rapacious and bloodthirsty eyes on this land, determined to make it its helpless prey.  It already decides the election in some of our largest cities.  It controls the revenues of the most populous State in the Union, and appropriates annually hundreds of thousands of dollars raised from Protestant taxes to the support of its own ecclesiastical organizations, and to the furtherance of its own religious and political ends.  It has reached that measure of influence that it is only by a mighty effort of Protestant patriotism that measures can now be carried, against which the Romish element combines its strength.  And corrupt and unscrupulous politicians stand ready to concede to its demands to secure its support, for the purpose of advancing their own ambitious aims.  Rome is in the field with the basest and most fatal intentions, and with the most watchful and tireless energy.  It is destined to play an important part in our future troubles; for this is the very beast which the two-horned beast is to cause the earth and them that dwell therein to worship, and before whose eyes it is to perform its wonders.

And in our own better Protestant churches there is that which threatens to lead to most serious evils.  On this point one of their own popular ministers, who is well qualified to speak, may testify.  A sermon by Charles Beecher contains the following statements:—­

“Our best, most humble, most devoted servants of Christ are fostering in their midst what will one day, not long hence, show itself to be the spawn of the dragon.  They shrink from any rude word against creeds with the same sensitiveness with which those holy fathers would have shrunk from a rude word against the rising veneration of saints and martyrs which they were fostering....  The Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another’s hands, and their own, that, between them all, a man cannot become a preacher at all, anywhere, without accepting some book besides the Bible....  And is not the Protestant church apostate?  Oh! remember, the final form of apostasy shall rise, not by crosses, processions, baubles.  We understand all that.  Apostasy never comes on the outside.  It develops.  It is an apostasy that shall spring into life within us; an apostasy that shall martyr a man who believes his Bible ever so holily; yea, who may even believe what the creed contains, but who may happen to agree with the Westminster Assembly that, proposed as a test, it is an unwarrantable imposition.  That is the apostasy we have to fear, and is it not already formed?...  Will it be said that our fears are imaginary?  Imaginary?  Did not the Rev. John M. Duncan, in the years 1825-6, or thereabouts, sincerely believe the Bible?  Did he not even believe substantially the confession of faith?  And was he not, for daring to say what the Westminster Assembly said, that, to require the reception of that creed as a test of ministerial qualification was an unwarrantable