on the Scriptures? Said Charles Beecher,
speaking of the Protestant churches: "They shrink from any rude word
against creeds with the same sensitiveness with which those holy fathers
would have shrunk from a rude word against the rising veneration of saints
and martyrs which they were fostering.... The Protestant evangelical
denominations have so tied up one another's hands, and their own, that,
between them all, a man cannot become a preacher at all, anywhere, without
accepting some book besides the Bible.... There is nothing imaginary in
the state