That the majority of the Christians in our land are still to be found in connection with these churches is undoubtedly true.  But a change in this respect is also approaching.  For Paul exhorts all true Christians, in his words to Timothy above referred to, to turn away from those who have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof; and those who desire to live pure and holy lives, who mourn over the desolations of their Zion, and sigh for the abominations done in the land, will certainly heed this injunction of the apostle.  There is another prophecy which also shows that when the spirit of worldliness and apostasy has so far taken possession of the professed churches of Christ as to place them beyond the reach of reform, God’s true children are every one to be called out, that they become not partakers of their sins, and so receive not of their plagues.  Rev. 18:4.

From the course which church members are everywhere pursuing, it is plain to be seen in what direction the Protestant churches are drifting; and from the declarations of God’s word it is evident that all whose hearts are touched by God’s grace and molded by his love will soon come out from a connection in which, while they can do no good to others, they will receive only evil to themselves.

And now we ask the reader to consider seriously for a moment what the state of the religious world will be when this change shall have taken place.  We shall then have an array of proud and popular churches from whose communion all the good have departed, from whom the Holy Spirit is withdrawn, and who are in a state of hopeless departure from God.  God is no respecter of 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”