persons nor of churches; and if the Protestant churches
apostatize from him, will they not be just as efficient agents in the
hand of the enemy as ever pagans or papists have been? Will they not
then be ready for any desperate measure of bigotry and oppression in
which he may wish to enlist them? After the Jewish church had finally
rejected Christ, how soon they were ready to imbrue their hands in the
blood of his crucifixion. And is it not the testimony of all history,
that just in proportion as any popular and extensive ecclesiastical
organization loses the Spirit and power of God, it clamors for the
support of the civil arm?

Let, now, an ecclesiastical organization be formed by these churches;
let the government legalize such organization, and give it power (a
power which it will not have till the government does grant it) to
enforce upon the people the dogmas which the different denominations can
all adopt as the basis of union, and what do we have? Just what the
prophecy represents: an image to the papal beast, endowed with life by
the two-horned beast, to speak and act with power.

And are there any indications of such a movement? The preliminary
question, that of the grand union of all the churches, is now profoundly
agitating the religious world.

In May, 1869, S.M. Manning, D.D., in a sermon in Broadway Tabernacle,
New York, spoke of the recent efforts to unite all the churches in the
land into co-operation on the common points of their faith, as a
"_prominent and noteworthy sign of the times_"

Dr. Lyman Beecher is quoted as saying:--

"There is a state of society to be formed by an extended
combination of institutions, religious, civil and literary, which
never exists without the co-operation of an educated ministry."

Chas. Beecher, in his sermon at the dedication of the Second
Presbyterian church, Ft. Wayne, Ind., Feb. 22, 1846, said:--

"Thus are the ministry of the evangelical Protestant denominations
not only formed all the way up under a tremendous pressure of
merely human fear, but they live, and move, and breathe, in a state
of things radically corrupt, and appealing every hour to every
baser element of their nature to hush up the truth and bow the knee
to the power of apostasy. Was not this the way things went with
Rome? Are we not living her life over again? And what do we see
just ahead? Another general council! A world's convention!