s this a beginning of _organized_ lawlessness on the
part of the Anti-christ?"

"I think not," replied Ralph. "I should rather say that it was a bit
of wanton outrage of all the decencies of ordinary life, and arranged
by some of the rude fellows--male and female--of the baser sort. You
noticed, of course, that most of those immediately connected with the
two cars, looked like the drinking, smoking, sporting fellows who are
the _habitues_ of the music-halls and the promenades of the theatres."

An uproarious cheering of the mighty throng interrupted Ralph for a
moment. Only those well to the front of the procession could know the
cause of the cheering, but the whole mass of people joined in it. As
the roar died away, Ralph Bastin took up the broken thread of his reply:

"Yet, for all I have just said, I feel it in my bones as Mrs. Beecher
Stowe's old negress 'mammy' used to say, that this foul demonstration
on this golden Sunday morning, is the unauthorized unofficial beginning
of the Anti-christ movement."

There was a couple of hundred yards between the tail of the actual
procession, and Ralph and his companion. Hundreds of people thronged
the sidewalks, but the road was fairly clear, and along the gutter-way
there swept a gang of boys with coarse, raucous laughter,
kicking--football fashion--two or three of the half-burned Bibles that
had fallen from the cauldron-altar on the car.

The church Secretary visibly shuddered at the sacrilege. A pained look
shot into Ralph Bastin's face, as he said:

"Such wanton, open sacrilege as that could only have become possible by
the gradual decay of reverence for the word of God, brought about
largely by the so-called 'Higher critics' of the last thirty years, the
men who broke Spurgeon's heart, the Issachars of the nineteenth and
early twentieth century, those 'knowing ones' who, like Issachar,
thought that they knew better than God."

The two men walked on together in deep talk. Ralph learned that his
companion was Robert J. Baring, principal of the great shipping firm,
and of merchants and importers.

Baring was an educated man, and of considerable culture, and Ralph and
he found that they had very much in common. But that which perhaps
constituted the closest tie between them was the fact that both had
lost their nearest and dearest, and were _left_ to face the coming
horrors of the Anti-christ reign, and the hideousness of the great
Tribulation.

"God grant