for the authority in all this, to be destroyed.

The apostate church was the cause and the authority for all the excess
of evil of the times, hence the ten-kingdomed confederacy which had at
first buttressed the impious system, now, by united action, destroyed
it. "_And the ten horns which thou sawest, and the Beast, these shall
hate the harlot, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat
her flesh, and shall BURN HER UTTERLY WITH FIRE. For God did put in
their hearts to do His mind, AND TO COME TO ONE MIND, and to give their
Kingdom unto the Beast, until the words of God shall be accomplished._"
(Rev. 17:16-17)

"Man is a religious animal!" And Lucien Apleon, endowed with special
wisdom of his father and Master--the Devil--recognized this necessity
for a religion from the outset of his career.

The Devil has always recognized religion, encouraged it, and has even
instigated it in a hundred forms, during the last 6,000 years. Only
every effort of his Satanic power and force has been directed towards
the luring of the religious soul _away from God_. The Devil is a
Ritualist! He loves to entangle souls in a ritual, and the more
sensuous the ritual, the better he is pleased, because such
sensuousness and ritualism ministers to the "flesh," and while men and
women's religion is fleshly, it cannot be spiritual. And the FATHER
seeketh spiritual worshippers, "for they that worship Him, must worship
Him in Spirit and in Truth." Then, too, Satan knows that all
religiousness that is of the "flesh," tends to make its devotees
anxious for the development of a good-self within them, while true,
spiritual life _in Christ_, leads to the continual consciousness that
"_in me, that is IN MY FLESH, dwelleth no good thing_."

Lucien Apleon encouraged religion, but not the religion of the Lord
Jesus Christ--for he, Apleon was The _Anti_-Christ. It was he, with
his emissaries, taught and guided by Satan, the Arch-enemy of God, and
of His Christ, that had subtlety, secretly energized the
world-religion, that followed the taking away of the church. That
world-wide system had been an amalgamation of all the then existing
false systems of religion. With the taking away of the church every
type of license had been gradually permitted to the worshippers in the
churches of this infernal system, until, at last, as we have seen, the
governments had been compelled to abolish what at first they had helped
to establish--for lic