112 THE UNITED STATES IN PROPHECY.
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 ecclesi-
astical 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 dif-
ferent 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 move-
ment? The preliminary question, that of the grand
union of all the churches, is now profoundly agitat-
ing 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 ex-
tended combination of institutions, religious, civil, and
literary, which never exists without the co-operation of
an educated ministry.”
AN IMAGE TO THE BEAST. 113
Chas. Beecher, in his sermon at the dedication of
L 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 cor-
rupt, 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 coun-
cil ! a world’s convention! Evangelical Alliance and Uni-
versal Creed!”
The Banner of Light of July 30, 1864, said: —
¢“ A system will be unfolded sooner or later that will
embrace in its folds Church and State ; for the object of
the two should be one and the same. The time is rapidly
approaching when the world will be startled by a voice
that shall say to every form of oppression and wrong,
‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.” Old things are
rapidly passing away in the religious and social, as well
as in the political world. Behold, all things must be
formed anew.”
The Church Advocate, in March, 1870, speaking
of the formation of an “Independent American
Catholic Church,” a movement now agitated in this
country, said :—
“There is evidently some secret power at work which
may be preparing the world for great events in the near
future.”
A Mr. Havens, in a speech delivered in New
“York a few years ago, said :—
“For my own part, I wait to see the day when a Lu-
ther shall spring up in this country, who shall found a
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